Schneier on Security

Clive Robinson • April 18, 2020 12:28 PM

@ MarkH, Lurker,

There’s no way to avoid trading lives lost to disease, against economic devastation which, at some point, may itself function as a mass killer.

It’s a question I asked a few days back, of where do you take the hit, upto 14% of your most economicaly advantaged now, causing mass disruption in the economy or take an anual poverty hit for the next decade or three due to poverty and depression brought on by a massive recession?

That is the problem with extended national lockdowns that have to last 90-120 days after last infected case…

The assumption there is off course that we “must have economy destroying indefinate length nationa lockdowns”.

The answer of course is we don’t.

If we “Track, Trace, Test, and Confine” at a highly localised level then we do not need the economy to be shut down, just sensible social distancing.

Whilst people will die untill an effective treatment comes along or even a vaccine, the numbers of sick can be kept down to a small proportion of hospital capacity by prompt test & confine action.

The problem is “testing”…

What we need is two antibody tests and an effective RT-PCR antigen test.

Thus yiu need a cheap “instant” antibody test with a low false positive rate (0.1% or less) as an initial screen. If you’ve got antibodies it’s back to “the coalface with you” to be an economically active drone.

If you don’t have antibodies to the cheap instant test then either the more expensive more exacting lab antibody test or if you are likely to be infectious the RT-PCR test. If you show no signs of infection or antibodies then back into “shelter in place confinment” and if possible be economically active at home if for no other reason the sake of your sanity. If you do show positive for the virus antigen then it’s probably best to have the equivalent of the old typhoid quarantine hospital facilities where you can get immediate medical attention if only as a “lab rat” untill you show negative for virus antigens. Or you become sufficiently symptomatic to require medical intervention early with potentialy drugs like inteferon B to stop your condition becoming serious. Thus easing the preasure on hospital resources. Again early intervention with CPAP + Oxygen therapy, broad spectrum antibiotics and antifungal medications to stop secondary infections before they start, and although manpower intensive fairly vigourous physiotherapy to help loosen up the dead cells and fluid deep down in the lungs so that your body has a better chance of getting the muck up and out thus keeping the airways clearer. Again this hopefully will help reduce the numbers of people becoming more critical.

The point is the virus does not kill you unless your immune system totaly fails you. What kills you is secondary infections stopping the immune system or clinical shock from inflamation going on to cause sepsis, organ failure and death. Or if you are on a mechanical “inflationary” style ventilator spending to long on it.

Which brings up the question which is better, a ventilator that forces oxygen into the lungs causing known problems. Or the old style “iron lung” chambers that apply negative presure to the chest etc thus lifting the chest and more gently drawing air into the lungs without greating excessive known to be harmfull pressure in the lungs.

History shows us that polio sufferers could spend months on an iron lung without the need for surgery or drug induced coma and survive and recover sufficiently not to need the iron lung.

What I could not find is upto date pros/cons of the two types of intervention.

Oh there is another potential avenue of investigation that I’m not even sure anyone is considering which is a form of localised heating…

Put simply virii do not like to be warm, they prefer the cold to survive. One of the most primitave immune responses that are found in many many species not just primates is the abiliry to raise the body temprature to make viability of pathogens less.

This pathogen causes problems when it gets into the lower respiritory track. What most do not realise is that you can breath in air at over 50C and survive people do this in deserts during the “warmer times of year”… The reason is that the blood supply can take the heat away from the lung lining and get rid of it via persperation at other parts of the bodies surface.

Thus the question arises as to how far you can raise the temprature of the air going into the lungs without damage and getting rid of it by cooling other areas of the body?

I suspect we will have a partial answer to this in a month or two when the middle east starts to heat up for “summer”.

However if anybody reading this knows the answer to “how hot can the air be” and what effect that would have on the SARS-CoV-2 in vevo I for one would be interested to know because as an engineer I know we can quite carefully and very finely control not just the temprature of the air it’s humidity and oxygen contents. And if doing this reduces the need for high oxygen levels that damage the lungs then so much the better.

Because whilst I fully expect the First World can stop the virus becoming endemic and keep the economy going in their nations by quarantine measurse on the population via good “Track, Trace, Test and Confine” and very strong border protections (both of which are security nightmares), I also know it’s not possible with “slum” or “high density” type living without strong medical intervention. With India the Near East Africa and parts of the Middle east having around 1/5th of the worlds population in unsuitable housing and living conditions and life styles. Their Governments will not be capable of providing either the required level of issolation or healthcare thus the community spread and death rates will be appaling. Worse their Governments will not be able to give the required economic aid to maintain even the megerest of living standards. So the resultant loss of life from dire poverty will cause social unrest and major attempts at “health emigration”. But it is certain no mater what left to themselves these nations will get SARS-CoV-2 endemic in their nations thus vastly increasing the risk of new strains that could be both more infectious and more virulant with the possability that as with Dengue Fever getting hit by first one strain then the second could in effect disable peoples immune systems…

Clive Robinson • April 18, 2020 1:32 PM

@ 65535,

Next, is this so called SARS-covid virus really very differentiate than the seasonal flu which mutates constantly… and the fact that covid virus is in many humans and animals a large portion of the time? It seems that SARS-covid is similar to the seasonal flu. I wonder who is telling the truth.

As has been mentioned yes the common flu strains and SARS-Cov-2 are quantifiably different on many levels.

To believe otherwise is to buy into the Fake-news being put around by various people for their own gain over the rest of society.

It’s another form of “climate denial syndrome” designed to make you not believe science, so you will accept any unproven irrational claims untill you finally wake up and realise you’ve not only been made a fool of you have yet again lost rights and opertunities to the 1% of the 1% who’s sole intent is to rent seek you out of any assets and into poverty. It’s yet again a variation of the failed “free market mantra” and worse that the neo-liberals pay certain economists and thus others to parrot.

If you like it’s another sick joke like the espousing of the “trickle down effect”.

