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The coronavirus numbers are growing as expected, and will be growing much more. There are many websites with coronavirus information. I did some digging around to find the ones which presented the data I wanted to see. I am sharing below the sites I have found most useful to see how the data is trending. Fyi.

Global
States 
Connecticut
Florida 
New York
Pennsylvania

The numbers are going to rise significantly from what already looks high. We should not be surprised or alarmed. More tests are going to happen and more cases will be found. If you are interested in the impact of the numbers, I suggest reading “The Sober Math Everyone Must Understand about the Pandemic” by Jason Warner. The essence of his article is if we take action on social distancing now, we can bend the curve and save a lot of lives and avoid a crisis for our healthcare system. If we do not do a good job of social distancing, like what millennials were doing on Florida beaches, then we face catastrophe. Jason’s article steps through the numbers, and it is not pretty.

I posted an op-ed piece in a technical newsletter called TNW. The title of the op-ed is “Mobile voting is far from perfect, but it’s better than what we have now”. The current situation of voting challenges is proof perfect. You can read the op-ed it here. The Congress could do remote voting very easily and safely. One Senator said the Senate should get with it in the 21st century. The vote on the rescue package was 96-0. The four missing Senators were at home. Senators are so technically unaware they could agree on a way to allow the four Senators to vote remotely. The speaker of the house said, “We can not vote from home”. As I have said so many times, we can put a robot on Mars, but we can’t figure out how to vote remotely.

The next author event is scheduled for May 15th at Founders Hall in Ridgefield, CT. Time will tell if it will need to be rescheduled.

The numbers continue to grow and, as Dr. Fauci says, it is going to get worse before it gets better. If we all do a good job in social distancing, the curve will bend sooner rather than later. The government is pulling out all stops for therapeutic solutions, as Dr. Kuhn described on Thursday. As I wrote last week, there is a silver lining to the dark cloud hovering over all of us. One of the numerous positive things going on is the development of a vaccine for Covid-19.

Significant progress is being made by Moderna Therapeutics, CureVac, and Inovio Pharmaceuticals, who are going as fast as possible to begin human testing. Nevertheless, the approach they are taking uses biological DNA and RNA as the core ingredient. As advanced as the current development process is, vaccines as we know them have a number of shortcomings. The most visible shortcoming is they take years to develop and manufacture. Potentially more significant is they become obsolete if and when the virus evolves, which it will. There are already multiple strains, and there will be more. Finally, the immune response the vaccines produce may not be strong enough to be effective.

A totally new approach is under development using synbio. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has put $60 million into coronavirus research including for the synbio effort. If you read Daniel Suarez science fiction novels (among my favorite authors) you have already heard of synbio. It takes a major role in his book, Change Agent, which takes place in 2045, and is about Interpol’s Genetic Crime Division which grapples with a new type of crime: illicit genetic editing. It is quite a thriller.

Synbio stands for synthetic biology. Synbio is mostly about the design and construction of new biological parts, devices, and systems, and the re-design of existing, natural biological systems. More specific to the issue of the day, synbio may replace the DNA and RNA ingredients mother nature has provided for the development of vaccines with synthetic ingredients.

A vaccine made from synthetic ingredients can potentially offer some significant advantages. The big one is scalability. Synbio vaccines could be produced efficiently for millions or even billions of doses. Another advantage is synthetic ingredients do not need to be refrigerated. This would be a huge benefit for places like sub-Saharan Africa.

Synbio vaccines are developed using computer models, not flasks and test tubes. With billions of calculations, a nanoparticle can be designed which has the exact properties desired. The really big breakthrough with synbio is the attachment of viral molecules to the nanoparticle. Neil King at the University of Washington and his synbio colleagues knew there would be another coronavirus epidemic, like the SARS and MERS outbreaks before the current Covid-19 outbreak. King said, “…there will be another one after this,” perhaps from yet another member of this virus family. We need a universal coronavirus vaccine.” One vaccine for all corona viruses. That will be the breakthrough.

