How'd that work out?

 We get questions 'all the time' about this, that, and the other.   And sometimes the replies may not seem timely, but 'hey, I'm doing the best that I can'

One topic that has raged this month is RE-OPENING SCHOOLS.   

We've commented in two earlier posts about the prospects and initial reality for universities.   See August 4, "Some say, 'the ship has sailed'?" and August 19, "Yes, Matilda, the ship has sailed"

And we're very concerned for our grand-daughter who is an eighth grade science teacher in Shreveport Louisiana.   She reports that her principal is one of those who still believes (fervently) that Covid is a hoax

So it might be worth looking back a bit at a couple of 'leading states' whose governors think (or at least thought) this was a hoax--Texas and Florida.

Here's the news clips for those two states at the end of April

Trump followed on May 4 on Fox News, reported out on May 5:

So, let's look at the choropleths (the geo-spatial maps) for Florida and Texas, up until these bold decisions, and what happened over the next three months.  First, the Confirmed Cases data:

And, GASP, did it 'stay in the cities' or did it spread across the entire state?  Recall that ORANGE is bad.  These maps are of Cases per capita.

I'd call that a 'clean sweep' -- on May 1, only 4 counties out of 67 had more than 300 cases/100,000.  By August 5, every county in Florida had more than 1,000 cases per 100,000 residents.  Whew!

How about Texas and its 254 counties?

Wow!.  On May 1, nine counties out of 254 had more than 300 cases/100K; only 1 had 1,000+.   Fast forward after "we're safe to re-open" and only 5 counties have less than 100 cases/100K, and 10 more are less than 300.   A whopping 130 counties have more than 1000 cases per 100K residents.  

HOW'D THAT WORK OUT?

Pretty hard to defend the 'hoax' idea when the fires are starting to burn in 'your town'

Lord Kelvin got it right

 William Thomson, in later life dubbed Lord Kelvin, was perhaps the most noted scientist of his time.  True, he did say "X-rays are a hoax" and that both radio and aircraft will be impossibilities, but he was known as a physicist, not a futurist.   What he did say about measurement became the motto for the Hewlett-Packard Company for four decades, before it really thought much about computers.

Some notable and pertinent Lord Kelvin quotes:

As I was graduating from college, I needed a job (with two kids, I couldn't figure out why they called it a Bachelor's Degree).  My advisor, Carver Mead, said, "You're good in the lab, you ought to consider a small company named Hewlett-Packard.   They build instruments for engineers, and that's pretty neat because an instrument has to be three times faster or more accurate than the thing you're working on in order to get a valid measurement.  Thus, instrument designers get to be not only at the 'state of the art' but well ahead of it."

Turns out he was right.   Turns out it was yet a small company--I was their 98th engineer in 1962.  In 1982, as Corporate Engineering Director, I had 15,000 engineers reporting either directly or indirectly to me.   We'd grown some in 20 years.   In fact, from 1962 through 1998, HP was in fact the fastest growing US corporation in the Fortune 2000, hard as that might be to believe.

But it still, mostly, operated as a small company, or rather, a cluster of small companies each organized with their own Profit and Loss statement, replete with their own R&D, marketing, and manufacturing teams.   And, yes, in order to be a good or great instrumentation designer, you had to know a lot of things that no university teaches.   There are no degrees in instrumentation design.   What mattered was a generalist's view of science and engineering, and then domain specialization in medical or chemical or aeronautical or astronomical fields in order to understand and design appropriate solutions.

Which is why it is so distressing to watch the charade about Covid-19 testing.   What farcical actions by a host of groups--the CDC, the Feds, many of the States, and certainly the 'test manufacturers'.  Mygawd, amateur hour.   And because of it, we've probably endured three times as many deaths as would otherwise have been expected.

If you cannot measure, you cannot improve.   Simple

Testing, testing--one, two, three

Testing for Covid19--what's the story?   

Do we need more tests?  The U.S. needs to improve its coronavirus testing to deliver results within two days, said Anthony Fauci, the top U.S. infectious disease official.  “We need to do better,” Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said Wednesday about testing in an interview with Bloomberg Television’s David Westin. “No excuses. It needs to be done.”