If you still think that COVID-19 is less harmful than the average flu go have a look at the seasonaly averaged death rates. Rhe flu deaths were less than the five previous year average this year. However as COVID-19 got into the community the death rate has climbed and climbed well above the previous five year average it’s getting on for three time in the UK but in Italy and Spain we know regional figures were between five and eleven times that of the five year average…

But something else to look at over on the WorldOmeter web page for the US,

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

At April 18 2020 18:09 GMT it shows the following,

Recorded cases : 728,081
Closed cases : 102,191 (14%)

Of the closed cases,

Survived : 63,955 (63%)
Died : 38,236 (37%)

0ver 1/3rd of recorded cases have had an outcome of death and less than 2/3rds have so far survived. What is not shown is how many of those that have survived have servived without being debikitated in some way, including respiritory or cardiac disfunction that almost certainly will result in a much shorter life span.

Einstein had a definition of madness that was in effect asking a question repeatedly exoecting a different outcome…

It’s been shown here that SARS-CoV-2 and the common strains of the flu are not just “quantitatively different” but “qualitatively different” as well from information gained by scientists. But more importantly you’ve been shown just by the Recorded deaths and simple arithmetic the same thing the two virus types are no where near the same in effect.

So why do you think Einstein’s observation is incorrect?

Clive Robinson • April 18, 2020 1:59 PM

@ JonKnowsNothing,

With regards

“Amazon has begun using thermal cameras inside its warehouses to screen workers who could be infected with coronavirus, employees have told Reuters.”

That’s maybe what the employes have been told, but colour me skeptical…

I could be wrong but based on previous information about “The Boss” and the lack of supplying PPE to employees, I would look for another reason the cameras are going in other than finding potential COVID-19 sufferers.

My first thought would be it’s a “backdoor excuse” to put in a surveillance system for other reasons.

We know that the technology for “checkout-less stores” has been trialed and appears to be sufficiently successful based on AI augmented by humans.

My guess would thus be they are for an AI “employee continuous evaluation system” the sprinkling of AI being all the diference between this and those “Crotch Shot devices” installed in a UK newspaper in the appropriately named “hot desk office” till thr journos threatend to string up the editor by his goolies. That is it is in reality a system by which hiring firing and potential promotion will be judged… And even if that is not the current intention, it’s likely to be what it becomes fairly quickly.

Clive Robinson • April 18, 2020 4:35 PM

@ MarkH, ALL,

I know you have concerns about India and across to to the Middle East with respect to living conditions, and I share those.

And as I mentioned above I’ve had concerns about social unrest as certainly in some parts if you do not work on any given day you do not have the money to buy food that evening, and there is no support structure other than family and friends (who would all be in the same position so can not help).

Well there are also others that earn slightly more as their jobs tend to be more skilled, and they tend to be paid weekly. One such group is seamstress’ in Bangladesh which is one of the largest producers of clothes in the world.

Well it appears some employers have locked the seamstress’ out and not even payed them for work done. The employers excuse is “orders canceled from the first world”. Now I do not know if that is true or not but I suspect there is more than a grain of truth in it[1].

However I noticed on a COVID “Live update” web page[2] the following,

Hundreds of workers in Bangladesh have taken to the streets in defiance of social distancing rules to demand unpaid wages during the Covid-19 shutdown.

Thus not just social unrest has started but also it’s of the type that could easily escalate disease transmission.

But that’s not all the bad news, as quite a few know Ramadan is just around the corner, and this has certain rituals and traditions as well as religious practices that if carried out would destroy any kind of social distancing.

Iran appears to be just starting to get on top of it’s SARS-CoV-2 curve, if care is not taken then it might well reverse the curve a week or so after the start of Ramadan…

[1] Clothes shops are not yet “essential services” although in the UK quite a few “supermarkets” do sell clothes as well as food so I’m assuming not all orders are cancelled, if anything some orders may well go up as fashion / boutique / Sportswear / etc cloths shops are closed especially those for children who as any parent with younger childern know “they grow like weeds”.

[2] For a live update page it sure has a weirdly titled URL,
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2020/apr/18/coronavirus-live-news-global-deaths-pass-150000-trump-china-china-denies-any-concealment-pence-origins-europe-germany?page=with:block-5e9b27658f08bade1f295b58#block-5e9b27658f08bade1f295b58

Clive Robinson • April 19, 2020 12:46 PM

@ Miquel,

What do you think about the latest Stanford study (as well as several others) which shows an actual death rate of 0.1%

Have you actually read it?

Or as I suspect only seen “reported headlines”?

The first thing you have to understand is it’s suggested figures are not based on factual evidence vut a projection from “random sampling” in a very very small subset of the general population that produces it’s “study cohort”.

Other studies with larger cohorts show significantly different figures both larger and smaller. That alone should give you pause for thought as to the difficulty with making peojections on small cohorts.

Another thing to watch out for is the alowance for R_t way to many talk about R₀ which is not the right figure to use as the “average replication rate R changes with time. For quite a few reasons.

Further as a first order approximation the infection numbers rise “to a power” or “exponentialy. That is Y_n+1 = K Y_n where K is some value where if greater than one gives exponential growth, constant growth when one and obviously a decay when less than one. Amongst other things K like changes with both time ‘t’ and R_t which is dependent on the virus infectiveness as a base rate and the environment and the number, and time it comes into contact with viable hosts. As a second aproximation K decreases as hosts either become immune by having a vaccine or by infection, or they die… Which ever way the number of potential hosts in a closed space decreases with time.

But the important thing about an exponential curve is it’s continuous which means a linear line crosses/touches it only once or twice.

This means you can easly show just as with “a stoped clock” it matches what you want it to say twice once or twice. Thus selectively picking your line can show it’s equal to any disease related death or the average death from old age.

So watch out for something that says “our measurments upto the first week of march show flu was killing more people”… Whilst it would be true it would also be a deliberatly erroneous conclusion to come to. Another trick is to “misapply the growth figures”. When you present only
Y_n as the growth rate not Y_n +
Y_n-1 … + Y₁ you are magically making the preceding dead and now immune not count. This is easily done both by mistake and by choice, the latter can be a deliberate attempt to distort figures to match some desired outcome…

But there are more subtal issues to contend with, for instance “try defining random” you will quickly find you can not without making assumptions, circular arguments or more often than not both. This should be a “VERY BIG RED FLAG” but what you normally get told is “Random sampling is the gold standard”. With a little thought you will realise that with those assumptions both implicit and explicit if they are either insufficient in number, incorrectly applied, or just plain incorrect then any projections based on them are effectively “finger in the wind” at best to disasterously wrong.

