Oh how shall I its deeds recount
Or measure the untold amount
Of ills that it has done?
From China’s bright celestial land
E’en to Arabia’s thirsty sand
It journeyed with the sun.
O’er miles of bleak Siberia’s plains
Where Russian exiles toil in chains
It moved with noiseless tread;
And as it slowly glided by
There followed it across the sky
The spirits of the dead.
The Ural peaks by it were scaled
And every bar and barrier failed
To turn it from its way;
Slowly and surely on it came,
Heralded by its awful fame,
Increasing day by day.
On Moscow’s fair and famous town
Where fell the first Napoleon’s crown
It made a direful swoop;
The rich, the poor, the high, the low
Alike the various symptoms know,
Alike before it droop.
Nor adverse winds, nor floods of rain
Might stay the thrice-accursed bane;
And with unsparing hand,
Impartial, cruel and severe
It travelled on allied with fear
And smote the fatherland.
Fair Alsace and forlorn Lorraine,
The cause of bitterness and pain
In many a Gaelic breast,
Receive the vile, insatiate scourge,
And from their towns with it emerge
And never stay nor rest.
And now Europa groans aloud,
And ‘neath the heavy thunder-cloud
Hushed is both song and dance;
The germs of illness wend their way
To westward each succeeding day
And enter merry France.
Fair land of Gaul, thy patriots brave
Who fear not death and scorn the grave
Cannot this foe oppose,
Whose loathsome hand and cruel sting,
Whose poisonous breath and blighted wing
Full well thy cities know.
In Calais port the illness stays,
As did the French in former days,
To threaten Freedom’s isle;
But now no Nelson could o’erthrow
This cruel, unconquerable foe,
Nor save us from its guile.
Yet Father Neptune strove right well
To moderate this plague of Hell,
And thwart it in its course;
And though it passed the streak of brine
And penetrated this thin line,
It came with broken force.
For though it ravaged far and wide
Both village, town and countryside,
Its power to kill was o’er;
And with the favouring winds of Spring
(Blest is the time of which I sing)
It left our native shore.
God shield our Empire from the might
Of war or famine, plague or blight
And all the power of Hell,
And keep it ever in the hands
Of those who fought ‘gainst other lands,
Who fought and conquered well.
E. Thomas Ewing, Veronica Kimmerly, and Sinclair Ewing-Nelson, “’Look Out for La Grippe’: Using Digital Humanities Tools to Interpret Information Dissemination during the Russian Flu, 1889-1890.” Medical History Vol. 60, Issue 1 (January 2016), pp. 129-131. DOI 10.1017/mdh.2015.84
I won’t go into why people moved away from these logical options for transportation and to the illogical gasoline automobile. Kunstler does a good job of that in The Geography of Nowhere. Instead, I want to point out here that the recent tsunami devastation in Japan is showing a sudden uptick in two-wheeled commuters.
At no point in that post or since have I thought about the use of bicycles during a pandemic. I suppose my assumption was breathing would be elevated, increasing risk of infection or spreading the virus faster somehow.
The city has a pollution-loving history with a huge “we’re busy trying to get rich/famous, leave us alone” lobby that claims doing the right thing for “others” is economically unfeasible in their list of priorities.
Color me completely surprised, therefore, when I read that NYC in pandemic disaster mode is accelerating bike lanes and recommending people cycle.
In early March, de Blasio encouraged commuters to “bike or walk” to reduce the spread of COVID-19 if they had to travel, and New Yorkers listened: According to the city’s Department of Transportation, bike traffic over its bridges has dramatically increased this month compared to the same time last year. Citi Bike also saw demand surge 67 percent in early March.
Very few cars are on the road, streets are mostly empty. Thus the risk of being hit and killed has suddenly evaporated. On top of that the air is incredibly clean now. And if that wasn’t enough, studies show cycling boosts your immune system.
Since cyclists tend to use physical distancing measures anyway when they ride, now that I think about it, the pandemic shelter in place instructions (keep 6 feet separation) are natural and easy to abide.
DOT spokesperson Brian Zumhagen says the agency is looking at “using cones or movable barriers” to create temporary bike paths with space from traffic lanes, and may designate new parking for bikes on sidewalks and in pedestrian plazas. DOT is also working with Citi Bike to add more docks in parts of Manhattan.