Do we need fewer tests?  Trump praised testing in the U.S.: “50% of the country is short-term testing.  ...you have to remember, we did 61 million tests. The next country is -- like Germany is at three. India with 1.5 billion people is at 11. We’re at 61. Nobody’s even close to us in testing.”“Our testing is the best ever, the best in the world....” 

What are the nuances?

This is one of those "both are right" situations.  Here's the world-wide graph for testing per capita, courtesy of Johns Hopkins Center for Disease Control:

Indeed, the US leads the world in both number of tests, and tests per capita.   Are the counts accurate?And are they effective?

Fauci said the U.S. still has too many instances where testing results take days or a week to come back. “I can’t credibly defend that and say it’s a good thing, because it’s not,” he said. He said the goal is to have at least 95% of test results returned with a week.  Fauci and other public health officials have said that faster test results are needed to prevent the spread of the virus. Waiting days for results means many people may unwittingly spread the virus before learning that they’re positive and take precautions.  If the tests take longer than two days for results, contact tracing becomes  impractical.   And estimates are that less than 10% of US testing meets that criteria.

Other 'flies in the ointment' exist.   Nearly all of these have been unique to the US, although Brazil and some European nations have endured similar situations.

A. Many states have been conflating infection tests with anti-body testing, notably high-incidence states such as Florida and Georgia.

B. The number of tests counted may not equal the number of people tested.   Especially in the early months, it took three tests per person to obtain a clear answer, so the test counts were only one-third of the assumed total.'

C. The number of sequential tests given to preferential individuals may not be considered--Trump and his cabinet have each experienced dozens of tests per person; same for professional sports figures and many prominent national figures.   And suspected individuals are often tested multiple times.  Some states--Ohio and North Carolina, for example--have insisted that they only count 'the individual' rather than the actual number of tests given to a person.

 

D. Reliability of the "Confirmation"tests.   Mike DeVine, the Ohio governor, this month experienced first positive, then negative, tests for COVID-19, providing fuel for skeptics of government pandemic mandates ....  “I’m sure the internet is lighting up with ‘Well, you can’t believe any test,’ ” Mike DeWine said in a WCOL radio interview Friday, after a whirlwind of events the day before when the initial positive showing forced the Republican to scrub a planned meeting with President Donald Trump. And on Sunday, he told CNN’s “State of the Union” that “people should not take away from my experience that testing is not reliable or doesn’t work.”

Instead of seeing Trump at the Cleveland airport, DeWine returned to this state capital for new testing with his wife, Fran, through Ohio State University’s medical center. They then went to their southwestern Ohio farm in Cedarville, where DeWine said he planned to quarantine for 14 days. But within hours, he had received Columbus test results that were negative. The first test, part of protocol for people meeting with the president, was a rapid-result antigen test, while the Columbus testing was a genetic, laboratory test whose results are considered more reliable. 

https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/nation/coronavirus/2020/08/09/ohio-governors-positive-then-negative-covid-19-tests-spark-controversy/3330703001/

E. Reliability of the Antibody tests.   This is also nuanced: the early flux of commercial, quick-to-market COVID-19 antibody tests were highly error-prone.   And even after reputable manufacturers took time to develop reliable antibody tests, they can still provide inaccurate results--especially false positives.   Additionally, recent data shows that COVID antibodies don't always last in people's bodies.  Some who test positive on an antibody test may later test negative--even within 10-12 weeks.  Source for these statements: https://www.sharp.com/health-news/the-truth-about-antibody-testing.cfm

***********  

My personal experience was (and is) complicated.   When I and my doctors first were concerned, on March 6, the day that Trump said at the CDC that the US had "a million tests ready', our county hospital claimed that there were no test kits available in the county.  I was the first person in our county to be 'suspected'--the first validation would happen two days later.  After first putting me in an isolation room, and asking a bunch of questions, they tested for pneumonia and sent me home.

