How dangerous is this?Kevin Drum

A couple of weeks ago we were arguing about how safe it is to fly these days. Today, we get a professional assessment from Joseph Allen, a Harvard professor of exposure assessment science. I didn’t know there was any such academic field to be a professor of, but it just goes to show you. Anyway, what does he have to say?

Before we go any further, let’s make one thing clear: Airplanes are certainly vectors of disease, efficiently transporting infectious people around countries and the globe. This is obviously critical in terms of outbreak control for covid-19. But the fact that airplanes help spread disease across geographies does not mean that you are necessarily at risk during flight. There are fairly simple things you can do, if you do need to travel, to reduce the odds of getting sick.

Billions of people travel by plane every year, yet there have only been a handful of documented disease outbreaks attributable to airplanes in the past 40 years. If planes made you sick, we would expect to see millions of people sick every year attributable to flights. We haven’t seen it because it’s just not happening.

Allen does have some advice about how to make air travel even safer, and he favors manadatory mask wearing. That said, the actual risk of catching COVID-19 from sitting in an airplane for a few hours is quite low.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through May 17. Reporting is a little spotty on weekends pretty much everywhere, and with that taken into account there are no big changes. Still, with the exceptions of Germany and Switzerland, it sure looks like it’s hard to make that last bit of decline to get below a rate of 1 new death per million. I suspect it’s because the pressure to loosen social distancing restrictions gets too strong to ignore once you’ve made significant progress but before you’ve truly crushed the curve.

The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here. The Public Health Agency of Sweden is here.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through May 16. Germany and Switzerland are in a legit fight to see who gets to 0.5 deaths per million first. The rest of the curves are surprisingly similar regardless of their size, and they show just how slow the mortality decline is compared to how fast it rose to its peak. For example, it took Italy only about three weeks to go from zero to peak, but six weeks later it still isn’t back down to zero. Other countries show the same pattern.

The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here. The Public Health Agency of Sweden is here.

Update #1: Responding to my post about the quantum wave function, the consensus among commenters and the twitterati is that Ψ is usually pronounced sigh, though occasionally with a very soft, almost inaudible P sound at the beginning. Please note—as so many of you didn’t!—that we are talking solely about Ψ as it refers to the wave function in quantum mechanics. It is immaterial how it’s pronounced in Greek or in various mathematical contexts. This is for the wave function only, and the sighs have it.

Update #2: Responding to my post about the upcoming COVID-19 boom, several people have reasonably pointed out that it all depends on how people actually respond to reopening orders. It’s possible, for example, that despite our president’s best efforts to kill everyone, people will mostly remain voluntarily locked down and very careful about their interactions with others. If that’s the case, then deaths will probably flatten out, or even decline modestly, rather than spiking upward.

There’s evidence to suggest that this isn’t happening, though. The reopenings are driven both by Trump and by public pressure to end the lockdowns. What’s more, GPS surveys show that people are traveling more. There’s also anecdotal evidence of bigger crowds—though as long as they stay outside this might not be a big problem.

Overall, I still think we’re in for a COVID-19 boom. But it’s possible that the public is smarter than our politicians and will remain cautious. Only time will tell.

Suppose you are a demographer and you note that there was a baby boom this year:

Demographicus: Births were up 10 percent! In a few years we’re going to need more kindergarten classes.

Skeptico: Pshaw. Kindergarten attendance is down compared to last year.

One year later:

Demographicus: The clock is ticking. We’re still going to need those kindergarten classes.

Skeptico: I don’t see any uptick. In fact, kindergarten attendance is still declining a bit.

Two years later:

Demographicus: Time is getting short. What are we going to do about those kindergarten classes?

Skeptico: There’s still no increase. Stop being a chicken little.

Four years later:

Demographicus: Have you seen the enrollment figures for next year? We need those classes! There’s still time to build them if we act fast.

Skeptico: Um.

Five years later:

Demographicus: Where are we going to put all these kids?