Sharon Begley wrote a beautiful article in STAT which explains the synbio efforts underway in much more detail. See To develop a coronavirus vaccine, synthetic biologists try to outdo nature. STAT has great articles about life sciences and the fast-moving business of making medicines.

The coronavirus numbers are growing, and will be growing much more. There are gazillions of websites with coronavirus information. I did some digging around to find the ones which presented the data I wanted to see. I am sharing below the sites I have found most useful to see how the data is trending. Fyi.

Global
States 
Connecticut
Florida 
New York
Pennsylvania

The numbers are going to rise significantly from what already looks high. We should not be surprised or alarmed. More tests are going to happen and more cases will be found. If you are interested in the impact of the numbers, I suggest reading “The Sober Math Everyone Must Understand about the Pandemic” by Jason Warner. The essence of his article is if we take action on social distancing now, we can bend the curve and save a lot of lives and crisis for our healthcare system. If we do not do a good job of social distancing, like what millennials have been doing on Florida beaches, then we face catastrophe. Jason’s article steps through the numbers, and it is not pretty.

I posted an op-ed piece in a technical newsletter called TNW. The title of the op-ed is “Mobile voting is far from perfect, but it’s better than what we have now”. The current situation of voting challenges is proof perfect. You can read the op-ed it here. The Congress could do remote voting very easily and safely. One Senator said the Senate should get with it in the 21st century. The speaker of the house said, “We can not vote from home”.

The next author event is scheduled for May 15th at Founders Hall in Ridgefield, CT. Time will tell if it will need to be rescheduled.

One thing all the Coronavirus experts agree on is the virus will continue to spread for some time. One important question related to this is how contagious is the virus? The key measure is transmissibility, how rapidly the disease spreads. Transmissibility is indicated by its reproductive number, abbreviated as Ro and pronounced R-nought or r-zero. Ro represents the average number of people to which a single infected person transmits the virus. On January 23, the World Health Organization estimated Ro for covid-19 to be between 1.4 and 2.5. Other studies have estimated Ro between 2.4 and 4.0. An outbreak with a Ro less than 1 will gradually disappear. A Ro of 4.0 would produce an extremely bad situation. For comparison, the Ro for the common flu is 1.3 and for SARS it was 2.0.

If we do nothing, then Ro will be high and the number of cases and deaths will be very high. As predicted by some, if we do nothing, the spread could go exponential and lead to millions of cases. If we take aggressive actions, however, the Ro will be lower and the growth rates of the disease will be flattened.

The spread of the disease to date should be a wake up call for every person and organization. Supplies are being hoarded which should already have been on hand. Action plans are rolling out, but they should have been ready from Day 1. The government is prepared for hurricanes but not totally prepared for a pandemic. The good news is the Federal, State, and Local governments are learning a lot from the situation and the emergency plans to reduce bureaucracy should have a very positive impact. Public private partnerships in retail and lab testing are set to solve the critical problem of testing. The wake up call may lead to a silver lining in the coronavirus cloud. Following are some components of the silver lining.

