There is a growing sense in the U.S. that the epidemic is now unstoppable. Each state, city and rural area has their own crisis. Hot spots can suddenly turn up anywhere. A small outbreak in Alaska has been one of the country’s fastest-spreading for three weeks, while transmission in Texas and Arizona has slowed.
Perhaps 10% of the infected account for 80% of new cases. Unpredictable super spreading events in nursing homes, meatpacking plants, churches and bars are major drivers of the epidemic.
Contact tracing is moot, there are too many cases to track.
None of the medicines for which hopes were once high (AIDS drugs, antivirals and malaria drugs) have proved to be cures. Experts familiar with vaccine and drug manufacturing are disappointed that, thus far, only dexamethasone and remdesivir have proved to be effective treatments, and they are limited to special circumstances.
Six months of a global pandemic have stirred an unprecedented amount of research. While many things about Covid-19 have been discovered, a lot of research has produced incomplete and sometimes contradictory results.
These are the pressing questions that do not have answers yet.
1. Why do people respond so differently?
Some people have mild symptoms or even no symptoms and don’t know they are infected. While most reactions are respiratory there are also cases of heart and blood vessel damage and kidney failure. Many people require hospitalization, some end up in an Intensive Care Unit (ICU) and many people die from Covid-19.
2. What’s the nature of immunity and how long does it last?
Studies have found that the level of antibodies produced by the immune system when someone has been infected with Covid-19 can vary quite a lot. It is not known what level of antibodies are necessary to provide immunity or how long it lasts.
3. Has the virus developed more dangerous new mutations?
Molecular biologists can determine the genetic mutations in Covid-19 and use this information to track how the virus has spread from one region to another around the world. But it is not known if any of these mutations are more virulent or transmissible than others.
4. How well will vaccines work?
Some vaccines might work well at preventing lung infections but not infections elsewhere in the body. Some vaccines may produce enough antibodies to work for some people but not enough to protect others from infection.
5. What is the origin of virus?
There is general agreement that the virus originated in bats. Scientist are able to compare the Covid-19 genome to the genomes of coronaviruses found in different bats and other animals. So far, there are genetic differences that are too large to conclude what the original source might be.
I was working on my laptop in the kitchen instead of my office where I usually work. I noticed that the login to Windows was really slow. I was further from the router than normal, so my Internet connection was probably a little slower. Why should this affect a simple login?
I remembered that I set up Windows 10 with a Microsoft account. There were many recommendations to do this and it didn’t seem to be that easy to use an alternative.
I reviewed the “advantages” of using a Microsoft account, and didn’t really see any that were relevant to the way I use my PC, or to the way I suspect most other people use Windows. I don’t use many Microsoft apps and I didn’t see any value to synchronize my laptop with my Android phone or iPad (if Microsoft software even works very well with “foreign” machines).
I found that it is not that difficult to switch from a Microsoft account to a Local Account. Just go into Settings and search for Accounts/My info.
Once this was done, sure enough my Windows login was a lot faster. To see a noticeable speedup like this, a fair amount of data must have been transmitted (sent and/or received) between my computer and Microsoft servers.
So what was my PC sending to Microsoft?
I have no idea. I spent some time researching this question and I could not find any detailed explanations from Microsoft or third party tech experts.
Whatever data is being copied, I would rather none of it get stored on Microsoft servers. If you have similar concerns, switch your Windows user to a Local Account.
Television news loves to show pictures of crowded beaches as examples of how people are ignoring social distancing guidelines. In some cases this may be true, but in many cases they have just lost perspective.
Here’s a photo of a beach that looks overcrowded.
But that’s because you are looking at a long stretch of beach along the shore line.
When you look at the same beach, looking towards the water, you can clearly see that there is easily more than 6 feet between groups of people.
The responsible way for television to report overcrowding at a beach would be with an aerial view.
As lockdown restrictions are relaxed and people go out more, what is the probability of actually encountering someone who has Covid-19 and is contagious?
