John DiMarco on Computing (and occasionally other things)
I welcome comments by email to jdd at cs.toronto.edu.

Mon 23 Nov 2020 00:00

Thoughts on Covid19

Visual representation of Covid19 viruses under electron microscope
Image by PIRO4D from Pixabay
I'd recently reread a blog entry I'd written more than a year ago now on intentionality about blog posting. After writing it, I lived it: I wrote several additional blog entries throughout the year. But then along came the Covid19 pandemic, and it illustrated a problem with intentionality: intentionality requires priority. When Covid19 hit Ontario in March, the pandemic required substantial changes in how I live and work, and that drove a reprioritization of my efforts, both in my job as Director responsible for computing at the University of Toronto's Computer Science department, and at home, as a parent of teenagers in high school. In the face of the challenges of Covid19, blogging seemed not sufficiently important, and of course, it wasn't. So I didn't write, I worked. I am grateful to have work, in fact: I know of others who couldn't work because the sort of work they did couldn't be done from home. I consider myself fortunate to work in the computing field, which has not been so badly affected. In fact, in many ways, computing has been part of the solution (networking, videoconferencing, cloud computing, medical informatics, etc.) and has been boosted rather than impaired. In my job, I and my staff, and my department, found ourselves not without work, but with too much. This is not necessarily a bad situation to be in, but it doesn't lend itself to blogging.

Another reason is that Covid19 didn't just affect me professionally, it affected me personally: I lost a parent to Covid19 this summer. While I am not in any way unique in having lost someone to this disease, I was not really in a good state to blog, for quite some time.

There is still another factor, though, one that also kept me from blogging. I am no epidemiologist. Still, as a thinking person, I seek to understand what was going on, why, and what can be done about it. Seeking to understand is, for me, theraputic: it helps me deal with stress, anxiety, grief, and loss.

First, I looked for good sources of information about the pandemic itself. The Centre for Disease Control and Prevention in the US has plenty of good material about it. One thing I found particularly helpful was an analysis in mid-May about a choir practice in Washington state with 61 attendees, one that led to most becoming infected. It resulted in three hospitalizations and two deaths. The CDC report is a very helpful example of rigorous statistical data analysis set in a small, understandable real-world context. As an illustration of what the Covid19 virus is like, I find it very helpful. For instance, it suggested airborne spread before that became generally realized.

Secondly, information about previous pandemics. Again, the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention in the US has a very good past pandemics page, put together before the Covid19 pandemic started, covering the horrifying 1918 influenza pandemic that killed fifty million people around the world, and the later influenza epidemics of 1957, 1968, and 2009. Each of these provide a general helpful picture: firstly, that each pandemic has a timeframe that is typically greater than one year but less than two, that transmission reduces in the summer but increases in the fall/winter due to indoor crowding and decreased relative humidity, and that mass vaccination can be an effective way to ward off a disaster of the scale of the 1918 pandemic.

One problem with this current pandemic is that, unlike the pandemics of 1957, 68, and 2009, the virus is not influenza, but a coronavirus. There are four coronaviruses that have been circulating widely for years (229E, NL63, OC43, and HKU1), but they typically don't cause serious illness. Two others (SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV) emerged in the early 21st century, both quite dangerous and certainly serious enough to warrant vaccination were they to spread widely, but due to a great deal of diligence and effort, and not a little good fortune, both of these were kept from spreading through the world population. The current Covid19 pandemic, caused by yet another coronavirus, SARS-CoV2, is the first coronavirus both serious enough and widespread enough to warrant a vaccine. Unlike for influenza, a coronavirus vaccine has never been produced before, so it has taken longer than it would if this pandemic had been influenza. Only now, as we approach the one year mark of the virus' first emergence, are we seeing some likely vaccine candidates. It will still take some time to produce and distribute suitable vaccines.

In the meantime, while efforts continue to design, test, produce and distribute a suitable vaccine, the challenge is to keep Covid19 from spreading far and fast. While at first it was believed that Covid19 spreads primarily through surface contact, there is increasing evidence for areosol spread (fine droplets in the air). So methods are needed to hinder the passing of the virus from one person to another. There are two main approaches: keeping people further apart, and putting physical barriers (e.g. masks) and processes (e.g. handwashing) in place so that the virus can't easily pass from one person to another.

The best way to hinder the transmission of Covid19 is to find out who may be contagious (through testing and contact-tracing), and keep them away from everyone else (quarantine) until they are no longer contagious. One challenge is that it can sometimes be very hard to detect when someone has Covid19 and is spreading the virus. There is a wide variation in how Covid19 affects people who have it. For many, it can take days for symptoms to emerge (presymptomatic), and for some, Covid19 can be mostly or completely asymptomatic, yet asymptomatic and presymptomatic Covid19 patients can spread the disease. If those who may have Covid19 can be identified (through testing and thorough contact tracing), then those individuals alone can be quarantined until they are no longer contagious. If they cannot be identified, then the only way to hinder the spread of the disease is to assume that almost anyone might have Covid19. This requires such things as requiring everyone to wear masks, and, despite severe social and economic cost, lockdowns, which are a sort of semi-quarantine for everyone. As I write this, Covid19 has been spreading quite quickly in my city, Toronto, despite a mask mandate, and so Toronto is going into lockdown.

How will it all end? In the struggle between pessimism and hope, I choose hope. I hope that I will not lose any more family members to this disease. I hope that effective vaccines will soon be available in the necessary quantities. I hope that the measures taken to hinder the spread will be effective. I think it is reasonable to expect that we will see the widespread distribution of effective vaccines in 2021, and this pandemic will be over sometime next year. Will everything be the same? No, I think not. Some businesses (tourism and travel, for example) will have a massive economic hole to climb out of, and some companies will not survive, but people will travel again. Working from home, and technology in support of it, will be more widely accepted. Cheek-to-jowl "open-concept" offices, handshaking, and other close-quarters working practices will be less readily accepted. There will be a greater consciousness of viral hygiene, and a greater acceptance of masks. But life will go on. Covid19 will no longer command the attention it is getting now. Other things will seem important again. And there will be many worthwhile things to blog about.

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