Likewise the source of your data. We know that the figures we get on the likes of the Johns Hopkins and WorldOmeter web sites are not just wrong but very wrong in deed. They are compleatly underestimating what is going on in the community by a factor of between being 1/6th to 1/80th too small…

Just to start with various tests have shown that between 45% and 88% of cases are “unsymptomatic”. Further we have had Dr Mike Ryan at the WHO very recently saying that “very many people are not seroconverting”… What that means is that those “antibody tests” wont work on those people because although they’ve had the disease they have no antibodies. The problem is Dr Mike Ryan’s statment is an unspecified quantative statment which is about as useful as saying “many solids go from solid to vapour”. What is needed is a relative or ratio statment such as from one Chinese study saying “more than 6%”. But either way it means all those tests for antibodies are under reading by an as yet unkbown amount.

Which all means the only thing we can say about these “sample and project papers” is, “Except by chance they are going to be wrong” or perhaps less kindly but nether the less true “GIGO”.

It’s why I keep talking about “look at the excess death rate” that is the actual total numbers of internments/cremations/etc against the previous “five year average”. Whilst this might read slightly high it’s actually the only thing that’s even remotely close to telling us what is going on.

Just remenber with such a high rate of “asymptomatic infection” our inability to come up with valid assumptions for sampling cohorts and the fact that an unspecified “many” do not seroconvert, all cohort test results will be inacurate to an “unknown” extent. Thus we may never ever know the actuall infection rates against risk groups…

And that’s the final nail in the “death rate” argument because there are age and other factors such as melatonin in the skin the “0.1%” figure is actually meaningless it’s self without considerable qualification.

In reality what is important to know is within a degree or two what the difference is in outcomes based on medical support. If you look at two European Countries such as Germany and the UK they show not to disimilar hospital rates but extreamly different death rates… Is that due to,

1, Better healthcare in Germany.
2, A significantly higher number of pale skined people in Germany.
3, A combination of both.
4, Some other as yet unknown cause.

Looking at Spain and Italy you might conclude that it’s just the increased level of melatonin reducing the Vitimin D conversion in those who are of “Southern European skin tones”.

In the US for instance healthcare insurance tends to be higher in the northern part of the country (Alaska especially) or where there are large communities of people with darker skin tones…

This has in the past been attributed to lack of vitimin D which is very important for your immune system functioning. Likewise zinc that also effects BMI control thus in turn type II diabeties which is a majorly flaged comorbidity in critical COVID-19 cases. Similarly magnesium for heart health which is the second major comorbidity flagged. All three of these micronutriants tend to be significantly lacking in many people especially in the Western World.

Untill someone actually does proper double blind tests on micronutriants in sever and critical COVID-19 cases we can not rule them either “in or out” of treatment. However it was fairly easy to get these micronutrients over the counter in super markets and the like and most Drs can have a simple blood test run on you to see if you are low or not.

Clive Robinson • April 19, 2020 2:59 PM

@ SpaceLifeForm,

Nice to hear you are alive and kicking something other than the walls 🙂

With regards,

It helps me deal with cabin fever.

Yes for some strange reason reading papers on SARS-CoV-2 has a strangely similar effect.

I’ve been house bound since early Feb… Annual tradition that my son and I have is to visit London’s China town for the Chinese New Year celebrations and have a buffet meal and a visit to some of the supper markets.

This year there were a number of obvious tour parties from China and to be honest neither of us thought anything about it.

My son had what he thought was a touch of 24hour Noro virus but I got hit by muscle aches and diarrhea for well over a month with chest pains towards the end but no chills fevers or anything other than my usual aches and pains oh and an annoying cough when lying on my back that felt like it should be productive but never was.

I was told to stay in issolation as “it sounds like winter vomiting disease” –Noro Virus– initialy by the Drs over the phone. As it draged on you could hear that “fingernails on wood” noise get louder as they scratched their heads. Then I got told I’d hit the jackpot and had all the comorbidities then known for COVID-19 so stay in batten down the hatches repel all boarders and develop a fetish for staring at pastel coloured walls…

Well I’ve had to follow Drs, orders, like them or not because as I’ve mentiond my son’s mum is a cardiac rehab nurse on the floor below the only infectious disease wards within centralish London and saw BoJo when he visited them. Like him she got COVID-19, but in her case “by diagnosis not test” so it could have been the flu for all anyone realy knows (the only testing in the UK back then and still pretty much the same still is VIP’s and those knocking on deaths door).

So I’m in for the full four month and climbing “home issolation” with charity workers and family bringing me in “fresh”[1].

However I broke my toe a few days ago, I was bare foot and hurried from one room to another and caught my little toe on the door frame. It made a good excuse to talk to someone else even if it was just a Dr. They looked through my notes and said “You’ve probably had COVID” so I could consider getting an X-Ray. I asked them what made them think that… Apparently increasing numbers don’t show fever when infected but have other symptoms such as loss of taste and the other symptoms I had had… I asked the obvious question “Can I have an antibody test to confirm it?” the answer was no they are reserved for other people… So I asked a couple of more pointed questions about “what’s the odds of me dying of an unxrayed broken toe if I assumed it was broken and just strapped it up?” I was told very low, so I asked the deal breaker “what is my chance of dying if I visited the hospital by public transport and I had not had COVID?” well I’ll let you guess what the answer to that was, and give you a hint, I’ve decided as bad as it is observing pastal coloured walls is at the end of the day just a state of a still alive brain…

