The Mitigation Strategy doesn’t try to contain the epidemic, just flatten the curve a bit. Meanwhile, the Suppression Strategy tries to apply heavy measures to quickly get the epidemic under control. Specifically:
- Go hard right now. Order heavy social distancing. Get this thing under control.
- Then, release the measures, so that people can gradually get back their freedoms and something approaching normal social and economic life can resume.
The benefit of suppression is that it would provide us time to develop new testing methods, build capacity in regards to equipment and get things in order. Overall this would provide a number of benefits, such as:
- Fewer total cases of Coronavirus
- Immediate relief for the healthcare system and the humans who run it
- Reduction in fatality rate
- Reduction in collateral damage
- Ability for infected, isolated and quarantined healthcare workers to get better and back to work. In Italy, healthcare workers represent 8% of all contagions.
Pueyo suggests that a suppression strategy can be understood as a hammer and a dance.
During the Hammer period, politicians want to lower R as much as possible, through measures that remain tolerable for the population. In Hubei, they went all the way to 0.32. We might not need that: maybe just to 0.5 or 0.6.
But during the Dance of the R period, they want to hover as close to 1 as possible, while staying below it over the long term term. That prevents a new outbreak, while eliminating the most drastic measures.
What this means is that, whether leaders realize it or not, what they’re doing is:
- List all the measures they can take to reduce R
- Get a sense of the benefit of applying them: the reduction in R
- Get a sense of their cost: the economic, social, and ethical cost.
- Stack-rank the initiatives based on their cost-benefit
- Pick the ones that give the biggest R reduction up till 1, for the lowest cost.
A lot of this is elaborated on further in the Imperial College’s report Impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to reduce COVID19 mortality and healthcare demand.
We show that in the UK and US context, suppression will minimally require a combination of social distancing of the entire population, home isolation of cases and household quarantine of their family members. This may need to be supplemented by school and university closures, though it should be recognised that such closures may have negative impacts on health systems due to increased absenteeism. The major challenge of suppression is that this type of intensive intervention package – or something equivalently effective at reducing transmission – will need to be maintained until a vaccine becomes available (potentially 18 months or more) – given that we predict that transmission will quickly rebound if interventions are relaxed. We show that intermittent social distancing – triggered by trends in disease surveillance – may allow interventions to be relaxed temporarily in relative short time windows, but measures will need to be reintroduced if or when case numbers rebound. Last, while experience in China and now South Korea show that suppression is possible in the short term, it remains to be seen whether it is possible long-term, and whether the social and economic costs of the interventions adopted thus far can be reduced.
So here we are again. One week I am catching up with Richard Olsen and co for drinks in the city and then the next week we are in lock-down again. I remember reading about the hammer and the dance early on in the pandemic, where we lock-down to get on top of things and then dance with the ever changing rules and restrictions. The problem is, I do not think we are very good at dancing. Coming home from my night out, face-masks on public transport were near on non-existent. On top of that, the bar thanked me for clicking on the QR code at the door. Maybe he was just being courteous, but it did not feel like it.
In lock-down, I took our daughters for a ride. At the local reserve, there was a food truck set up with two guys selling take-away. Sadly though, there were no face-masks. I contacted the company privately raising my concern and got the following response:
I am not sure he quite understands how masks work. That I wear a mask for him and he and his colleague wear a mask for me. To be fair, my greater fear is not catching COVID from him, although it is a possibility, but rather that such small businesses will no longer exist if we do not all do our bit to get on top of things. Personally, I am able to work from home, so other than having to support our children with their learning, I am not impacted. Sadly, I am not sure everyone quite sees it that way.
On other matters, I have been listened to new albums by Olivia Rodrigo, Haerts and St. Vincent, but have found myself retreating to the more familiar with Estelle Caswell’s ode to gated reverb playlist. In addition to this, I have been tinkering with Google Sheets and XML, as well as started a few posts, but with jobs around the house and work at the moment, I seem to be failing with following through.
Here then are some of the posts that have had me thinking:
Education
The Trouble with Teaching: Is Teaching a Meaningful Job?
John Danaher dives into his frustrations with teaching in a university setting, providing a provocation to reflect upon in respect to all aspects of learning and teaching.
Knitting a Healthy Social Fabric
danah boyd explores role played by schools in building the social fabric and democracy of the future.
Is De-Implementation the Best Way to Build Back Better?
Peter DeWitt reflects on the need to de-implement and take things off the plate in order to build back better.
Mapping Assessment
Ron Ritchhart provides a model for mapping assessment based on two dimensions: integration and evaluation.
On Rereading
Victor Brombert reflects upon the different forms of rereading and the uncanny experience of coming upon lost notes in the margins.
Technology
The Global Smartphone
A team of anthropologists spent a year conducting an ethnographic study in nine different countries documenting the ways in which smartphones are used by older people. The team come to the conclusion that the smartphone has come to represent the place where we live.
Pedagogy, Presence and Placemaking: a learning-as-becoming model of education.
David White talks about the issue of simply moving face-to-face learning online and the need to foster presence to help make online spaces places that foster learning.
YouTube’s kids app has a rabbit hole problem
Rebecca Heilweil takes a look at the way in which YouTube Kids and the autoplay function acts as a gateway to questionable content.
Data isn’t oil, so what is it?
Matt Locke suggests that we need more effective metaphors to help people understand the place and purpose of data in our world today.