On March 20, de Blasio announced that the city is rolling out new, temporary bike lanes on Second Avenue in Manhattan between 34th and 42nd streets and on parts of Smith Street in Brooklyn that doesn’t already have a bike lane.
“We’ll be looking for other areas all over the city that need them,” de Blasio told reporters at a Friday press conference announcing the new lanes. “Certainly want to encourage people to use bikes as much as they can at this moment…
Amazing. In just a week, due to the shift from selfish to societal impact values, NYC has flipped from dangerously car-heavy bottom-ranked streets for cycling to a Mayor encouraging bikes as much as possible.
Add pandemics to the list of disasters that lead to increased bicycle sales.
I’ve written several times about big data and visualization issues for the COVID-19 pandemic.
March 3: Visualizing Coronavirus Spread: Many Tools, Results Vary Widely
March 8: America Admits to Cooking its Numbers on Coronavirus
March 11: Why Big Data Missed Early Warning Signs of COVID-19
As a long-time researcher of big data security, the most important problem space always has been one of data integrity, no matter how many times the market tries to shift everyone’s focus onto confidentiality (encryption, encryption, encryption).
Why do we care about data integrity here, or more specifically about test results on a dashboard? A recent Guardian article explains the significance with a simple metaphor to tell us how badly the White House is mismanaging security science:
Trying to combat the disease without testing is like running through a forest blindfolded – it’s not going to end well.
I would only add to that we’re entering a situation where we don’t control the running part, a virus does. The speed of movement is more like being caught in an avalanche and there’s a quote that always runs through my mind when I’m on steep terrain in deep snow:
…sparse trees do nothing but provide things for you to hit as you’re swept away.
First, the Worst.
America’s CDC has one of the worst, if not the worst, dashboard in the world. I’m embarrassed to even post it here. Don’t look. It’s pointless. Until they figure out that Alaska is part of the US, I’ve given up even trying to rationalize how badly CDC is doing.
Instead, I offer you a visualization by Buzzfeed News of small data about the White House itself, which shows spread of the virus due to obvious failure in leadership (lack of proactive distancing and testing).
Next, an honorable mention in this worst category is the much celebrated Johns Hopkins University dashboard. A good attempt, yet perhaps a dangerous lesson in failures.
It sadly appears to be broken and untrustworthy while being heavily cited as a success. In the three links at the start of this blog I’ve warned about their issues before (e.g. with everyone predicting NYC being a hot spot yet their map failing to represent growing cases). I also just noticed there’s a site that depends heavily on the dashboard, which now carries a very disturbing warning at the top.
Johns Hopkins university, the source of almost all of the charts, maps and tables below, is currently experiencing technical issues. The visualizations that show cases in the US, in China and worldwide over time are therefore incorrect. If you’re using them in your articles, please inform your readers about the issue.
To be fair it’s a little unfair to call it the John’s Hopkins University dashboard when a graduate student (Ensheng Dong) built it for (or with) Lauren Gardner, Professor of civil and systems engineering.
Also I have to give a shout out to Splunk. They tend to be known for over-priced proprietary data quicksand, yet they’ve very nicely announced removing their usual red flags by offering an app via github for COVID-19 data.
While we will continue to expand our app and add features, we understand that others have their own ideas of how to visualize this data. Feel free to clone this app and create your own version, or get in touch with us… to collaborate and submit data and visualizations that you think others may find useful in the publicly available app.
There’s just a little problem. Can you understand this chart?
It reminds me of this old National Geographic chart of “Vaccine Victories” but gone completely wrong.
Hate to be cynical in the face of a gift horse, yet that default visualization for a flagship dashboard is so illegible… no wonder they’re giving it away and asking for community to do better. It just maybe is why they’re pushing the general public to post ideas so they can then commercialize it and make money off pandemic volunteers. I know, too cynical.
By the way, does anyone really want to use “Day 62.5” in a chart?
Second, the Best.
Singapore is unquestionably the best national site. It baffles me why the US federal government couldn’t grab Kibana and put this together in a week at most.
The first cases come around January 20th and growth is contained. It’s all very easy to see, and they offer numerous ways to pivot the data by demographics and region over time. It’s so good, I just imagine a competent White House would have had a same or better one by end of January at the latest.
The “testings” donut on the lower right is my favorite widget, although it tells us 8% of tests are positive when we really should want to know what percentage of the total population has been tested and when. Anyway, the whole thing feels masterful after playing with so many bad examples.