[1] “Fresh” is a term used in the UK army, and was especially prevelant during the “troubles” when soldiers ate a lot of “Rat Packs” which is not a bunch of Hollywood crooners but high energy food from tins of which the only enjoyable bits were the sweeties and shortbread biscuits, the latter being highly prized, because if you ate four of them and drank three pints of “standard NATO” you could by just eating the sweeties and drinking the tea avoid having a crap for two weeks or more… Don’t get me wrong there was nothing wrong with the “Rat Packs” it was top notch grub for field rations and highly valued by US troops who hated their less than effectionatly named “Meals Rejected by Ethiopians” (MRE’s). The problem was the limited range of Rat Packs often made worse by QM’s playing “favourits” thus you could end up with just one choice of Rat Pack for an entire two or three week period… Thus fresh food even just a humble pint of real milk or sliced white loaf was valued. Often by a little trickery you could get a lot of fresh eggs and packs of bacon and real Hineze tomato ketchup. This was the “Fresh” most highly prized and if you could make the perfect “egg and bacon banjo” (sarnie) then you were held in high esteam and got the equivalent of “light duties” rather more than anyone else. Having been a “gridlion” chef I could not only turn out a master banjo including a “half toastie” (toast the bread lightly on one side, add real butter and put the egg with runny yolk on it two or three slices of bacon a light scraping of ketchup on the tosted side of the top slice and thus your sandwich has that little extra flavour and crunch) I also carried in my tool kit a large selection of herbs and hot spices which ment I could turn out a “Ruby” (curry) with a Rat Pack and other interesting items like a herb and sausage omelet and thick stews (powdered soup, tinned mince, tinned vegtables, milk powder, water and when heated stir in porridge fine oatmeal to thicken along with a beef and a vegtable boulion cube and salt lots of peper and some sugar if ketchup is not used and anchovy essence to give that umami taste that a jaded palat screams for). As a soldier etc when you have to spend a lot of time in close quaters with other men in less than desirable circumstances like a block house, the ability to turn out a variaty of tasty dishes not only makes you popular, it also cuts down a lot of tenssion in a detail… Whilst an army might march on it’s stomach it dances on it’s taste buds. I even have a recipe for making choclate cake with potatoes and porridge oats which can be a real lifter if it’s someones birthday or they’ve had news from home they’ve become a dad or similar, you can also make passable nochi and lasagna as well it you add enough herds in the sauce.

Clive Robinson • April 19, 2020 3:08 PM

@ Freezing_in_Brazil,

I’m personally worried – and curious – about the viral load real effect on the death rate

It’s not just the viral load but how far you breath it in.

Contrary to what many think most of us don’t even use a smallish petcentage of our lungs when we are just sitting around etc. Thus shallow breathing, so you might not even get the virus particles into the lower lung where it does the most damage…

Also hot dry air might be too much for the virus to be viable for very long.

There are a lot of factors to consider.

Clive Robinson • April 20, 2020 12:41 AM

@ vas pup,

Ultraviolet LEDs prove effective in eliminating coronavirus from surfaces and, potentially, air and water:

I’m glad of that.

If you remember back what feels like an eon ago but was in reality just a handfull of days we talked about masks and how conventional NBC masks were bulky and quite strenuous to breath through. I proposed using UV-C tubes (mercury vapor in quartz glass lamps) after a conventional fan and particle filter as a way to make an assisted anti-pathogen mask to be worn at the back like a “fanny pack” with air tubes carrying the steralised air going over the head to a face shield / visor or full face mask.

The problem I had was I did not like the idea of using the tubes because they were fragil (plus you would not want what was inside them getting in your lungs). They also drew alot of electricity thus what you gained in one direction (smaller, lighter, quieter motor) you lost in another (fragil tubes, big batteries).

Speaking of fragility the proposed substrate “silicon carbide” is the second hardest substance to mankind just after diamond (the last time I looked). But the actual LED it’s self was not an issue, mounting and encapsulating would be. With LEDs and their big brothers laser diodes the light comes out from the semiconductor junction not the surface thus they got mounted in a tiny cup shaped electrode with a parabolic profile. The higher the frequency of light the less it wants to go throufh solids, bends, or reflections. Which ment not just issues with the mounts but encapsulant material…

As I’ve mentioned a few times before, you always need to keep your basic rules of physics in mind to sanity check. In this case it’s the old “Energy can not be created or destroyed”. Whilst LED’s are transducers converting electrical energy to light, they are far from perfect thus excess energy becomes heat. Likewise the reflecting mount and encapsulant will convert the higher frequencies of light into heat as well. Engineering the heat out to protect the LED has always been a bit of an issue especially with laser diodes.

I wish the researchers well and hope they can jump the hurdles like champion thoroughbreds as this is going to be a tough race to run.

Also I suspect the pathogen air filter issue for medical breathing masks will not go away any time soon. It might have escaped peoples memory but these potential pandemic pathogens are comming out of Africa, China and other “fresh developing” nations –where the zoonotic interface is raw– more and more frequently. SARS-CoV-2 is not like Ebola where transmission tends to be localised to remote almost 3rd world places it’s “opportunistic” and likes to get “frequent flier miles”. Thus has popped up all over the world and invaded the Western World of high density home / work / transport where conditions are almost ideal for transmission…

Something I suspect those “self apointed elite” living in NYC in their multimillion dollar appartments now feel is “too close to home” as it’s not just on their door step but crossing the threshold worse than any other home invador… They have found that neither the politicians they pay for, or the guard labour the politicians in theory control for them, can stop these lethal “home invadors”.

It’s only high quality education, healthcare, and sanitation for all that can keep the pathogens in check. In fact all the things that those expensive appartment dwellers hate and have fought to cut back on year after year in search of profit. Which they then use to buy more control of politicians, to get more power and thus status… It would be funny to see these self appointed “masters of the Universe” end up in the petrie dish hoist by their own idiology if it did not unfortunately effect the rest of us… H.G.Wells and George Orwell must be sadly shaking their heads.

Clive Robinson • April 20, 2020 2:38 AM

@ Sancho_P,

As I understood (in a conversation, not a physician myself) the kidney and other organ damage is secondary due to low blood oxygen

It’s what “sepsis” and the “clinical shock” that leads into it are all about.

It’s a long time since I was taught this but “clinical shock” is a “catch all term” that covers what the four main causes of shock do not. One of the four is “Hypovolemic shock”, if you look it up you will see it defined as,

Hypovolemic shock happens when there isn’t enough blood in your blood vessels to carry oxygen and vital nutrients to your organs. This can be caused by severe blood loss, for example, from injuries.

It’s important to note that whilst shock is frequently due to low blood preasure, the actual cause of the shock is the inability of the circulatory system to deliver the bodies “metabolic needs” that is “oxygen or micronutrients or both”.

In the case of COVID and pneumonia the important point is the “not enough oxygen”. Which triggers the bodies automatic systems on the assume it’s haemorrhaging blood and thus it takes compensatory action. Which can look like “Cardiogenic shock” which the lack of oxygen or the stress arising from it can cause.