A week later, the hospital story (since I was back again) was that "Yes, they now had two kits in the county, but they were reserved for 'important people'--which made me feel a bit second-class."  Two weeks after that, they said the kits they now had were unreliable, in fact unusable, for lack of a key component.   The LA Times reported on this, noting that only 1,138 people had been tested in the state, a week after Trump's boast--because of a re-agent that was missing.  The governor called it -- "shipping a printer without the ink"  https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-03-11/coronavirus-testing-kits-lack-key-ingredient-causing-confusion

After a month of this charade, five visits to ER and the hospital, the docs said, "Look, we've tested for everything else, including Valley Fever, echocardiograms, pleurisy, cardiac angiograms, COPD tests, etc., but just stay at home and self-quarantine" which I'd been doing all along.  "We just don't think it is worth testing for COVID with the kits we have, and besides, you're past the 'infectious stage'.   The antibody tests were just arriving--I even bought a few shares of Abbott Labs, excited by their new test, only to have it turn out to be only 50% reliable.

By the time antibody testing was deemed 'accurate', the docs all said, "No point in it--you'll test negative now because it will have worn off."

The next day, the President again told the nation: "Anyone who wants a test can get one--no problem"

I chagned the channel.

Yes, Matilda, the SHIP HAS SAILED

 August 4, I posted a glum assessment from a workshop held with the AnywhereAnytime team, led by Dan Thomas, one of America's premier strategic thinkers.   Dan spent some 36 years teaching in the Executive Education section of Stanford's Business School, along with time at Harvard and others.

His succinct wrap-up was that "kids will not follow the rules" so if the decision on re-opening a school is dependent on the health impact for students, teachers, staff and the community, it is a lost cause.   The report generated some 'hate mail' from some of my erstwhile friends, who apparently still believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.

What we didn't expect was such sudden vindication.   Here's nine major universities (including private Colorado College in my 'old home town') that have just found out that students did not follow the rules:

https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/18/health/colleges-return-coronavirus-cases-wellness/index.html

So, Matilda, did the ship sail?   How will this play out across the country, not just in colleges but in elementary and secondary schools as well?   

Thoughts?

Reflelcting on a multi-cultural mixed bag

Although I've lived in California most of my life, and I am one of those oddities today in California--a native son born before World War II (only 2 people in 1,000 in California today fit that description)--and I have been here non-stop for the past fourteen years, I had no insight or perspective about Kamala Harris when she became the Vice Presidential nominee for the Democratic party.

And I just read a story about her and her husband, which was eminently readable no matter your party persuasion.   It is at https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/relationships/doug-emhoff-kamala-harris-husband/2020/08/18/a6c64db6-e15c-11ea-8181-606e603bb1c4_story.html?utm_campaign=wp_post_most&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_most

What appealed to me?   Simple.   The lines about the backgrounds of she and her 'new' husband sounded sort of just like my wife and me.   

"a pairing that reflects the country’s diversity. Emhoff is White and Jewish. Harris is Black and Indian — she identifies as Baptist, like her father, but her mother also introduced her to Hindu customs. “They showcase America as it is, as it is becoming and as it will be . . . .”   

"It’s Harris’s first marriage and Emhoff’s second — he has two children from his previous one. According to the Pew Research Center, remarriage is on the rise — as are unions of two people of differing faiths and races."

How, you might ask, is that "just like my wife and me"?    Well, we are 're-married'--each of us for the third time.   We estimate that we have had a thousand people 'tsk-tsk' when they hear that.   The fact that we are now together for 35 years is some testament that it worked, but each of our deceased parents would doubtless still be surprised.

Re people of differing faiths and races uniting, Jenny is Catholic, my first wife was Mormon, and the second Episcopalian, while I was raised as a Protestant Methodist.   Moreover, Jenny's second husband was Jewish, so we've covered the waterfront on mixing differing faiths.

As for ethnic mixing, our offspring and our nieces and nephews have brought Asians and Hispanics into the family, not to mention Southerners from Alabama and Louisiana.   Not wildly diverse, but enough to challenge some family old-timers with Archie Bunker views.