Skeptico: No worries. We’ll just throw up some tents or something.

This is the position we’re in with COVID-19 right now. If you have more babies this year, it’s a guaranteed sure thing that in five years you’ll have more kindergarten students even though you’ll see no sign of it in the intervening years. Likewise, if you lift social distancing restrictions, it’s a sure thing that COVID-19 deaths will increase in three or four weeks even though you’ll see no sign of it in the intervening weeks. And as this map from the New York Times shows, that’s exactly what we’re doing:

We’re now a week or two into the Great Reopening and so far everything looks hunky dory. But that’s exactly what you’d expect. We’re still coasting on the lockdowns we put in place in March, and it will take another couple of weeks for the effect of the reopening to start showing up. In the meantime, the skeptics will keep saying that everything is great because the increased spread of the coronavirus is mostly invisible—until suddenly, one day, it isn’t.

We are being idiots. For better advice on what we should do, read this by Marty Makary and this by Alex Tabarrok and Puja Ahluwalia Ohlhaver. Put them together and the basic advice is familiar: combine universal mask wearing with aggressive test-and-trace once an area gets its disease prevalence below 1 percent. Click the links for more details.

UPDATE: More here.

One of my readers heard my plea for something to wear that wouldn’t affect my breathing as much as a cloth mask and sent me a plastic face guard, like the ones dentists use. She says that she and her husband really like them. “We’re both old and have underlying conditions, plus my husband takes 2 immune suppressing drugs, so we don’t mind looking dorky!” You be the judge:

I tried this out yesterday and it’s way better than a cloth mask for purposes of breathing. The question is, is it as effective at protecting other people from my coughs and sneezes? It looks like it might be, though I doubt that an intuitive guess about the fluid dynamics of a face guard is worth much. But here’s a report in JAMA that says face shields are great:

According to Perencevich’s group, “face shields may provide a better option.” To be most effective in stopping viral spread, a face shield should extend to below the chin. It should also cover the ears and “there should be no exposed gap between the forehead and the shield’s headpiece,” the Iowa team members said.

Shields have a number of advantages over masks, they added. First of all, they are endlessly reusable, simply requiring cleaning with soap and water or common disinfectants. Shields are usually more comfortable to wear than masks, and they form a barrier that keeps people from easily touching their own faces. When speaking, people sometimes pull down a mask to make things easier — but that isn’t necessary with a face shield. And “the use of a face shield is also a reminder to maintain social distancing, but allows visibility of facial expressions and lip movements for speech perception,” the authors pointed out.

As it happens, my face shield doesn’t meet all these criteria: it doesn’t cover the ears and there’s a bit of a gap at the forehead. I don’t really get the ear thing, though. Cloth masks don’t cover the ears, after all. So why would a face shield that doesn’t cover the ears be any worse? In any case, Amazon didn’t present any better options, but one possibility is a hat-mask:

That covers everything and it’s stylish as well! Anyone have any better ideas?

I have a job for someone with video skills. A recent survey reports that men who don’t wear masks feel that “face masks make them look weak and uncool.” These are ordinary men, not the lunatics with guns outside the Michigan statehouse, and their behavior can be changed. What I’d like to see is a PSA that can blanket the country. It would be simple.

Part 1 would be this video or something similar, which shows how wearing a mask affects the airflow from a cough or sneeze:

Part 2 would explain that you might have coronavirus even if you feel perfectly healthy. Half of all people with COVID-19 have no symptoms, and many of the rest have only mild symptoms. So you might be passing along the virus without even knowing it. If you wear a mask, the life you save might be your neighbor’s, or your pastor’s, or the kids in the 4-H club that you work with. Given the target audience, maybe the PSA should even include a clip of President Trump telling everyone to wear masks:

Needless to say, you’d want to cut off this clip after about five or ten seconds. There’s no need to include Trump’s obvious distaste for the idea.