1. The development time for vaccines must continue to get shorter. The good news on this is they can sequence the genome of the virus in hours. Sequencing the first human genome cost about $1 billion and took 13 years to complete. In the case of the coronavirus, the detection of the virus was confirmed in France on Friday, January 24. Later that day, the Institut Pasteur received samples of three suspected cases they detected with the novel coronavirus and began preparation for the sequencing. The process started on Monday and was completed early Tuesday evening. Remarkable. The next step is the process for creating, testing, and manufacturing a vaccine. The process to get from recipe to tested and available vaccine needs a major upgrade and modernization.
2. A major information technology (IT) upgrade is needed between state and federal public health organizations. Now that millions of test kits are being distributed, the public will be asking what were the results. As it stands, the answer from the government will have to be, “We don’t know”. This is a problem I wrote about in Health Attitude in 2015. State governments have been reluctant to share data with the Federal government. It is partly cultural and partly because there is no efficient way to do the sharing. The bureaucracy involved is immense. The Feds have spent hundreds of millions on incentives to get states to share their data but it is not happening as it could. The benefits of sharing will be huge. Once millions of consumers, labs, and providers add data to an anonymized national database, a multitude of data will become available for the greater good. Researchers can study the anonymized data and gain insights about the health of the population at a community level, nationally, or globally. This will be extremely helpful for establishing travel bans and imposing quarantines on a more pinpointed basis rather than a cancel everything everywhere approach. Hopefully, better data sharing will be in place before the next pandemic.
3. A big question which needs an answer is what is the best therapeutic for treating covid-19? Various drugs are being tried. This is new. Historically, if you have a certain disease, you are prescribed a certain drug. For example, if you have breast cancer, then take XYZ drug. Oncologists have learned a combination of drugs may work better than the normally prescribed drug. Either approach in a sense implies one size fits all. In fact, every cancer is different and very personal. This is where AI and machine learning (ML) come in. Globally, more than 350,000 chemical compounds (including mixtures of chemicals) have been registered for production and use. Might one of them work to cure covid-19? I would say it is likely. How do they find the chemicals which can work? ML can be applied to all hundreds of thousands of possible cures based on the genomic sequence of the patient and of the novel coronavirus. You might think of it as a digital clinical trial done in hours, not months. I am confident this type of approach will evolve. 
4. Like you, I have been receiving emails from a lot of organizations ranging from global travel companies to our local dry cleaner. They are all very similar. One I received caught my eye. They said, “Currently, our entire staff is equipped to work remotely and to support our clients and one another via phone and email. We will send updates to you as appropriate, and information regarding our status and availability will be posted on our website”. This is an organization which was prepared. Many were not. Many companies and schools and conferences are saying they are going remote: e-learning, e-meetings, e-conferences. Saying you are e-whatever doesn’t make it happen. Do all the employees and customers have access to reliable high-speed bandwidth? Probably not. Are they all trained on how the e-engagement works? Probably not. Effective e-whatever takes a lot of planning, testing, and training. The good news is bandwidth is generally much better than it was a decade ago. The wakeup call will result in organizations asking key questions. How well do we function as an e-organization? Before we go back to “normal” do we really need everybody to go back to the way it was? Can we streamline our organization and our services by fine tuning our e-capabilities?
5. The pandemic is exposing the weaknesses of our paper-based government, including how we vote. Social separation is being urged but to vote, thousands had to stand in line for hours. Those that voted remotely did so by licking an envelope and stamp. Online and mobile voting can work with security, privacy, accuracy, and verifiability if we put our mind to it. Digital discourse can strengthen our democracy. The discourse doesn’t have to be in crowded rooms. Hopefully, the wake up call will get policymakers thinking about the many things we do by touching paper touched by others. Real estate closings, bank loans, paying for things with cash, and the list goes on.

The pandemic has provided a wake up call. If we do nothing, hide like a hermit, and hope it goes away, things will get worse. If we take aggressive actions as described at coronavirus.gov, we can flatten the curves and start thinking about covid-21 and how we can prepare now.

Data Facts of the Week

The coronavirus numbers are growing, but see my article, “Is There a Silver Lining in the Coronavirus Cloud?” If you like to follow what is going on in the coronavirus world statistically, take a look at worldometers.info/conronavirus. After the table of country by country statistics, the page shows the specific things which changed from the prior day. For other interesting real-time statistics about population growth, visit the homepage at worldometers.info. Each day the dedicated doctors and scientists learn more and more about the DNA of the virus and how to cure it and ultimately prevent it.

On Friday morning I was a guest on WNZF “Free For All Fridays”. The Flagler County, Florida news station program was hosted by General Manager David Ayers. Local government officials, a hospital executive, and a congressional representative participated. You can find the podcast here.

The next author event was scheduled for March 19th at AdventHealth in Palm Coast, FL. The event was cancelled by AdventHealth. It will be rescheduled.