In remarks that many found confounding and frightening, [White House occupant] described the governor of Washington state as a “snake”, praised his own expertise and falsely claimed that anyone who wants a coronavirus test can get one. Pence was later forced to correct this.
It only stands to reason that the federal and Washington state visualizations of virus test results are complete opposite ends of the spectrum.
They’ve taken the vaccination simulations, everyone knows all too well in visualization templates and games to learn from, and made an extremely useful point about why social distancing action was needed immediately after the first cases were confirmed.
Perhaps even more importantly the above illustration shows why quarantines aren’t as effective as social distancing.
The same article shows Jan 21 was the first confirmed case and distancing wasn’t started, tests were not being done at scale, due to sheer incompetence of US government leadership. Hundreds of thousands of Americans are likely to die based on unnecessary delays and indecision by the White House.
Let’s be honest here, it’s March 14 and tests still are not done at scale. The White House only started to actually pay attention after financial markets reacted to the White House lack of reaction and everything crashed; by then it was far too late to turn back the clock and start effective early virus response. It’s such a tragedy to see very clearly in the visualization here how an easily predictable and well known exponential curve was ignored until too late.
The Washington Post sends a warning simply and clearly:
If the number of cases would continue to double every three days, there would be about a hundred million cases in the United States by May. That is math, not prophecy.
Now let’s go back up and marvel again at how math is driving the Singapore dashboard, and the very clear and transparent fact that they have a flat line instead of an exponential curve.
Update March 15: I’ve been asked to list some of the other sites considered, beyond those already mentioned in the previous blog posts (e.g. NYT, Hong Kong). Here is a short-list for review. Let me know if you agree or disagree with my worst/best results.
Milwaukee’s Palmolive 1920s marketing campaign about basic safety, a major messaging shift to social good away from their late 1800s imagery that made them world famous (exotic cleanser suitable for Egyptian Pharaohs).
These coronavirus quarantine times,
Definitely need some new soap rhymes.
Plenty of soap sits on shelves all around the world, yet toilet paper and hand sanitizer are disappearing far too quickly, leaving shelves barren. Why? I’d say it’s a lack of action by nations to run anti-hoarding public service announcements (e.g. it’s illegal in many places) as well as pro-soap safety slogans and information campaigns.
The economics of ignoring science
First of all, psychologists believe that hoarding behavior during a crisis is related to a sense of control. It’s ironic because hoarding exhibits instead both a lack of control as well as a transfer of power from the individual to large corporations known to use their fortunes to further reduce individual control.
Toilet paper in some cultures, for example, represents training people from a very early age on healthy living habits in a very inexpensive bulk retail format. Buying huge amounts of paper at low cost arguably feeds into a tribal association with a fundamental product for keeping oneself clean and safe.
Water and soap would of course be cleaner than toilet paper. Studies report how infections decrease among those who use a bidet, so a spike in bidet installations and decrease in paper would be beneficial for multiple reasons. Yet when someone starts to panic it may not be an ideal time for them to shift into thoughtful things like washing with soap at the toilet instead of paper (although data suggests it is starting to happen anyway).
Thus, hoarding is about people in faith-based toilet paper societies needing to feel in control of their cleanliness and safety if a novel virus starts to scare them. Buying rolls of paper feeds directly into feelings of something tangible being done, to avoid feelings like loss of control. It’s a primitive but effective trauma coping mechanism.
People also have developed a kind of blind faith in hand sanitizer. Unlike paper, sanitizer benefits mostly from slick marketing that manages to squeeze popular perception of control into an unremarkable pump bottle or box of tissues. Sadly, on that note, the marketing often is entirely deceptive and unsafe because it doesn’t work at all as advertised:
The front of the package doesn’t mention that it’s alcohol-free; the back includes small print that lists benzalkonium chloride as the active ingredient and the label “alcohol-free formula.” Nowhere on the Amazon product listing does it say it’s alcohol-free.
Here’s another take on it from Supramolecular chemistry expert Palli Thordarson who tweeted out why soap with water is superior:
The scientist went on to explain that disinfectants, wipes, gels and creams containing alcohol – hand sanitisers – are effective at killing bacteria, but don’t break down the structure of the virus. […] The Tweets come after Dr Norman Swan also declared soap was better on ABC’s 7.30 program.
There is no real comfort or any advantages to the sanitizers only more risks (such as toxic additives and false advertising) versus other known safer and more effective options such as soap and water.