Anyway, that’s it. Have it narrated by Clint Eastwood or Bruce Willis or some other right-leaning tough guy. Add another few seconds of intro and outro, along with a nifty slogan, and you’re done. Anyone want to take a rough crack at this?

Caroline Brehman/Congressional Quarterly via ZUMA

Oh hey, President Trump fired yet another inspector general last night. Was it because he helped out in the impeachment probe, like the other IGs Trump has fired? Yes, but only peripherally (he was looking into Rudy Giuliani’s efforts to get our Ukraine ambassador fired). So what did he do?

State Department Inspector General Steve Linick was fired Friday in a late-night ouster that drew condemnations from Democrats….Rep. Eliot L. Engel (D.-N.Y.), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, claimed the State Inspector General was fired after opening an investigation into Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and said the timing suggested “an unlawful act of retaliation.”

….A Democratic congressional aide said that Linick was looking into Pompeo’s “misuse of a political appointee at the Department to perform personal tasks for himself and Mrs. Pompeo.”

The Trump message continues to get stronger every day. If you so much as open an investigation against someone in the Trump administration, you’re fired.

Needless to say, this poses a problem. The job of an inspector general is to audit the cabinet department he works for. But since Trump is currently president, everyone in every cabinet department is part of the Trump administration. This basically means that the entire IG corps is on notice not to seriously investigate anyone.

Of course, this only poses a problem for you and me. For Trump, it’s exactly the message he wants to send. And you won’t hear a peep out of Republicans about this. Apparently they’re just fine with it.

Here’s the coronavirus death toll through May 15. I don’t have anything special to say today, so I thought I’d take a look at my April 28 post that lists a dozen things I tentatively believed about COVID-19. How have those held up?

I’ll revise and extend three of them. On #5, I may have been a little pessimistic. A full suite of countermeasures, rigorously enforced and widely complied with, probably reduces deaths by more than half. Maybe 60-65 percent?

On #8 I was completely wrong. Summer is five weeks away, and it’s obvious we’ll have 150-200,000 deaths by then. In my defense, how could I have guessed that our president would urge everyone to go out and party at the first sign of declining death rates?

On #9, I probably shouldn’t have entertained even the idea of the slightest relaxation of countermeasures.

The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here. The Public Health Agency of Sweden is here.

Chad Orzel linked yesterday to a post by Sabine Hossenfelder about quantum superposition, and it unsurprisingly degenerated into the usual mush that interpretations of quantum mechanics always do. But then the subject turned to linguistics and it got interesting. As you may know, the quantum wave function is represented by the Greek letter psi (Ψ), with |Ψ²| representing the probability of a particle being found in any particular place.¹ So a reader decided to try on a joke in comments:

How should Psi be pronounced? Is it P-Si, Si, or a superposition of the two? Or is the word not pronounceable until it is spoken, like when Prince changed his name.

But Hossenfelder took the question seriously:

Well, I pronounce it the way that I have heard it most often which in English is “ps-ai” (in German it would be “ps-ee”). The easiest way to find out I guess is to listen to the video? I have no idea which one is the “correct” pronunciation, given that it’s Greek and I don’t speak Greek, but I can tell you that if you pronounce it this way physicists will know what you are talking about.

Huh. I’ve always pronounced it sigh, rhymes with pie. It never occured to me that you’d pronounce the initial P.² So I googled around a bit and got conflicting answers, which I suppose is very on-brand. However, on one particular site the speaker was clearly pronouncing it p-sigh, but with just the barest emphasis on the P. The best I can describe it is that it sounded as if the P was trailing off before it even got started, followed by a normal pronunciation of sigh.

So I guess this is a question for physicists, or anyone who’s taken a quantum physics course. Is Ψ usually pronounced with its initial P? If so, how distinct is it?

¹More or less. Don’t @ me with your eigenvalues and inner products.

²And you don’t pronounce the initial P if you’re using psi as short for psionic. We are talking here solely about the pronunciation of Ψ in its quantum mechanical sense.

UPDATE: Answer here!