The other problem is when you get a pathogen causing shock, the pathogen can get into the blood supply and cause “septic shock”. This is true for the primary and secondary infections arising from immuno-compromise.

But even if “septic shock” does not occure without sufficient “oxygen and nutrients” the outcome of “organ failure” happens and then your body follows the same sepsis path to DIC and death.

https://www.answers.com/Q/What_is_CLINICAL_shock

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sepsis

Clive Robinson • April 20, 2020 9:49 PM

@ MarkH,

To maximize your odds of surviving a gun battle, don’t be in one.

My father’s version was,

The place to be when there is trouble… Is somewhere else.

His emphasis realy was on what some call “situational awareness” or “getting a vibe”, “listening to your sixth sense”, “thinking hinky”, etc. His point being that there are almost always “indicators of trouble” or “something wrong” as “trouble does not come out of nowhere”. Whilst your concious mind may not spot the “tells” your monkey brain will if for no better reason “to send you scurrying up a tree”.

Thus if you spot the “tells” or even just feel a little uneasy, make the choice to modify your behaviour and get out quietly and quickly but without signs of deliberatness or panic.

His viewpoint was further if you overly respond then so what? All you are is “erring on the side of caution” which might cost you time and inconvenience, but importantly not your life etc. It’s a lesson combat soldiers do learn if they live long enough.

I personaly have no idea how often or even when I’ve “over reacted”, but I do know all the times I’ve “under reacted” and when… Because I still have the scars and bone aches and itches[1] to remember them by…

I don’t know how you teach people “the sixth sense” or “feel fey”[2]. But I do know it’s well worth listening to what your body is telling you when you feal even a little uneasy. That is when your gut or the short hairs on the back of your neck are trying to tell you something, it’s important to listen. Look on it as a message from your successful ancestors in lifes game.

Because even in our modern world “life takes no prisoners” if you blunder about you eventually hit a wall or worse.

I’ve been known to say on considerably more than one occasion that,

There is no such thing as an accident only lack of information or the inability to apply it.

I know it sounds cold or heartless but as far as the laws of physics are concerned the movment of objects under forces is in human terms fully predictable. Thus the question is can you deduce the path of an object in time to take corrective action? The answer is not always “yes”, especially when the object you are trying to avoid has “a mind of it’s own”…

Though I did find out something curious when quite young, which is how to do the seemingly impossible which is run through an open crowd.

The reason is humans normally follow heuristics in crowds. One of which is “maintain direction unless forced to change” and another “pause if in doubt”. Thus if you are moving as little as three times as fast as the crowd as a first approximation you can assume that they are in “fixed positions” therefor “you navigate around them” as you would as if trying to run through a wood or forest. Another heuristic is that crowds “move more slowly in the middle” but that is because they are “densest in the middle” and “have more inwards movment around them” thus “more information to process” so more “doubt to pause for”. The opposit is actually true that is crowds move more rapidly towards their edges, even when an edge is defined by a barrier. You can see this happen if you watch a crowd from above. Put simply a barrier reduces degrees of freedom thus doubt so people pause less and their movment is not just faster but more predictable. Oh and the most important heuristic is “people are lazy” that is why they “go with the flow” or take what looks like “the shortest path” thus doing the opposit has advantages.

All things you need to know if you are designing emergancy exits or crowd flow control mechanisms etc. Importantly because crowds are in theory sentient they “do not flow like water”, that is whilst water has freedom of movment it has no “freedom of choice”.

The “living lesson” is you have the “freedom of choice” to select a path that gives you the maximum “freedom of movment” and it’s usually wisest to do the opposit of others which is “don’t head into a crowd” but “skirt around it”. Which is useful to know if you want to get out quickly or loose people that are following you.

Their objective if they are not sufficiently experienced is to take the shortest path towards you, your best stratagy is to keep as much of the center of the crowd between them and you. Even though your path might be longer towards the edge of a crowd it’s less dense and your progress faster, thus even if you cover twice the ground distance you can still put distance between you and them as you’ve made their “shortest visable path strategy, the slowest moving path strategy” for them.

Experienced manhunters know this so they try to do the opposit which is to try to use the normal desire of people to move directly away via the shortest visable path to drive you into the most blocked path to keep you pinned down. For this to work for them it means they have to somehow “stand out from the crowd” if they are not wearing uniforms then like boats that go against the flow they make much larger than them ripples that stand out.

There is an optimum strategy to deal with this but as they say in all the most annoying accademic teaching books “That is left as an excercise for the reader” 😉 though I’ll give you a hint “they can not herd you if they can not see or recognise you”[3].

Any way “Think hinky listen to your monkey brain and make the choice to stay safe”, and “walk the less traveled path” as wild is not the same as dangerous.

[1] When I mention “bone itches” a lot of people give you a funny look. They are the ones who’ve never had “bad breaks” the sort that remind you when the weather is changing. I don’t think it’s a form of “phantom limb syndrome” because a quick look at the barometer tells you that “change” is happening normally from fair… When I used to sail people thought it odd that I started suddenly doing things whilst the sun was shining, but were as equally supprised when a bit of “dirty weather” like sea fog or squals turned up. Some thought me a “Jonus” that my behaviour attracted the dirty weather, others I was “fey”[2] and the more experienced thought it had a touch of “weather eye”. Me I just know my bones itched as the preasure changed, and my short hairs on the back of my neck went up because my monkey brain had seen “tells” that my concious mind was not, so I’d take a damn carefull look around to see what my concious mind was missing. Thus see the “tells” such as spoting the closing horizon, the change in wave tips, or shadows on the water, diferences in clouds especially hight and shape or even how birds were flying etc.

[2] I’m not sure where “fey” comes from but it still gets used in Scotland. It implies another worldly ability like that of “eleves or faeries” or as the critic John Mason Brown put it “the fey quality was there, the ability to see the moon at midday”, a sense of being more intune with the world or nature than most.