On the temptation to nuke everything and start over
Influenced on Kin Lane’s decision to leave the past behind, Doug Belshaw reflects on the temptation to start over.
General
The Case for Letting People Work From Home Forever
Jaclyn Greenberg makes the case for a permanent move to working from home, while Cal Newport pushes back instead arguing for near-home locations.
Welcome Back, Darling
Kath Sullivan and Nathan Morris explore what it means to have water back in the Darling River. In contrast with the past few years of dry river beds, towns like Brewarrina, Wilcannia and Menindee have become energised once again.
In the Air Tonight’s influence, intrigue, and THAT drum break that endures 40 years on
Matt Neal reflects on the forty years since Phil Collins’ released In the Air Tonight and its ongoing legacy, especially in regards to gated reverb.
Tao of WAO
Laura Hilliger and Doug Belshaw have started a new podcast associated with their participation in We Are Open Co-op.
The Weaponization of Care
Autumm Caines discusses the way in which survelliance technology is packaged with notions of care as a way of normalising various practices.
Read Write Respond #065
So that was May for me, how about you? As always, hope you are safe and well.
Cover Image via JustLego101
Also on:
The current pandemic has led to many changes in habits. One of which is that I like to be prepared when I go to the supermarket, especially when doing a big shop. Fine I may not last out the two to three weeks that Zeynep Tufekci flagged early on:
However, I at least try and limit how often I go out. That is usually the intent of lockdown measures (Melbourne is currently in its fifth lockdown at the point of writing) used to hammer the virus. One strategy I have used is to be clear about what I might need at the shops split into different sections. As a part of this, I wrote out a list of essential items and have been using this to create the weekly shopping list. Today, I decided to have a go at turning this into a spreadsheet using Google Sheets that I could use to generate the list. Here then are my steps:
List of Items
I started by writing something of a complete list of items. Associated with this, I categorised each item in a separate column. To save from writing each category each time, I created a separate list of unique categories and then used this with data validation to create a dynamic drop-down list. This meant that if I added a new category it would then be added as an option. In a third column, I added a checkbox for each item to be used to produce the weekly list.
Switch the Category
Added to the category, I used the SWITCH formula to create a sort order.
=IFNA(ARRAYFORMULA(SWITCH(B2:B,"Veg",1,"Fruit",2,"Meat",3,"Dairy",4,"Bakery",5,"Sweets",6,"Non",7,"Freezer",8,"Other",9)))Generating the Summary List
Once the items required were ticked, I wanted a summary that I could copy into a message. My initial iteration was a simple query:
=QUERY(Sheet1!A2:D,"SELECT C WHERE D = TRUE ORDER BY A")The problem with this is that it did not put each item on a new line. To fix that, I used the JOIN function and the New Line character.=JOIN(CHAR(10),QUERY(Sheet1!A2:D,"SELECT C WHERE D = TRUE ORDER BY A"))Although this put each item on a new line, I then wondered about adding an emoji for each section to break up the information. To do this, I combined the new line and emoji characters, with a separate query for each category.
=""&CHAR(129477)&""&CHAR(10)&""& {JOIN(CHAR(10),QUERY(A2:D,"SELECT C WHERE A = 1 and D = TRUE"))} &""&CHAR(10)&""&CHAR(10)&""&CHAR(127822)&""&CHAR(10)&""& {JOIN(CHAR(10),QUERY(A2:D,"SELECT C WHERE A = 2 and D = TRUE"))} &""&CHAR(10)&""&CHAR(10)&""&CHAR(129385)&""&CHAR(10)&""& {JOIN(CHAR(10),QUERY(A2:D,"SELECT C WHERE A = 3 and D = TRUE"))} &""&CHAR(10)&""&CHAR(10)&""&CHAR(129472)&""&CHAR(10)&""& {JOIN(CHAR(10),QUERY(A2:D,"SELECT C WHERE A = 4 and D = TRUE"))} &""&CHAR(10)&""&CHAR(10)&""&CHAR(127838)&""&CHAR(10)&""& {JOIN(CHAR(10),QUERY(A2:D,"SELECT C WHERE A = 5 and D = TRUE"))} &""&CHAR(10)&""&CHAR(10)&""&CHAR(127851)&""&CHAR(10)&""& {JOIN(CHAR(10),QUERY(A2:D,"SELECT C WHERE A = 6 and D = TRUE"))} &""&CHAR(10)&""&CHAR(10)&""&CHAR(129387)&""&CHAR(10)&""& {JOIN(CHAR(10),QUERY(A2:D,"SELECT C WHERE A = 7 and D = TRUE"))} &""&CHAR(10)&""&CHAR(10)&""&CHAR(129482)&""&CHAR(10)&""& {JOIN(CHAR(10),QUERY(A2:D,"SELECT C WHERE A = 8 and D = TRUE"))} &""&CHAR(10)&""&CHAR(10)&""&CHAR(129531)&""&CHAR(10)&""& {JOIN(CHAR(10),QUERY(A2:D,"SELECT C WHERE A = 9 and D = TRUE"))}Resetting Selections
The last task was to add a script to reset the checkboxes. For this, I added a script via app scripts I found here and created a button as a trigger.
You can make a copy of the whole spreadsheet here.
When it comes to coding, Clive Thompson talks about learning to code by doing something every day and doing so with purpose. Here is another example of a solution that is as much about learning as it is about the solution itself.
Comments and recommendations on improvements welcome.
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Shopping Sheet – Improving the Shopping Process During the Pandemic by Aaron Davis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.