Now that the Trump administration's spectacular incompetence* is literally getting people killed, one naturally wonders what calamity tomorrow will bring. Poetic justice would be if Trump himself and his ring of enablers were culled by COVID-19, but I'm not holding my breath (I mean I am, but that's only because you're standing too close). If you think any comeuppance whatsoever will ever inconvenience these guys, you are practicing for your coma. As Jessie observed of Walter White, Donald Trump is the devil.
Which brings us to sequesterfying.
In Part I LINK of LabKitty's Plague Song Trilogy, we examined the spatiotemporal properties of infectious disease to model the global spread of COVID-19, from its humble beginnings in a Pangolin's alveoli to a pervasive plague rivaling the Black Death, rap, or Facebook. In Part II, we examined the rationale of the response, which the Internetigensia has taken to calling "flattening the curve." Now here in Part III we examine the mechanics of that response.
Call it what you will -- sheltering in place, avoiding public spaces, social distancing, that thing we nerds have been doing since Gymboree -- paramount is one question: Will it work?
You're not going to like the answer.
As Indy's dad said: I remembered my Charlemagne -- let my armies be the rocks and trees and the birds in the sky. There's no record Charlemagne ever said that, but whatever. More to the point, since there's scant COVID-19 testing and no vaccine, our only defense option is to put the world between us and the world. Be it the rocks and trees or a stairwell filled with shopping trolleys, the key here is to create an infection free bubble in which you can survive long enough for COVID-19 to run its course amongst the already infected.
Professional epidemiologists study this using something called individual based modeling, which is basically The Sims + infection. Our model here will be much simplified, in the interest of providing something you can run on your phone from inside your pillow fortress without killing your batteries.
The first parameter of interest is the infectious period (which we met in Part II as the reciprocal of the recovery rate). This establishes the required duration of your hunker. Put simply, you need to remain isolated until the disease abates. To account for this, we include a "removed" category in the simulation. Individuals remain infectious for the infectious period, after which they automatically transition to removed. Those in the removed category can no longer infect you or anyone else, nor can they be reinfected. As far as the math is concerned, the removed simply disappear.
The other parameter of import is the porosity of your perimeter. Put simply, how impenetrable is your isolation? If it's 100%, there's nothing to discuss. However, no isolation is perfect. You can do 99/100 things right -- trucks blocking the doors, rope ladder to your secret liar, food court cleared of zombies -- and then the bikers see Fran learning to fly the helicopter and your efforts come undone. Before you can say Monroeville Mall, a new generation of directors are remaking the genre using "fast" zombies, which misses the entire point of zombies. But I digress.
For illumination, we once again turn to Javascript.
Below you will find a simulated soon-to-be infected society divided by a barrier. The infection begins on the left side, with susceptibles and infected drawn as black and red squares, respectively. You (green square) are on the right. Your goal is to ride out the epidemic.
(short) --- barrier --- (long)
(sparse) --- population --- (dense)
Your isolation success is determined by the sliders. There's two sides to isolation: 1) the ruggedness of your preparation, and 2) the frequency infecteds attempt to breech. We model #1 by varying the length of the barrier, with better preparation represented by a longer barrier. We model #2 by varying the number of susceptibles, with more susceptibles translating into more frequent challenges of your barrier if/when they transition to infected. You can change the barrier while the sim is running, but changing the population doesn't take effect until the next run.
The duration of the infection is fixed at 100 time steps. Transmission occurs by contact, although I left the hitbox code slightly wonky to add a little variability. A run continues until no infecteds remain or you succumb.
The infectious period of COVID-19 appears to be not shorter than 5 days but not longer than 14. As such, you're probably wondering why authorities are expecting civilization to shut down for months. It's because each time isolation fails, the clock resets. And as the sim should convince you, isolation is hard. Not impossible, but certainly not easy. The bad news is it's worse in the real world. In the real world, isolation doesn't just depend on you; it depends on everyone. Therein lies the rub.
It's easy to keep your perimeter intact given a pantry full of MREs and a shotgun. However, when daily ablutions necessarily involve trips to the grocery store or apothecary, accidental armor chinks are inevitable. And that doesn't begin to factor in the gross stupidity a free society and Fox News encourages, whether it's a father breaking isolation to take his daughter to a school dance (yes, that happened), a congressman attending an NRA meeting rather than voting on disaster relief (also happened), or simply standing shoulder-to-shoulder for a White House briefing. In the movies, you can just shoot the braindead. In polite society, the braindead have the upper hand.
People can't be trusted to remain in isolation. Some have no choice. Medical providers, first responders, the workers keeping the lights on and the grocery stores open. These people cannot simply disappear. If they do, getting sick will be the least of your problems.
Each time isolation fails, the clock resets.
Decisive action taken months if not weeks ago could have prevented this mess. But that didn't happen. It didn't happen because the Trump administration didn't take the threat seriously. It didn't happen because the professionals were talked over or shouted down. It didn't happen because in Trump's America "expert" is a dirty word and lunatic conspiracy theories determine policy. The only person who matters in Donald Trump's America is Donald Trump.