[3] A true story from the “troubles” might give an opposite hint. One of the “known faces” was being forever followed by the security services and it was a thankless task because he never did anything of note other than jink around and wave at his followers when they got to close. Then he started wearing a large dark coat and a pair of those “Micky Mouse Ears” you get for children in Disney Land. This made him very very easy to follow even when he jinked around. Thus his followers fell into the “complacency trap” and started following not the man but the coat, the ears, and the jinky behaviour… Without the hat and coat they could not recognise him except up close, thus their complacency led them to “fall back to a safe distance”. So when he jinked into a shop doorway and the hat and coat jinked out they carried on following the hat the coat and the jinky behaviour… Meanwhile the man had whipped off the hat and disapeared through the shop taking his coat off as he went, got into a waiting car and disapeared off the radar whilst the hat and coat still walked around town, only it was another hat and coat on an acomplice who had been waiting in the shop… Nobody realy knows how long he got away with that little trick, but it took a “set of fresh eyes from London” to spot it and circumvent it because the man had also fallen into the same “complacency trap” and made the mistake of using the same shop too often… Oh and remember the words of the old Mamas and Papas song,

https://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/mamasandthepapas/tripstumbleandfall.html

The trick is in the title.

Clive Robinson • April 20, 2020 11:36 PM

@ JonKnowsNothing,

While not completely inaccurate, there are lots of deaths that have contributing factors but this categorization is being used as “an excuse” for not taking care of the population in general.

The problem is “terms with meaning” in a “professional domain” get reused in another lets say “unprofessional domain”. This was the cause of an argument between @MarkH and myself over “Herd Immunity” which has a professional meaning that only applies to an endemic pathogen that is not “fully novel” in any existant generation thus most certaily does not apply to SARS-CoV-2.

However in the UK “Political Domain” Dominic Cummings know by some as “The unelected brain of BoJo” who fancies himself as a “modeler of note” because he got lucky with an election decided to misuse “Herd Immunity” as a term for a policy of what was effectively “genocide by wildfire infection with a fully novel pathogen” for which the only scientific evidence at the time was a CFR above 5.4%. He was touting it incorectly as the least expensive way out of the pandemic, to politicians who are lets be honest not known for studied rational thinking.

So yes there will if we alow SARS-CoV-2 to survive and become endemic “herd immunity” eventually but common sense tells you that will not happen for three generations of deaths or so. In the mean time you have between that and untramled wildfire spread, a “rate limited” spread which many are confusing with “herd immunity” thanks to political double speak.

Rate limiting also called “flatening the curve” is a technique to keep a process within the capabilities of the resources you process with. In engineering you would say “limit feed stock speed to within acceptable tool ware and energy input”, that is there is a “sweet-spot”. You see this with your car engine, it has an optimal speed to run at, hence the need for gears to keep the engine in that optimal range even though the vehicles speed is changing.

All processes have optimal sweet-spots and they change as things like the cost of electrcity changes or tools become worn. So we measure “productivity” which has different meanings for different people depending on what their objective is which is why you have the “eye diagram” relating production quantity and production cost per item, profit occurs “in the eye” and is most when the two lines are furthest appart.

The same is true for healthcare, the optimum number of cases is not just a function of “through put” it’s also about cost per patient in resources that can not usually be quickly changed[1] such as facilities and trained personnel. Also you have to consider “tool ware” or “burnout” those that drive should know that the faster you run an engine the hotter it gets. They have also might have been told it’s a bad thing to do because it dramatically reducess the life of the engine thus it’s value as an asset significantly[2].

Well what applies to engines also applies to humans they have an optimal running rate that’s around 2/3rds of their maximum rate. If you run them at maximum for even fairly short periods they burn out and both their optimal and maximum rate quickly drops to a much smaller value as they have no reserves left to draw on[3]. This has all sorts of implications that take carefull thought to manage to maintain any real measure of performance in a prolonged crisis.

When you view staff as not just interchangable but disposable as certain large silicon valley Corps obviously do, the workers quickly become “jaded” thus less efficient, but the neo-liberal mantra does not alow for this, thus broken staff with mental health issues arise, which can give rise to workplace hostility and violence neither of which is of any benifit usually.

But that does not stop people in places of power thinking otherwise thus making plans with ludicrous goals.

This is bad enough when issues are “straight line predictable” but when they are expenentialy increasing trouble comes very fast and very hard. Funnily most people don’t tend to realise that “straight line predictable” is a special case and things happening to a power law are actually the norm.

To get round this straight line approximations are made, the most common of which is “cooking times” where you get “X minutes per pound and 1 pound for the oven” it’s actually a two line approximation to the first part of an exponential curve.

[1] The Chinese solution was to do the seemingly impossible, which was build new hospitals and fly in thousands of trained personnel. They could only do this because they had a robust system from having spare capacity in their systems[2].

[2] I know it’s a point I keep making but the neo-liberal view point that is effectively “spare capacity is stealing from our pockets” or more evasively “leaving money on the table” is always going to fail. What neo-liberals don’t explain is that they have a “slash and burn” mentality. That is they do something to draw maximum profit in the first cycle knowing that subsequent cycles have exponentially decreasing profit. They then use the first cycles profit to falsely inflate the value and sell it on befor the second or subsequent cycles shows the true state of affairs. A simple example is buy new plant equipment and excess feed stock both of which are seen as assets. You then run the machines at maximum throughput even though it significantly shortens the life of the plant equipment, you also sell finished stock in a restricted way to artificially raise it’s value which makes it look like another significant asset. Thus on paper the business looks asset rich, when it realy is not. If you’ve ever worked in a business that venture capatlists take an interest you will have seen all sorts of these asset value inflation techniques being used… Not surprisingly investors caught on and became more cautious which is why the venture capatlist market has changed and funding is harder to source. That is “burn rate” is nolonger viewed as a growth indicator of future performance.

[3] For physical activities the burn out and recovery times appear remarkably similar to dehydration and recovery times in the short term. But riding on starvation and recovery times in longer time periods. Thus you get a decreasing sawtooth type curve. The same sort of sawtooth curve applies to mental activities but here the curve is very much shortened to about one hour peaks in a four hour window with a need to shut down for twelve to sixteen hours in every twenty four. Thus an eight hours on eight hours off cycle gives a better through put initially but it plays havoc with body systems after a few days which is why twelve on twelve off or four on four off tend to end up being used with a one day off and one day rotation rest every five to six working days is what you usually end up with depending on where the workers are billited in relation to the work area.

Clive Robinson • April 21, 2020 12:35 AM

@ Lurker,

did you actually read the John Rappoport story?

