Tag: covid

WHO & COVID-19

How much bearing does my experience have on what is happening now in the WHO COVID-19 response? I don’t know. You have to make up your own mind about this. But having seen the sausage being made, I am all too aware that the organization can be steered by political considerations. And that definitely increases uncertainty about what is happening on the ground.

Genomic epidemiology

We believe this may have occurred by the WA1 case having exposed someone else to the virus in the period between Jan 15 and Jan 19 before they were isolated. If this second case was mild or asymptomatic, contact tracing efforts by public health would have had difficulty detecting it. After this point, community spread occurred and was undetected due to the CDC narrow case definition that required direct travel to China or direct contact with a known case to even be considered for testing. This lack of testing was a critical error and allowed an outbreak in Snohomish County and surroundings to grow to a sizable problem before it was even detected.

this is a great summary of the state of the art on using mutations to reconstruct how a disease spreads.

COVID-19 Scenarios

One unlikely but possible scenario is that this “novel” virus is not really novel. Because its symptoms are generally mild and very similar to other symptoms from flu and other viruses, it may have been circulating around the globe for a while, without a name. It can be transmitted by people who have no symptoms at the time or even while they have the virus. If the majority of people infected don’t ever get sick, but easily pass it on, then it can spread widely unseen. But a few are susceptible to it and die. Because the symptoms are not unique to it, this illness is assumed to be flu or something else. Then something happened in China to produce notice — maybe someone created a test for it — and then as people died, the new test found many people positive.

1918 Flu

The Spanish flu strain killed its victims with a swiftness never seen before. In the United States stories abounded of people waking up sick and dying on their way to work. The symptoms were gruesome: Sufferers would develop a fever and become short of breath. Lack of oxygen meant their faces appeared tinged with blue. Hemorrhages filled the lungs with blood and caused catastrophic vomiting and nosebleeds, with victims drowning in their own fluids. Unlike so many strains of influenza before it, Spanish flu attacked not only the very young and the very old, but also healthy adults between the ages of 20 and 40.

2020-03-01:

In most disasters, people come together, help each other, as we saw recently with Hurricanes Harvey and Irma. But in 1918, without leadership, without the truth, trust evaporated. And people looked after only themselves.

Telemedicine

Another form of anticompetitive state-level protectionism.

The biggest hurdle may be state medical boards. Idaho’s medical licensing board punished a doctor for prescribing an antibiotic over the phone, fining her $10K and forbidding her from providing telemedicine. State laws that restrict telemedicine — for instance, requiring that patients and doctors have established in-person relationships — have drawn lawsuits charging that they illegally restrict competition. Georgia’s state medical board requires a face-to-face encounter before telemedicine can be delivered, while Ohio’s does not.

2020-03-26: Robots could enable a form of telemedicine that would keep humans out of areas of contagion. A small example is Spot:

It’s using a custom mount and enclosure for an iPad or similar-sized screen to be used for video conferencing between doctors and other healthcare workers and their patients.

Another is the 4x speedup for hygiene theater:

It takes human cleaners 1 hour to carefully disinfect the CT scanning room, wiping down the equipment and surfaces. So when the pandemic hit, and the room had to be cleaned after each use, “a machine that used to be able to do 30 scans a day is down to 7.”

Violet can clean the room in just 15 minutes. It uses machine vision powered by Intel’s Movidius AI chips to map and navigate its surrounding environment. Though humans still have to wipe down the “nooks and crannies the robot can’t get to, like behind the door handles.” But by cutting cleaning times down from 1 hour to 15 minutes, the hospital’s capacity for CT scans increases 4x.

2020-04-15: Health care costs can be lowered by reimbursing at the same rates for telemedicine or treatments that are at home, and by paying fees per patient, rather than huge profit margins on elective procedures

Bioethics will kill us all

We have ideological biases that say, “we shouldn’t be meddling with nature” In China, 95% of an audience would say, “Obviously you should make babies genetically healthier, happier, and brighter!” There’s a big cultural difference

As of 2021-07-01, things are even worse:

Probably the biggest mistake was not intentionally infecting vaccinated volunteers. This could be done in 1 month, vs 6.5 months for the ecological trials that the entire world did out of misguided PR ethics. (2.5 is probably more realistic given signups, approvals, and big pharma’s slow data analysis and reporting. That’s still 100K of lives.)

