Coleman McCormick

Archive of posts with tag 'Coronavirus'

✦
✦
✦

Florida Beaches, 3 Months Post Lockdown

May 29, 2020 • #

We’re almost to the three-month mark since the lockdown started here in Pinellas. Pretty quickly all of the public beaches were closed, right in the midst of Spring Break season. For a county with so many of its economic drivers tied to tourism and beachgoers, that specific element of the lockdown was unprecedented, but given the unknown around the virus’s possible impacts, it was the right decision.

Earlier in May the county reopened the beaches, and naturally, the first weekend was mayhem. We’ve gone a few times throughout the month, and it’s certainly been busy, but not a ton busier than it’d be during any other May.

We’ve been to Pass-a-Grille, St Pete Beach, and Sunset Beach, each of them is moderately busy during normal time, but the biggest issue right now has been the artificial limiting of crowds by law enforcement, mostly by limiting permitted parking. The beaches themselves are crowded in pockets, but still far safer and more distanced than some parks and trails I’ve been to. There are officers keeping an eye on things at the beach walkways and helicopters patrolling up and down looking for anything overwhelmingly crowded. I’m glad they’ve been able to manage it without it getting out of hand. My anectodal feedback on the national news coverage of ā€œOMG they’re reopening beachesā€ is that they’re overblowing it. It’s not near as bad as most of the b-roll beach footage would have you believe.

Overall it seems like the county’s done a good job in a tenuous situation. And for the most part residents have been respectful in mask-wearing and distance-keeping — a lot more than I would’ve predicted. Floridians aren’t well known for compliance and good behavior.

It’s looking like we’re completely lifting restrictions on beaches, playgrounds, and pools next week, as well. Hopefully with appropriate distancing behavior we can gradually get comfortable again with at least outdoor activities, while keeping an eye on the case count figures to be cautious.

✦
✦
✦
✦

Weekend Reading: COVID Edition

April 25, 2020 • #

āš—ļø COVID and Forced Experiments

Benedict Evans looks at what could return to normal after coronavirus, and what else might have accelerated change that was already happening.

ā€œEvery time we get a new kind of tool, we start by making the new thing fit the existing ways that we work, but then, over time, we change the work to fit the new tool. You’re used to making your metrics dashboard in PowerPoint, and then the cloud comes along and you can make it in Google Docs and everyone always has the latest version. But one day, you realise that the dashboard could be generated automatically and be a live webpage, and no-one needs to make those slides at all. Today, sometimes doing the meeting as a video call is a poor substitute for human interaction, but sometimes it’s like putting the slides in the cloud.ā€

šŸ“ˆ COVID-19: What’s wrong with the models?

One of the things continually aggravating about all of the data, models, projections, and analyses about COVID-19 is how little anyone cares to retroactively analyze prior predictions. Over the last two months the predictions have been all over the map, and as time marches on and many are wrong, some are right, there’s no analysis of what assumptions were made that turned out not to be true causing the wide divergence between projection and reality.

Peter Attia calls out here something rarely acknowledged about why projections are wicked:

ā€œProjections only matter if you can hold conditions constant from the moment of your prediction, and even then, it’s not clear if projections and models matter much at all if they are not based on actual, real-world data. In the case of this pandemic, conditions have changed dramatically (e.g., aggressive social distancing), while our data inputs remain guesswork at best.ā€

šŸ’‰ The Pandemic Isn’t a Black Swan but a Portent of a More Fragile Global System

Nassim Taleb, making his way into the New Yorker.

✦
✦
✦

Weekend Reading: The State and the Virus, Future of Work, and Stephen Wolfram's Setup

April 18, 2020 • #

šŸ› The Individual, the State, and the Virus

I agree with most of Kling’s takes here on the role the state should play in the coronavirus crisis.

šŸ‘©šŸ½ā€šŸ’» Mapping the Future of Work

A nice comprehensive list of SaaS products for the workplace, across a ton of different categories. Great work by Pietro Invernizzi putting this database together.

āŒØļø Stephen Wolfram’s Personal Infrastructure

Mathematician and computer scientist Stephen Wolfram wrote this epic essay on his personal productivity infrastructure.

✦
✦

Family Life in Quarantine

April 9, 2020 • #

March 12th was the last time I was at the office. We went full remote starting the next day.

