COVID-19 Update

While my audience here is pretty limited these days, I do feel a bit remiss that I haven’t given an update for anyone still following along. I’ve been pretty immersed in COVID-19 research since towards the end of February, and have had lots of private conversations, but I probably should have posted something earlier, considering how much of my time I’ve been spending on the topic.

There’s been a lot of talk about response and policy. I’m not sure I have a lot to add there (for those that haven’t been reading that stuff, I recommend Coronavirus: The Hammer and the Dance, AEI: National coronavirus response: A road map to reopening, and How Taiwan Used Big Data, Transparency and a Central Command to Protect Its People from Coronavirus). But I did finally get around to writing something that hopefully will be more directly useful for anyone right now, a COVID-19 Practical Advice guide.

This guide is focused on preventative best practices (including how to safely reuse PPE), and description of symptoms and what catching the virus might look like.

For those looking for some news/resources:

  • My COVID-19 Twitter List – a lot of epidemiology, stats and modeling, but also discussion on treatment, pathophysiology, etc.
  • COVID-19 Reddit subs – here’s my multi. It started with r/Coronavirus (news) and r/COVID19 (academic papers) but I’ve added a few extra ones – note, almost every region has a local COVID-19 sub
  • COVID19 Zotero Export – This needs a bit of refactoring, but a pretty good snapshot of the past month’s worth of research. It’s my active goal during this lockdown to be able to move this stuff into a better public format. (currently about 1200 items)

For those that don’t know, I’ve been in Tokyo since the beginning of March and expect to be here for the next few months. While things have been calmer/more normal than expected for the past month, sadly, I expect things to start getting serious in the next week or two – testing and general pandemic response has been seemingly quite terrible, but I guess we’ll see.