1DaySooner wrote a letter. The world’s foremost consequentialist signed. The world’s foremost deontologist signed. 2 of the most prominent bioethicists in the world signed. 15 Nobelists signed. 10s of philosophers who otherwise agree on extremely little signed. But they’re unethical.

Rarely do I so strongly feel the boot of others on my neck, and humanity’s neck.

The one distinctively courageous thing about the UK – the human challenge trials which got 40K volunteers – actually eventually started!.. In January 2021, with n=90.

Robot Logistics

Amazon Warehouse Automation Challenge. As with everything, Amazon are cheapskates. The price money is just $25k, hardly appropriate for this. For how it is in those warehouses, check out fulfillment
2019-05-21: USPS Tests Self-Driving

For this pilot, the human driver will handle the truck on surface streets, but TuSimple is already looking to a second phase of the pilot, where the robot does all the work. Meanwhile, it’s 400-person team is working to expand the robot’s operating envelope. The system can handle high winds, night driving (handling high beams was a pain), and rain, while ice on the road remains “a nasty problem.” If it never succeeds, the postal service has a team of mules up for the task.

2020-03-20: Missed Logistics Opportunity

Suddenly the world has been thrust into a crisis with 3 interesting aspects:

  1. A huge upswing in demand, and delivery companies are falling way behind.
  2. A sudden desire to not have a delivery driver touch packages, and drivers don’t want to interact with people.
  3. The roads in some areas have become almost deserted due to lockdowns.

What a glorious opportunity this could have been for the road based delivery vehicles. While they have not yet reached the safety level needed to do full time operations with no human on board in regular traffic, it’s quite possible that they can do it on mostly deserted streets. Particularly if low speed operations can be tolerated on those streets. However, even if that’s true, since nobody anticipated this, nobody has worked to build proof of that level of safety.

2020-06-26: Zoox

The ability to deliver anything in an Amazon warehouse on short notice will be a very attractive product. The cost of robot delivery will be low enough to be bundled in with Amazon Prime. If you can get anything in one of those giant Amazon warehouses in 30 minutes, that’s scary news for the rest of retail.

2020-12-14: Zoox robotaxi

this is interesting from a design perspective: what assumptions are no longer true and can be revised for a better experience? Passengers face one another, allowing for a more social experience. The interior is spartan, not the overcrowded complex dashboard of current cars and some robotaxi designs. Just a small display and charging port. The seats mix taxi goals (ease of cleaning and able to handle heavy use) with car design. The electric vehicle design allows a low center of gravity, and combined with wheels moved to the corners of the vehicle, a more flexible interior design with more space for the same footprint. Each wheel can also turn independently, allowing for an 8.6m turning radius. In many cases, it will not turn at all, when it wants to change direction of travel, it just changes. The vehicle is narrow and short enough, given that, to handle streets and driveways that might be a challenge for wider vehicles. Airbags are integrated into the special seats and their enclosing walls for extra crash safety.

2021-07-06: Posthuman Logistics

Outside of London is a massive supermarket—one that customers cannot enter. Instead it’s dedicated to fulfilling online orders. It’s filled with an upper-level cartesian grid swarming with over 2000 wheeled robots that zoom around in the X- and Y-axes. Beneath the robots’ wheels, each square of the grid is filled with up to 21 milk crates loaded with grocery products. The ‘bots can suck these bins up through their bottoms, then zip them over to the periphery, where additional sorting ‘bots pick-and-package them.

2023-02-23: Zoox goes public in California

Last week, the California DMV granted us our permit to operate our robotaxi autonomously on public roads. This weekend, we hit the road! It marked the first time in history that a purpose-built robotaxi—with no manual controls—drove autonomously on open public roads with passengers.