The 13th was Elyse’s last day in person at her school. Spring break was slated for the following week anyway, but she started up ā€œZoom schoolā€ a couple weeks ago. She’s only 4 and in pre-K, so they’re just doing their ā€œcircle timeā€ remotely. At least a chance to see her friends on cameras once in a while.

Other than the typical cabin fever of having to be at the house so much, I’m surprised how well the kids are handling it. They’re video calling cousins and friends occasionally, which they enjoy, and haven’t asked too many questions about why we don’t go anywhere anymore. We’ve told Elyse that there’s a sickness going around and we don’t want to get ourselves or others sick, so now when she talks about it she refers to ā€œthe sicknessā€ ā€”Ā ā€maybe we can go to so-and-so’s house when The Sickness is over.ā€ A biblical way of putting it.

We’ve now been separated for a full month from everyone. It’s surprising how quickly this 4-week period has blazed past, with days smearing together, the same routine more-or-less with kids and work. When every day is almost identical, they’re hard to tell apart. Eugene Wei had a great take on this phenomenon and its possible causes in a recent post:

The reason it feels like driving somewhere takes longer than driving home from that destination, even if both trips take the same amount of time, is that our ā€œattention gateā€ is wider open on the way there because the directions are unfamiliar to us. We’re looking more carefully at road signs and landmarks to make sure we don’t get lost. On the way back, as we near home, we can flip to autopilot since we’ve done that trip so many times. Our attention gate narrows and our senses absorb less information. The memory of the return trip ends up as a smaller file in our memory banks.

The reason you might look back on a long and monotonous stretch of repetitive workdays and feel like it was just a blur is that our brain can run an efficient version of some compression algorithm on what is a very consistent daily routine of going to the office and sitting at your desk, the way a JPEG algorithm can do wonders with an image that consists of large blocks of the same color.

The similarity between days, even ones on the weekend, provides no clear boundaries or breakpoints. We’ve had a few days where we went on longer walks or bike rides, but other than that it’s the same on repeat.

One thing we have that many don’t have the luxury of is one another, so the 4 of us spend time together. I feel for people that have to be alone during this period (certainly a trade-off, since ā€œincessantā€ would be a gracious way to describe kids in quarantine).

At this point it doesn’t seem like things will change anytime soon. I think everyone’s still waiting for the curve-bending to show real downward trends so we can loosen this situation a bit over the next month or so.

✦
✦

Bill Gates on Coronavirus

March 29, 2020 • #

A solid interview with Bill Gates with his thoughts on the COVID response. There aren’t many folks outside of the medical field more versed in this topic based on empirical experience than Gates. Interesting to hear his take.

✦

Weekend Reading: Cloud Services, Cities After the Virus, and Corona Care Map

March 28, 2020 • #

ā˜ļø Value of Cloud Based Services in Times of Crisis

Bryan wrote this post about how Fulcrum is supporting the COVID response efforts.

šŸ™ Cities After Coronavirus

I speculated a bit about this sort of thing earlier this week. How might urban design change?

One of the most pressing questions that urban planners will face is the apparent tension between densification – the push towards cities becoming more concentrated, which isĀ seen as essential to improving environmental sustainability – and disaggregation, the separating out of populations, which is one of the key tools currently being used to hold back infection transmission.

šŸ—ŗ COVID Care Map

Some colleagues in the geo community are working on this project to map health care resources by region and facility. All of the code and work is in the open on GitHub.

✦
✦
✦

Under Quarantine

March 18, 2020 • #

It’s a weird time right now across the globe. People all over are quarantined, either because of government mandate or self-isolation from others to try and stop the spread of the coronavirus.

I don’t think the world needs more sideline expertise or prognostication about what the virus is doing, how this period will end, or how the economy recovers. There’s already plenty of that out online and in the media — probably way too much.

But I wanted to write something down about this as a personal note for future me to read in the archives.

We’re on day 5 of a self-imposed quarantine, with the family here at home limiting our time out and about, and me working from the house. We’ve been out to the store a couple of times, but mostly we’re spending time here, in the backyard pool, or doing bike rides around the block. All things considered, it hasn’t been too bad. Work is different, but the whole team being remote hasn’t changed that much in productivity levels that I can tell yet.

There doesn’t seem to be a turnaround point hit yet in the rate of new infections. We’ll probably be holed up another few weeks, minimum.

We’re still sane so far, but we’ll see what 2 or 3 more weeks alone in the house with kids does to us.

✦
✦
✦