Err no, as I said it was apparently blocked for some reason.

However the use of a search engine pulled up his URL’s and just a fee of those were warning enough, especially when you saw the types of site that were linking to his web pages…

As I said it eas more than sufficient to say “Reader Beware”.

I also kind of assumed that it would be an “adware funded” site, which usually requires cookies and javascript and I don’t do those with unknown sites. It’s not just the malware spyware asspect, it’s the oh so slow load times and the fact it also brings the speed of this mobile phone browser down as well. So to me javascript and cookies very rarely offer me anything I want or even need, infact the opposit is way more true.

Clive Robinson • April 21, 2020 1:18 AM

@ MarkH, SpaceLifeForm, ALL,

Of course, their case counts must also be in a complete mess, so any inference of CFR from such numbers is worthless.

This has been my assumption from early on in the Italian epidemic.

Two things gave it away, the first is Italians are fairly big on obituaries in printed newspapers that are also online with archives. Thus alowing people to see 12 compleat pages for a weak this year that only had one and a half pages for a month earlier and aboit one and a quater for the same week a year beforehand. Thus simple maths gives about an 8 to 9.6 multiplication or a 7-8.6 times excess deaths.

Likewise town Mayors who get intetnment/cremation certificates from undertakers / morticians were getting 6-12 times those for the same period last year and raising hell about it not just through letters to central government but in the newspapers as well. Whilst “Official COVID figures” were a very small fraction of these excess deaths.

As I’ve been saying for a while the only numbers that are making any verifiable sense are the excess deaths, most of which one way or another can be directly attributable to COVID.

But it’s slightly worse, brcause as the UK’s National Audit Office graphs show this year the annual flu deaths were quite a bit down on the average for the previous five years (the same is true for other countries).

What is noticable on the UK NAO graphs is that for the first part of the year the deaths were flat, then slightly but noticeably declining to then turn into a clearly exponentially rising curve coincident with the official covid Deaths figures only several times larger. Indicating the same likely root cause of COVID. That is it’s not just the quantative excess deaths, but the qualitative shape of the graph giving a clear “smoking gun” held in COVID’s hands.

Whilst real CFR’s might be of use to epidemiologists in years to come, they are not going to get them for by far the majority of infections that are staying in the community and not being recorded in hospitals.

In a very strange way we can be thankful to murderers, because it was their attempts to cover up their crimes that have given rise over the years to the very strict rules about the recording of every internment / cremation with multiple public institutions. Thus we can trust the recorded deaths to be quite accurate in most first and second world nations.

Clive Robinson • April 21, 2020 9:33 AM

@ snur-pele,

You might want to check the spectral output of the UV tube in your EPROM eraser, I know the one in mine does not do UV-C according to it’s data sheet.

Clive Robinson • April 22, 2020 4:20 PM

@ Phaete,

He makes the point that the role of the observer (doctor in this case) and the mental state of the patient plays a big role in recovering from infections. All related to the placebo effect.

I’m well aware of the placebo effect and it does not take sugar pills or tonics to work magic on patients in hospital.

For I have an “undiagnosed” heart condition and for quite a while I was keeling over all over the place. They still don’t know what it is and I’ve subsequently developed AF so should in theory be deader than a door nail… But even though they don’t know the cause they can treat the symptoms by giving it a quick jumpstart if it drops below 60BPM.

The result was for several years I was spending one week in five in hospital…

Contrary to what some might think[1] I’m fairly amiable, and tend to make light of things and laugh things off. What I don’t like is being put in a room with three to five other people all looking as miserable as a wet sunday afternoon in Merthyr Tydfil[2]. Thus I made it a mission to get even the surliest of them to atleast smile if not laugh. I generaly found that once you got one to open up a bit the rest quickly followed. Both Drs and Nurses would be supprised to hear laughter and see games of bridge being played and other mild hyjinx going on. The result was people started to get colour back in their cheeks and their stats climbed much quicker than expected which brought the consultants down to see why things had upturned. Then people would notice both junior Drs and nurses lingering in the room as they liked a laugh or two as well…

Anyway laughter is infectious and it’s difficult to be surly when you are laughing. The upshot was as one of the senior cardiologists told me, patients got better quicker when I was around, and the staff were more chearfull.

So yes your body is effected by your mind and your body in turn effects the mind. Just get one to feel better and the other follows and then chases the other and soon they both feel quite a bit better.

[1] @Wael I can hear your finger hovering above the keyboard 😉

[2] Merthyr Tydfil has been the but of jokes for over half a century. The place is grey, charmless lacking in vistas or much of anything else, it also still has a bad dose of religious “look down your nosery” and was said to have more pubs than anywhere else and they were all closed on Sundays because of the pretentiousness that comes from those looking down their nose at others. To give you an idea of just how bad it realy is somebody opened a new pub and pretentiously called it “The Belle Vue Hotel” it’s in Glebeland St, and the only thing even remotely close to a “good view” is somrbody else tree aroind the back. Another that has opened is a J D Wetherspoon’s called “Y Dic Penderyn” I’ve no idea what it means in Welsh but I would suggest you don’t try saying it out loud in mixed company 😉

Clive Robinson • April 22, 2020 5:32 PM

@ Miquel,

leftists and democrats usually have a poor understanding of most things, live with false perceptions, and are hypocrites even when faced with hard facts and data.

Oh dear, you realy don’t get it do you… Like you most politicians of what ever stripe have not a clue about how the world realy works they just thibk they can wave a hand and mutter “Make it so”, it’s why they need to be surounded by people that not only understand “facts and data” but can understand how they were collected and the biasis they present.

Whilst you’ve not presented any “facts” just “opinions” many of which are either unqualified or suffering from “Old Distinguished Musing Issues”.

For instance Prof. Johan Giesecke saying,

At least 50% of the population of both the UK and Sweden will be shown to have already had the disease when mass antibody testing becomes available.

Is a musing, it’s a hunch bereft of any factual content to support it’s open ended projection.

It might never actually happen, in fact it probably won’t in the UK or the US or any other country late in taking sensible actions. So he’s never likely to get called on it.