Press articles about Internet voting abound. The articles quote technology experts who are worried about the theoretical risks of Internet voting, mobile or otherwise. They correctly say the Internet is not perfect. But, neither is the paper-base system we have. The anti-Internet voting activists continue to compare Internet voting to a perfect world which we will never have. They fail to compare it to the old fashioned paper based system which is now the preferred method to vote. How good is the paper based approach?

This past week’s Democratic primaries in Texas and California showed some of the imperfections of current voting methods. For many voters, the primaries were a nightmare. Some lines were up to six hours long. CNN reported voters walked away because they could not wait any longer. Axios reported, “Long wait times put a special hardship on low-income voters who are less likely to have flexible work hours, around-the-clock transportation and child care.” Another problem is southern states have closed 1,200 polling sites, presumably because of the cost to maintain them. It is no coincidence the closed polling sites had mostly been for Latino and black citizens, many of whom could not get to the alternate polling sites.

The paper based voting systems have numerous problems. The Los Angeles Times reported, “In California, machine jams slowed the rolls, delaying lines up to two hours.” Errors in voter registration forced voters to cast paper provisional ballots which would not be counted until the voter registration was confirmed manually. Voters were also confused about how to use the new voting machines. In some races, the voter had to click “more” to see additional candidates on the voting machine screen. At some voting locations, voting machines just flat out did not work.

We should not trust Internet voting, but we should trust the paper based approach? But wait, there is more. Western states have been pushing early voting my mail for years. It has grown rapidly. The number of early votes cast for Super Tuesday Democratic primaries was 4 million. In California, the early votes were 40%. Many of the votes were wasted because Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, and Tom Steyer dropped out after the early voters had cast their ballot. Many voters were quite disappointed they could not change their vote. With Internet voting, they could have. In fact, with Internet voting a citizen can vote as many times as they want up until the polls close. The last vote is the only one which counts.

We put a robot on Mars, 34 million miles away, and it is still roaming the Red Planet. We can also make Internet voting safe, secure, private, accurate, accessible, reliable, and verifiable. All we need to do state by state and county by county is to develop detailed plans, select vendors which have the best technology, and test, test, test. The only other thing we need is the political and technological will to make it easier for the many millions of people who couldn’t get to the polls or wasted votes by casting paper ballots early.

Data Facts of the Week

This past week, the AP reported there currently are 17 times as many new infections outside China as inside China. If you like to follow what is going on in the coronavirus world statistically, take a look at worldometers.info/conronavirus. After the table of country by country statistics, the page shows the specific things which changed from the prior day. For other interesting real-time statistics about population growth, visit the homepage at worldometers.info. Although each day the dedicated doctors and scientists learn more and more about the DNA of the virus and how to cure it and ultimately prevent it, fear and market reaction continues.

On Friday morning March 13 at 9 AM, I will be a guest on WNZF “Free For All Fridays”. As in past visits to this great local Flagler County, Florida news station, I anticipate a range of challenging questions from host and General Manager David Ayers. Tune in to 92.7 FM or visit flaglerbroadcasting.com/wnzf.

The next author event will be on March 19th at AdventHealth in Palm Coast, FL. The event is open to the public. Seating is limited, so RSVP by calling 386-586-4440 or email [email protected]. The first 65 to register will get an autographed copy of Robot Attitude: How Robots and Artificial Intelligence Will Make Our Lives Better which I will be discussing.

What is becoming clear about the coronavirus situation is it will not be contained. The question is what to do about it. The answer requires knowing where the virus will spread and when. The good news is artificial intelligence (AI) can provide answers now, and even more accurately in the future.

Dr. Kamran Khan, a 49-year-old Canadian epidemiologist and infectious disease specialist in Toronto, was working at a hospital during the SARS epidemic of 2003. The SARS virus started in provincial China and spread to Hong Kong and then to Toronto, where it killed 44 people. Khan concluded there must be a better way to track diseases. With that goal in mind, Khan founded a company in 2014 called BlueDot.

