Wait - why is Jason talking about COVID-19? And why are these written like FaceBook posts? There’s a longer explanation here but the short version is that my day job for the past 15+ years has been developing models of human health effects and medical response for chemical injuries and biological illnesses, including pandemics. I’ve been making these posts on FaceBook and I was asked to put them in a more shareable manner. I’m linking to the posts on the explanation page. These are the original, unedited posts. I’ll continue until I run out of things to say.
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Originally posted here on July 17th.
As I’ve said many times here, I’ve spent 16 years as a principal scientist for a fairly large group of folks who specialize in planning for the worst. Sometimes the worst happens and you realize that it’s worse than you could have planned for. It seems like when things go really bad, a colleague turns a phrase that really sticks with me. For example, one of my colleagues was doing real-time modeling following Fukushima Daiichi and when I asked them how it was going they said, “Well...we planned for a tsunami. We planned for an earthquake. We didn’t plan for both.” That assessment of what was going on was a punch in the gut.
I got that feeling yesterday. A colleague was talking about some projections for Florida over the next several weeks, and they referred to the projected cases as, “A number so big no amount of bullshit can bury it.”
I told a story on Twitter recently. It was about an email I sent to a colleague on March 3rd. This will sound ridiculous, but we only had a small handful of COVID-19 cases at that point. My colleague and I were supposed to co-emcee our company’s annual Leadership Banquet in Nashville, Tennessee. I was behind on some of the work I was supposed to do and he was asking for my status. My response included:
Also, they’re absolutely gonna cancel or delay this conference because of covid19, anyway.
Big jump in cases a-coming. More severe than originally thought. I don’t think I want to travel, tbh.
The company toyed around with keeping the conference open for a couple of weeks. You heard all the excuses that have echoed since…
There’s only a couple of cases in Nashville.
It’s really only bad if you’re in your 80s.
We don’t even know if it’s contagious.
These were scientists, by the way. Not necessarily folks like me, who have modeled pandemics, but people who at least know what an exponential function is. I was on many of these conversations and every once in awhile I’d chime in and say, “It’s gonna be canceled.” That was all I would say, there was no need to go any further than that. It was inevitable; that was a fact.
It was canceled, of course.
A lot of things were canceled. Thankfully, we never reached a number of cases so big that we couldn’t bury it in bullshit. Unfortunately, that allowed a lot of people to bury the number of cases in bullshit. It allowed folks in Florida and Georgia and Texas to say that this was all a New York problem. The numbers were exaggerated, anyway. We should praise these Southern Governors.
Here’s the deal: in-person classes are not going to happen. I mean, they’re going to happen in some states for four weeks, and then they’re going to stop happening. It’s as inevitable as the canceling of my company’s Leadership Conference. And it’s going to happen because certain states are heading toward numbers too big to bury with bullshit.
When we model school closures for a disease like COVID-19, it’s not for the purpose of saving kids’ lives; A lot of politicians are right that the data suggests kids are not as susceptible to COVID-19, and they are certainly much less susceptible to severe infections. Send your kid back to school and they probably have a higher probability of getting killed by a firearm than getting killed from COVID-19 (which is a whole different problem).
From a public health perspective, you need to close the schools to protect the children’s FAMILIES. Their siblings, parents, and grandparents. It’s amazing to me how many people still don’t understand what a virus DOES. Thirty kids in a class pass that disease around like wildfire. Of those 30 kids, none of them get a severe infection. But then there are 30-60 at-home parents and guardians, hanging around the same home, maskless, with these little COVID-19 carriers. Statistically speaking, some of them are going to develop severe infections;Weeks to months of hospital and rehab that could eventually lead to death. Hopefully they don’t pass it to the grandparents and other family members, but they probably will. The volume of cases we’ll start to see in the student’s families will be combined with the additional tragedy of the teachers and administrative staff that end up bringing COVID back to their families, as well. It will be a nightmare.
The most dangerous thing with a disease like this is an asymptomatic infectious person, and when kids start going back to school we’re going to have millions of them within weeks. And each one will directly infect one-to-two people who are far more susceptible to this disease. And the numbers will get too big to bury in bullshit.
The schools will close as the parents and guardians start to die.
Hopefully by sometime in October we’ll realize that going back to in-person schooling is a combined act of cowardice and stupidity. We could have had schools opened with restrictions, but people keep wanting rewards for doing nothing. I don’t even blame the general population, to be honest. We’re where we’re at right now because it’s been easier for leaders to bury the numbers in bullshit.
The virus is going to take the shovels away within the next month. Schools will close. Bars will close. Your salon will close. Hospitals and morgues will remain open.
The good news? So many folks are doing the right thing. Wearing masks, limiting interactions, finding ways to be creative and adapt to the situation. I also think more folks will continue to do the right thing. Even many businesses are adapting (mostly small businesses, but that’s fine), realizing that the economy is changing and trying to stay ahead of it. It’s too late for the Summer and probably too late for Fall, but maybe by 2021 we can turn this around. From someone who has studied this for a long time, who has modeled these things, who has dived deep into historical outbreaks and datasets - it is difficult to dismiss humanity’s drive to survive. It is largely primal, and we’re actually kind of smart, and despite all of the bullshit I do continue to have faith in us.
These are my opinions and thoughts and analyses - I am not representing any government agency or my company. More disclaimers on the main page.