Someone who has Covid-19 is infectious for 14 days but may not show symptoms for first 5 days (the mean). Once they have symptoms they will be either in quarantine or in the hospital. So your risk of encountering someone who is contagious is during the 5 days before they had symptoms. But there is no way of knowing how many such people there are, it may take up to 5 days before they have symptoms and can be counted. As a good approximation you can use the total number of new cases in the last 5 days.
Then divide by the population of your location to get the probability that any random person is infected.
For Toronto this probability is .07% about 7 out of 10,000.
Rather than meeting a single person, what about meeting another couple at a restaurant where there are two more couples at adjoining tables and one server?
Using high school math you can calculate the probability that one or more of these 7 people are contagious.
This probability is .5% about 1 out of 200.
This is a fairly low risk of encountering someone who could infect you. There is additional risk of airborne infection but not enough is known to estimate its probability (see previous blog).
But the more people in a group, the higher the probability. If you go to a house party where there are 25 other people, the probability that at least one person is contagious is 1.7%
Low probabilities do not mean that you can skip the social distancing rules. If everyone does that it will increase the spread of the virus, slowly at first since it is low probability but more rapidly as cases increase and the probabilities increase.
On July 9, WHO (World Health Organization) acknowledged that the coronavirus can spread through tiny droplets floating in the air, after more than 200 experts in aerosol science complained that the agency had failed to warn the public about this risk. https://news.yahoo.com/pandemic-exposes-scientific-rift-over-204543074.html
There were a few early cases of Covid-19 that suggested it was transmitted by airborne particles. A very dramatic case was the choir in Washington state that held a rehearsal with 60 members on March 10. Three weeks later 45 people were infected and two died. https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-03-29/coronavirus-choir-outbreak
This risk of airborne transmission is highest in crowded indoor spaces with poor ventilation and may help explain super-spreading events reported in meatpacking plants, churches and restaurants.
What can you do to reduce your risk of exposure to airborne transmission?
– Avoid crowded indoor places, close-contact settings and confined spaces with poor ventilation. – At home, open windows and doors whenever possible. – Upgrade the filters in your furnace/air-conditioning system and adjust the settings to use more outdoor air.
When I created this blog, I wanted it to include my earlier Virus Info email messages. So I simply copied and pasted each email into a blog post. They all looked good.
Then a reader informed me he was seeing image.pnginstead of images in one of the blogs.
I found that Firefox in Windows and Safari on my iPad had this problem. I had never seen any of these broken images because I always use Chrome.
For my blog I use the platform WordPress. I compose the blog message in a word processing type window. WordPress converts it to HTML so that it will display on a website. Clearly it was not generating the correct HTML for all browsers.
WordPress is big, really big.
“WordPress is the most popular web management system in the world and is used by nearly 75 million websites. According to WordPress, more than 409 million people view more than 23.6 billion pages each month and users produce 69.5 million new posts and 46.8 million new comments every month.”
So how could my simple copy and paste fail so badly?
Software bugs.
Trying to contact WordPress for help to correct this would have been a long, arduous process. So I did some experimentation and found a way to “fix” this myself. In each blog, I saved the images separately to my computer, deleted them from the blog message and then copied in the saved images.
Canadian news about Covid-19 has generally been pretty positive about the progress being made to contain the virus across Canada.
American news has been obsessed, for good reason, about the outbreaks occurring all over the country.
But you don’t see many reports about Europe. Many countries in Europe had major outbreaks before we even saw very many cases in North America. They have contained the virus far better. Our health “experts” probably could learn a lot from the Europeans, but I’ve never seen any indication that they communicate with them very much. This is doubly true for Asia. Many Asian countries have done a far better job from the beginning than Europe and certainly North America (noted in several earlier blogs). When’s the last time you saw an Asian virologist interviewed on our news?
Here’s the proof in pictures.
U.S.
Canada
Italy and Spain had the worst outbreaks in Europe, but they have brought their cases down much faster than Canada and to a much lower level.