One of the crazier things I hear, for example, is that hand sanitizer is more “convenient” because you don’t always have water with you. This of course begs the question of why you can have hand sanitizer with you if you can’t carry a small bottle of water?
Another thing I hear is that hand sanitizer saves time. And that is exactly the problem with it. Doing a 20 second minimum of soap and water washing is what makes it so effective. Going faster turns out to be less effective for both, plus you often find people squirting sanitizer multiple times and rubbing for 20 seconds anyway.
More to the point, being out and about in the real world with exposure to things like dirt, dust and oils makes sanitizer even less effective versus hand washing with soap. But again, hoarding is evidence of people seeking feelings of control through retail therapy, not about them making smart life choices.
Despite these facts, sales research shows percentages are up massively for sanitizer while soap doesn’t even make the chart
Hoarding is a crime
Second, there is of course is another explanation. Hoarders actually are predatory criminals aiming to corner a disaster market and profit from artificial scarcity that they hope makes them rich as they slowly kill their neighbors.
Amid coronavirus fears, this couple has made more than $100,000 reselling…
“The woman ahead of me bought $2,000 worth of thermometers,” said Zapatak.
The only people really benefiting from such panic and hoarding of goods are large conglomerates like the Koch family that dominate an industry and who infamously tend to stoke panic in democracies by claiming absurdly false things like Eisenhower was a Communist.
…reflect and amplify the least evolved parts of our biology and behavior: the remorseless struggle for survival that is the highest achievement of the reptilian part of our brain and the fears, rages and insecurities that flourish in primitive parts of our limbic system, our emotional brain.
Just remember, the more your reptilian brain parts panic buy things like sanitizer and toilet paper instead of locally sourced soap, the more a giant Koch empire is working to undermine democracy, not to mention you’re probably stockpiling a product that denies it to someone who actually needs it.
What is really on point now is a round of public service announcements and posters to remind people to stay calm and lather.
During the Great Fire of San Francisco, for example, the Oakland Mayor simply said businesses that use surge pricing during disasters (e.g. the entire predatory business concept of Lyft and Uber) would have their assets confiscated by the military.
Instead of that, several states (at least California, Washington and New York) had to direct Amazon to block gouging crimes based on hoarders. New York also committed to producing 100,000 gallons per week of it’s own public version of hand sanitizer, safer than the misleading commercial/private labels, for distribution wherever Amazon’s hoarders had attacked.
With the current absence of leadership ability in federal government on this topic, perhaps Amazon security staff could take it upon themselves to hack into anyone detected on their platform using gouging practices and seize assets for Amazon to redirect/redistribute. I suppose that’s like a man-in-the-middle platform attack by the platform itself, as hoarders would get no money in a sale and the product would be intercepted when it shipped. Probably too much legal red tape and coordination among private sector executives for that to work.
But seriously, law enforcement could be sent to these criminal-minded hoarding caches to seize their ill-gotten assets and redistribute via Amazon to vulnerable populations:
…they watched the list of Amazon’s most popular searches crowd with terms like “Purell,” “N95 mask” and “Clorox wipes,” sellers said, they did what they had learned to do: Suck up supply… Mr. Colvin does not believe he was price gouging. While he charged $20 on Amazon for two bottles of Purell that retail for $1 each, he said people forget that his price includes his labor, Amazon’s fees… “I’m not looking to be in a situation where I make the front page of the news for being that guy who hoarded 20,000 bottles of sanitizer that I’m selling for 20 times what they cost me.”
That’s right, Mr. Colvin believes his fellow citizens deserve to be gouged or dead because illegal hoarding isn’t free for him (just think of the legal fees alone to stay out of jail and avoid angry mobs) and Amazon wants a cut of his hoarding. Perfect example of market failure and why privatized systems can be the worst thing during times when societies need collaboration and cooperation the most.
One doctor, in a desperate appeal to get people to stop hoarding and start donating instead, explained it like this:
If doctors and nurses die because of inadequate protection, all the toilet paper and dried pasta in the world won’t save you.
There are many other examples of hoarding behavior in history of war (coronavirus has very similar dynamics as nations going to war) and how the hoarders were dealt with, so it’s a wonder nobody in government anywhere seems to be creating modern versions of these types of public service campaign posters.
And perhaps the best example of all, a Soviet poster warning to watch out for people who steal paper from books.
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
