COVID work from home – week 5 – 6 April – 12 April

by ezs | Apr 6, 2020 | evilzenscientist

Weekend – sunny and blue skies. Would be a perfect start to spring break in any other year. 10k deaths in UK hospitals, UK projected to be worst hit country in Europe. NHS frontline staff are sick. US hits 20k deaths and a long way to go.

Huge lines across various food banks across the US. Millions of jobs just disappeared in March.

Baked bread Saturday, foccacia planned for Sunday.

Friday – the kids are responding as well as can be expected to the news that school is out until September. Missing friends, missing social interaction, distance learning is not the same. Zoom sucks; Teams is better (their words). A proliferation of websites and logins for each class.

Almost 1000 deaths in 24 hours in the UK. Trump want’s to “reopen the US” – which will mean another massive spike.

Thursday – workday 26 at home. Routine. Without the rhythm of the office every day seems quite similar.

Noticeable differences: no planes in the sky, no contrails because of that, less roadnoise, you can really hear birds and the occasional barking dog.

1.5 million cases globally; that’s 500k new cases in six days. Log curve of new is flattening – but a long, long way to go.

Wednesday – 7000 hospital deaths in the UK. Good to see hospital vs home called out here. Still a shocking death toll. 938 deaths today. US sees 1800 deaths on Tuesday. 100 Days That Changed The World.

Tuesday – Boris still in ICU. Lots of conjecture on how ill he is.

Monday – multiple BBC websites are throwing 404 errors. Looks like a problem with their content system. 51k UK cases, 5.3k deaths. 331k cases in US, 9k deaths. The wave is yet to break.

Wearing of masks is “strongly recommended”. New cases and deaths (leading/trailing indicators) falling in Italy, Spain and WA state.

Boris in ICU. WA state triage exercise from 2018.

No school until September.

Local and global coverage for future reference.

COVID work from home – week 4 – 30 March – 5 April

by ezs | Apr 3, 2020 | evilzenscientist

Sunday – hopefully another sunny day. Time for some gardening, fresh air and sun! US has around 25% of the total global cases of COVID19 that have been reported.

Good longer read from The Seattle Times on the early days of the pandemic in WA.

It is exactly one calendar month since I worked in the office. Kids came out of school on 12 March.

Saturday – shopping for groceries and some manure for the garden. Sun is out. Shortages, empty shelves, rationing in the stores and distancing everywhere. About 50% of the folk out are now wearing masks.

That daily increase chart 100k new positive cases globally. Today. That’s more cases reported today than reported by the whole of Hubei province.

Friday – 684 deaths in the UK. Over 1000 in the US. This is a numbing scale of death. Nightingale Hospital London opened. The Queen will address the nation on Sunday.

Thursday – head down and working. Today the total global cases ticket over 1 million. 240k in the US. WA DOH still have no updated data.

Wednesday – WA DOH are getting heat about data ingress and reporting. No updates. PowerBI is updated, table view is back. Data is now three days stale with issues from the previous week.

883k postive cases reported globally. 190k in USA. Trump pivot to “240k dead by May“. 563 deaths in UK today.

Tuesday – back into the rhythm of work from home. Calls, lunch with the kids, talk about the day, dinner.

WA DOH data hasn’t been updated for days. Power BI move seems to have stalled at 28/March.

The Department of Health is committed to continued data transparency.
We are working to ensure daily numbers are posted on time. Here’s some context about recent challenges:
 The Washington Disease Reporting System (WDRS) is used to report notifiable conditions.
 Outside a pandemic, only positive results would be reported.
 WDRS is now tracking negative results for COVID-19. This volume is overwhelming the tool.
 We have worked with the vendor supporting WDRS to increase capacity.
 We are also investigating additional solutions, which may include:
o A separate reporting tool for negative results (roughly 93% of the data at this time).
o Automating deduplication work performed manually each day. One day last week, more than 2,000 duplicate results were removed to ensure accurate, reliable numbers.
DOH will share additional updates if this problem persists. We cannot provide an estimate for the next release of numbers, but are working diligently toward that goal.
This week, DOH made several new data points available. Our website now includes visualizations showing confirmed cases, the epidemiological curve, cumulative case and death counts, testing numbers, and demographic information. Also coming soon is hospitalization data.
We are working closely with Microsoft to optimize the user experience for this data, including for those without a high-speed connection or those working from a mobile device.

NHS sees extreme shortages. 381 deaths in UK today. 

Monday – the start of the fourth full week of isolation and work from home. At some point there are two items of housekeeping I need to do:

• re-order these posts so they read in reverse chronological order (newest at the top, oldest at the bottom)
• re-work the WA DOH model that I have, to use PowerBI and also align the data boundaries to the new midnight cutoffs coming from WA DOH.

WA DOH data still has gaps – I think the new visualisation and reporting will make this more consistent – but there are a few days of holes:

Kids are still home. There are pitchfork mobs ready for Issaquah School District – there are some awful folk on social media. 1284 deaths in the UK.

Local and global coverage for future reference.