When you signed up with an Internet Service Provider (ISP) you probably got a range of options for download speed, ranging from 10 Mbps (Megabits per second) up to 1 Gbps per second (1000 Mbps).
A byte is 8 bits, so 10 Mbps is 1.25 MB per second.
At 50 Mbps (40 MB/s), you will get good Internet access including HD (High-definition) streaming and online gaming. Plus you can share the connection with 3–4 other computers without noticing a slowdown. You can download high resolution photos in seconds and HD videos in just a few minutes.
Let’s suppose you have 50 Mbps service. Can you actually download data from the Internet this fast?
It depends on the Wi-Fi speed between your computer and the router. Here’s a typical home set up for your Internet connection. Anything using the Internet has to first send the data over the Wi-Fi network.
Wi-Fi is subject to a lot of noise interference (see the previous blog). Generally, the further your computer is from the router the slower your Wi-Fi connection is going to be because of interference from walls, ceilings and any other large objects in the path.
The Wi-Fi is network is shared among all the computers in your house so you need to run this from each device that uses the Internet. If you find that some of your Wi-Fi speeds are low, you should see if you can move the router and/or the computer so they are closer together.
Then add up all the Wi-Fi download speeds to see if your Internet connection is fast enough when all computers are streaming video. If the Wi-Fi total is greater than your Internet speed on your plan, you might want to consider upgrading to a higher speed. But if the Wi-Fi total is less than your Internet plan, you may want to change your Internet plan so you are paying for only the speed you can use.
I was happily working on my computer in my home office the other day and suddenly most of the tabs in my browser reported a network error.
Like most home Internet setups, my computer uses a Wi-Fi wireless connection to connect to the router provided by my Internet Service Provider (ISP). The router connects to a modem that sends your request to the ISP network where it gets forwarded on to the Internet.
I went into the Wi-Fi settings on my Windows computer, disconnected the Wi-Fi and then reconnected it. You can find the Wi-Fi settings by using the Search on the Taskbar (magnifying glass icon).
I went back to work and for a time everything was fine. But then I lost the Wi-Fi again. I checked on my mobile phone and it still had a Wi-Fi connection. So there was no problem with the Wi-Fi router, it was strictly a local problem on my computer.
I looked along a line of sight from my computer to the router which was downstairs in the kitchen and tried to think of what might be blocking the signal. Well right front of me I saw that the door to my room was closed. Now I often work with the door closed but this time on a hunch I got up and opened the door. Now after I reset the Wi-Fi it worked for the rest of the day without any further outages.
Why did this happen?
Wi-Fi is a radio signal. As such, it is subject to all kinds of noise disruptions. If you have ever listened to an analog radio, you know that there is often interference and you get crackle and other noises. For a digital signal such as Wi-Fi, the tiniest little noise that you wouldn’t even notice on a radio is enough to signal an error. Internet data is sent in packets typically about 1,500 bytes long. Any error in the packet means that the whole packet is discarded and the sender has to transmit the whole packet again. So a small amount of interference or noise on your Wi-Fi connection can create a lot of retransmissions that result in long delays when you are trying to use the Internet.
A major source of interference in our house is the microwave oven. Microwave uses radio signals that are in the same frequency band as our Wi-Fi, the 2.4 GHz frequency band. Our Internet router is in the kitchen and whenever the microwave is on it effectively knocks out the Internet for everybody.
Cordless phones, baby monitors and garage door openers also use the 2.4 GHz frequency band, so they can also interfere with your Wi-Fi.
Some routers support another Wi-Fi frequency band, at 5 GHz. If your router has this option, you will see another Wi-Fi network name in your device’s WiFi settings. You might want to consider using it instead of 2.4 GHz.
5 GHz is faster and less prone to interference from other devices since fewer devices use this frequency. However 5 GHz may have a smaller coverage area and is less successful at penetrating solid objects.
So computers that aren’t too far from the router should use 5 GHz. But mobile phones which move around and may be farther away from the router should use 2.4 GHz.