The simple fact is that the figures we see on the Johns Hopkins and other web sites are “recorded cases” that only represent some of those that get admitted to hospital. They say nothing about “community spread” or much else for that matter. When we look at other data such as “excess deaths over previois five year average” you can see that those recorded “COVID-19” deaths are just a fraction maybe 15% or less than the real figures. The problem is some tests on cohorts show about 2/5ths are infected but are either presynptomatic or asymptomatic, whilst other cohorts show only 3% either way that suggests those recorded figures are 1/20th to 1/100th of the community cases. Which ever way you “dice or slice” it the only thing we realy know is “we kbow damn little about the virus and nothing about how it effects a community”.

I could give you links to graphs that show why “SARS-CoV-2 is nothing like flu” which was your original claim since then you’ve failed to take on any evidence that is contrary to your “sacred belief” in neo-liberal myths.

Good luck with those because they are provably destroying both the UK and the US resilience to increasing consequences of mans actions, and that realy is the hight of stupidity to let it continue. I’ve mentioned before “Individual-v-Social rights and responsabilities” the neo-liberals are realy too stupid to understand that their espoused dream rests entirely on social infrastructure that they think they should not pay for… Without a social market capitalism can not exist plain and simple, if you want capitalism to succeed you have to grow the social market that supports it.

Oh and just to let you know it appears not only are food shortages on the way but ebola is back doing the rounds in Africa, with the UN talking about not just locusts and ASF using language like “Biblical proportions” and potentially 250million dead in Africa.

Now I don’t know where they’ve got their figures from or what they base their projections on, but I would not be surprised if there were significant food shortages increasing poverty and death and not just in Africa but the Western First World as well. After all I have been mentioning it for longer and saying why I thought it was going to happen, I also saw what was going to happen to oil production and explaind the unavoidable technical reasons and the potential consequences that are going to happen.

I’ll let others work it out for themselves, but when you shut down a significant percentage of your energy production fuel supply in an unavoidable way that may result in it never being started up again, it’s knock on effects are going to be far reaching, and doubling of food prices will be one likely result, that will cause all sorts of poverty to arise with the commensurate deaths for those that can not adjust.

Clive Robinson • April 23, 2020 5:19 AM

@ MarkH,

It’s one of several factors, I think, which render authoritarian regimes more vulnerable to abrupt downfall.

Yes, the build up is usually “cult of personality” which makes people suspend disbelief. Whilst they might initially listen and even be critical the repetative nature of the delivery causes them to become mesmerized and “fall into the thrall” and become authoratarian followers.

When starting a war for instance, usually initial success is easy because those you attack are not prepared to respond. Thus the faster and harder the initial attack the greater the gains. This can make a leader appear successful to the less knowledgeable citizens. As long as the leader can maintain “Bread and Circuses” few have reason to realise that there is a real economic cost following on behind, and the harder a leader tries to buy it off the greater the eventual fall.

Another issue is that of what happens when the head is removed? Often demagogic leaders surrond themselves by those who they think “reflect their glory”. Such reflectors are either sycophants or those biding their time. Either way when the leader is nolonger on thir perch for what ever reason you get a power vaccume and internal political fighting where little or no actuall governance happens. Which falls back on “civil servants” who if they have not been independent likewise fall into infighting (Brexit was a case in point where the civil service was independent and effectively ran the UK for a couple of years –which is why Domonic Cummings wants to decimate them–, other European countries where governments could not be formed were likewise run by the indepedent civil servants).

This “decimating” of independent government structures is always a very very bad sign. Because a good leader who knows what they are doing will see them as a solid resource not a threat. So leaders that decimate or attempt to decimate the civil service are showing that far from being knowledgable and effective, they are infact weak and craven and exhibiting the less plesant behaviours of school yard bullies.

All of which leads not to robustness of governance but fragility, nepotism, corruption and guard labour whos primary attributes are to be large and know how to polish boots and be cannon fodder for the demigod.

As you note, such greatness of leadership comes more from the petty bourgeois beer hall patrons disafected by their lot in life, rather than the Universities, proffessions and technical establishments, that form a nations bed rock.

Clive Robinson • April 23, 2020 8:02 AM

@ MarkH,

it’s that some of the [antibody] tests (there are many vendors) have results that are nearly random.

I’ve been having a little dig around and it appears to be a similar problem to those early “made@home” RT-PCR test kits.

1, Lack of specificity.
2, Lack of sensitivity.

The first effectively is responsible for the dangerous “false positives” from one of the other human “common-cold” corona viruse antibodies.

The second effect gives “false negatives” which whilst not particularly harmfull to the individual is harmfull to society that needs them back at work etc.

What is not clear is if some or all of the antibody tests have both problems or not. If they do then yes the results would superficially appear random, and should eaaily have been picked up during “approvals testing” (as happened in the UK).

Of more interest is that all these ineffective antibody test kits appear to have be quite deliberately selected by the US FDA for “fast tracking” why this might be the case it does not realy make much sense from the disease managment point of view. But then it was the same agency that mucked up the original testing that might have prevented or significantly reduced the near 30,000 new cases yesterday, of which some 30-40% will die based on current figures in the next few weeks…

But there is another problem that we need not just qualified but accurately quantified quickly. Which is the WHO statment of,

3, “many do not seroconvert”

What this means is that people known to have had COVID-19 have not or have not yet produced antibodies to SARS-CoV-2. I found some information that says it might be 6% of cases which would be about 21million people in the US… Most places have not –as far as we are aware– even seen a 6% infection rate in the general population yet.

But there is another issue that is also arising some respected researchers are making cautionary statments to the effect of,

4, “antibodies may only be good for 18months of protection”.

That is even if you’ve had COVID-19 come the summer or autumn of 2021 you could be getting it again if it’s still “community spreading” which means we could be in for the long haul on this especially with the potential for the likes of Africa and parts of Asia acting as disease reservoirs…

Oh on vaccine front it appears that the group in Oxford UK have received permission to do phase one human trials on young adults using “deliberate infection” they have also “jumped the gun” on manufacturing, apparently the UK government has stumped up the cash to start setting up production immediately even though we have no idea if this vaccine candidate is either safe or efficacious…

I’m not a gambler, so I won’t be volunteering for these reduced trials or the final product. Mainly because I’ve had problems with the “yeah totally safe” flu vaccine in the past, so I reckon I’ll sit this one out.