So now this is the new normal. Elect a clown, get a circus.
I said you wouldn't like the answer.
Which brings us to sequesterfying.
In Part I LINK of LabKitty's Plague Song Trilogy, we examined the spatiotemporal properties of infectious disease to model the global spread of COVID-19, from its humble beginnings in a Pangolin's alveoli to a pervasive plague rivaling the Black Death, rap, or Facebook. In Part II, we examined the rationale of the response, which the Internetigensia has taken to calling "flattening the curve." Now here in Part III we examine the mechanics of that response.
Call it what you will -- sheltering in place, avoiding public spaces, social distancing, that thing we nerds have been doing since Gymboree -- paramount is one question: Will it work?
You're not going to like the answer.
As Indy's dad said: I remembered my Charlemagne -- let my armies be the rocks and trees and the birds in the sky. There's no record Charlemagne ever said that, but whatever. More to the point, since there's scant COVID-19 testing and no vaccine, our only defense option is to put the world between us and the world. Be it the rocks and trees or a stairwell filled with shopping trolleys, the key here is to create an infection free bubble in which you can survive long enough for COVID-19 to run its course amongst the already infected.
Professional epidemiologists study this using something called individual based modeling, which is basically The Sims + infection. Our model here will be much simplified, in the interest of providing something you can run on your phone from inside your pillow fortress without killing your batteries.
The first parameter of interest is the infectious period (which we met in Part II as the reciprocal of the recovery rate). This establishes the required duration of your hunker. Put simply, you need to remain isolated until the disease abates. To account for this, we include a "removed" category in the simulation. Individuals remain infectious for the infectious period, after which they automatically transition to removed. Those in the removed category can no longer infect you or anyone else, nor can they be reinfected. As far as the math is concerned, the removed simply disappear.
The other parameter of import is the porosity of your perimeter. Put simply, how impenetrable is your isolation? If it's 100%, there's nothing to discuss. However, no isolation is perfect. You can do 99/100 things right -- trucks blocking the doors, rope ladder to your secret liar, food court cleared of zombies -- and then the bikers see Fran learning to fly the helicopter and your efforts come undone. Before you can say Monroeville Mall, a new generation of directors are remaking the genre using "fast" zombies, which misses the entire point of zombies. But I digress.
For illumination, we once again turn to Javascript.
Below you will find a simulated soon-to-be infected society divided by a barrier. The infection begins on the left side, with susceptibles and infected drawn as black and red squares, respectively. You (green square) are on the right. Your goal is to ride out the epidemic.
---
(short) --- barrier --- (long)
(sparse) --- population --- (dense)
Your isolation success is determined by the sliders. There's two sides to isolation: 1) the ruggedness of your preparation, and 2) the frequency infecteds attempt to breech. We model #1 by varying the length of the barrier, with better preparation represented by a longer barrier. We model #2 by varying the number of susceptibles, with more susceptibles translating into more frequent challenges of your barrier if/when they transition to infected. You can change the barrier while the sim is running, but changing the population doesn't take effect until the next run.
The duration of the infection is fixed at 100 time steps. Transmission occurs by contact, although I left the hitbox code slightly wonky to add a little variability. A run continues until no infecteds remain or you succumb.
The infectious period of COVID-19 appears to be not shorter than 5 days but not longer than 14. As such, you're probably wondering why authorities are expecting civilization to shut down for months. It's because each time isolation fails, the clock resets. And as the sim should convince you, isolation is hard. Not impossible, but certainly not easy. The bad news is it's worse in the real world. In the real world, isolation doesn't just depend on you; it depends on everyone. Therein lies the rub.
It's easy to keep your perimeter intact given a pantry full of MREs and a shotgun. However, when daily ablutions necessarily involve trips to the grocery store or apothecary, accidental armor chinks are inevitable. And that doesn't begin to factor in the gross stupidity a free society and Fox News encourages, whether it's a father breaking isolation to take his daughter to a school dance (yes, that happened), a congressman attending an NRA meeting rather than voting on disaster relief (also happened), or simply standing shoulder-to-shoulder for a White House briefing. In the movies, you can just shoot the braindead. In polite society, the braindead have the upper hand.
People can't be trusted to remain in isolation. Some have no choice. Medical providers, first responders, the workers keeping the lights on and the grocery stores open. These people cannot simply disappear. If they do, getting sick will be the least of your problems.
Each time isolation fails, the clock resets.
Decisive action taken months if not weeks ago could have prevented this mess. But that didn't happen. It didn't happen because the Trump administration didn't take the threat seriously. It didn't happen because the professionals were talked over or shouted down. It didn't happen because in Trump's America "expert" is a dirty word and lunatic conspiracy theories determine policy. The only person who matters in Donald Trump's America is Donald Trump.
So now this is the new normal. Elect a clown, get a circus.
I said you wouldn't like the answer.
* and breathtaking corruption, as we have discovered Republicans intentionally delayed action until donors could dump their portfolios before the market tanked. Someone you care about might die because the Trump administration's first priority was that their rich friends don't become slightly less rich.
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