1-7 Today was the first day I stayed in a hotel since the start of the pandemic. I thought some people might like to know my respiratory protection strategy.
2-
First, I picked a hotel that had individual HVAC connected to the outside.
3- When I arrived, I immediately turned that fan on but kept my respirator on. I then did a qualitative assessment of airflow the same way I do in hospitals to verify that positive and negative pressure rooms work correctly.
4- Take a piece of tissue and separate the plies and tear it to about 1/4-1/3" thick. Slide it down to the crack in the door at the floor to see which direction air flows. You can see the tissue didn't move, ie, static pressure.
5- I then turned on the exhaust fan in the bathroom to see how that changed the pressure dynamic. It made my room negative pressure in relation to the hall.
6- That meant I needed to block the gap under the door because whenever I would go into the bathroom, it would draw hallway air into my room. Still had my respirator on.
7- You can also see I put my small HEPA filter near the door as well. I then left my room to pick up some dinner. About 20-30 minutes elapsed before I got back. Between the AC pulling in fresh air and my HEPA filter running, I felt very comfortable without my respirator on return
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
I've been suspecting that there is much more COVID circulating than we know. The problem is that the scant data that we had keeps disappearing under this regime.
2- One of the few data sources right now is Google symptom searches. Here's the raw data for the US. I had noticed that these were increasing in many states as I was updating my website last evening.
Same data set, but with linear trend lines. I use one month into the pandemic as a crossover to allow time for social services to normalize and to eliminate skewed data during the start. Dotted - pre, solid - COVID era.
3 - 4
Now some calculus. The dotted line is the six prior month derivative, the solid one is the six month moving average of the derivative. The distance above the black dotted line is proportional to the increasing rate of claims.
This is exactly why I find this administration disgusting besides the fact that it is completely tone deaf. However, there is plenty of evidence that this is nothing new for Americans, even though we are all immigrants.
I read In the Garden of the Beasts in the spring of 2016, before the melon felon even had the Republican nomination. I found the parallels very disturbing.
2- When he got elected, I decided to fly to Munich to study the rise of Nazism right after the Inauguration. I wanted to understand how what was probably a normal population of people allowed it to happen. I could have just stayed here.
3- During the trip, I visited Dachau. I intentionally went on the rainiest, coldest day during my trip. I knew it would be nothing like the misery that was experienced there, but I wanted to feel something.
Back when we had good case data early in the pandemic, I could predict the day cases would climb about 10 days out with nearly 99% accuracy. Unfortunately, that data supply and resolution is long gone.
2-
Now the earliest warning I can give is based on my observations of surges occurring when a variant becomes about 50% of submitted samples.