BlueDot has developed an algorithm that can sift through hundreds of thousands of news stories and airline traffic information everyday. The goal is to detect and monitor the spread of infectious diseases. BlueDot applies AI technologies to create alarms about impending virus attacks. Its first success was accurately predicting the spread of Zika from Brazil to south Florida in 2016. Early on, it predicted the spread of coronavirus on December 31, 2019.

BlueDot has 40 employees including data scientists, epidemiologists, physicians, veterinarians, and software developers. Using natural language processing and machine learning, the BlueDot team has developed a real-time warning system based on the vast amount of data it analyzes. The data is retrieved every 15 minutes around the clock from scans of official reports, online news sources, professional forums and information retrieved from key word and phrase searches.

The Economic Times reported BlueDot, “Can read text in 65 languages and can track 150 different types of diseases.” Mr. Khan told The Times, “We call it the needles in the haystack”. After the AI software has analyzed the data, it presents the findings to human experts who tag information they believe is related to a threat.

“There’s a massive amount of data and the machine is finding the needles and presenting it to the human experts,” who then review it and train the AI to understand if the information corresponds to an actual threat. The Times reported, “If the threat looks real, the AI software then looks further for nearby airports and commercial air travel itineraries from around the world. Climate data, national health system databases, and even the presence of mosquitoes or animals that transmit diseases to humans are all taken into account.”

Once BlueDot is confident it has valid data, it sends an alert to its clients including airlines, hospitals, and government agencies informing them where the majority of the airline passengers might disembark. The recipients of the alerts can then prepare for a major disease outbreak.

The Times reported, “So on December 31, in the early morning, the BlueDot system picked up an article in Mandarin that mentioned 27 people suffering from pneumonia, all linked to a wet market in Wuhan.” The virus was not yet identified but the data contained some similarities to the SARS outbreak. BlueDot AI technology predicted the virus would likely spread from Wuhan to Bangkok, Hong Kong, Singapore, Taipei, and Tokyo, all of which have since reported cases of the novel coronavirus.

Other startup companies, government laboratories, Harvard Medical School, and numerous other centers of excellence are using AI to study massive amounts of data. They are using tools which were not available ten years ago. AI is being used to examine large numbers of chemical molecules to determine if they might be therapeutic toward coronavirus. Long term, it is likely there will be new diseases appearing. The good news is AI is getting smarter and smarter every day, and will eventually be able to predict outbreaks earlier and develop cures and vaccines much more quickly than is currently possible.

This Canadian start-up used AI to track coronavirus and raised alarm days before the outbreak

Press articles continue to beat up on Internet voting. They say the only way we can have accurate elections is with paper ballots. Paper elections are so accurate in Iowa they flip a coin to break ties. In Nevada they use cards. Meanwhile millions of people don’t vote because they can’t get to the polls.

Data Facts of the Week

If you like to follow what is going on in the world statistically, take a look at worldometers.info. As of Thursday morning, the site showed year-to-date deaths from Coronavirus at 2,814 and from seasonal flu at 76,441. The reason for so much fear and market reaction to coronavirus is because there is so much we don’t know about it, namely exactly how it spreads and how quickly.

Axios reported not only are pundits and policymakers concerned about tech headed toward out of control, but also the general population has concerns. A new survey shows 61% think tech is changing too fast, 66% worry technology is making it impossible to know what information is real or fake, and 61% think government think does not understand tech well enough to regulate it. 

As of mid-morning Friday, Tesla market capitalization has dropped by more than $40 billion. The five giant tech company market caps plunged by more than a half-trillion dollars. All five companies are global, but to put their massive valuation into perspective, it still represents 18% of the market cap of the U.S. S&P 500. Shareholders are not happy and government regulators and politicians are gearing up for new regulations. The pressure on big tech will continue to mount.

The next author event will be on March 19th at AdventHealth in Palm Coast, FL. The event is open to the public. Seating is limited, so RSVP by calling 386-586-4440 or email [email protected]. The first 65 to register will get an autographed copy of
Robot Attitude: How Robots and Artificial Intelligence Will Make Our Lives Better