Both of us are from the 'high-tech' world, so we've become acquainted with, and good friends with, Indians, Blacks, and Asians from a wide variety of countries and faiths and beliefs.  And we have consistently been impressed by their humanity as well as their intelligence and hard work and dedication.   

I've been on the Computer History Museum Board of Trustees for a while now, and it began as a bunch of computer nerds (almost all old white guys, usually ex-IBM or DEC folk).   Today, both on the staff and the Board, the heterogeneity is both gratifying and amazing--and the advice provided is much richer and more nuanced than it ever was in the pasts.

So, whatever else may play out in this election campaign, it is refreshing to see someone who isn't 'just another old white guy' on at least one ticket.  America has long since become a very multi-cultural country, and I for one think that is our greatest strength as a nation.

Los Angeles County

Treated as a nation, Los Angeles County has some interesting comparative statistics.

In terms of population, it is bigger than Switzerland, Israel, or Austria, and about the same as Portugal or Greece, at 10,110,000 folk.   Compared to American states, only six states are much larger--Texas, Florida, New York, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Ohio--while North Carolina, Georgia, and Michigan are roughly equivalent.    It has as many residents as South Carolina and Alabama combined.

And California, without Los Angeles County, still has more people than any other state.

In terms of land area, Los Angeles County is not so large.  it is about the same as Vanautu, which by the way has not yet had a single case of Covid19 (quick, can you point out Vanautu on a map?).   Peru is one hundred times larger; France is fifty times and Spain is forty times larger.  Actually, our county, Tulare with 446,000 folk, is 80 square miles bigger.   Next door Kern County (Bakersfield) is almost twice as big, and San Bernardino County (America's largest) is four times larger than LA County.

In economic terms, it is America's largest GDP county at $711 Billion, 4% of the USA.   It would tie for the 20th richest GDP nation with Switzerland, well ahead of Taiwan from which so much of American electronics has emanated.

California today with 11% of America's population, has 619,000 Confirmed Covid19 Cases, 12% of America's total and 11,700 Deaths, 7% of the USA total.   LA County, with 25% of California's population, has 36% of its confirmed cases and 47% of its deaths.  

.As a Covid19 hotspot, it is America's leading county, with 221,000 Confirmed Cases at this writing.   Granted, NYC's five boroughs exceed this number slightly, but only Miami-Dade County in Florida is within shouting distance, with 70% of LA County's cases.  Cook County (Chicago) has half as many.  

So LA County is 'the biggest deal' in the biggest state, with the leading Covid19 statistics.

What might we learn from it?

First, some demographics

LA County is 27% White, 47% Hispanic, 14% Asian, 9% African-American

LA County's Confirmed Cases (where known) are 15% White, 71% Hispanic, 7% Asian, 6% Black

Deaths are 24% White, 50% Hispanic, 15% Asian, and 10% Black

Thus in lockstep with California, Hispanics have borne the brunt of Confirmed Cases.   However, in sharp contrast with much of California, their death-rate is substantially lower in proportion to every other ethnic group.   Whites have one fifth as many cases, and half the deaths.  Worth understanding.

Second, some deeper analysis

LA County has 88 incorporated towns, some pretty large besides LA City itself (at 4 million).  Long Beach has 460,000; Glendale 201,000; and Pasadena 162,000.   Fourteen cities are larger than 100,000.

Seventeen have more than 3,000 Cases per 100,000 folk, which is enough that you'd likely know someone who has been infected.   Twenty-eight have less than 1,000 Cases per 100,000--relatively safe communities.    

Ditto for the 140 Districts within LA City, and the 133 Unincorporated areas.

So, a mixed bag, to be sure.   Mull these now, and we can return to this example later, comparing it to other big cities/counties in America, and also to the other California urban centers.

counties vs cities

 People have asked, "What about MY town?" when they first visit our Covid19 Dashboard  https://anywhereanytime.io/covid19/    

Well, unfortunately, that is pretty hard to do.   In fact, just doing the 3,142 counties of America daily for four variables, and calculating the 7 day moving average for each variable while we're at it, is a task.

But, people persist, so I did several experiments in recent times; I'll share some in the next few posts.   

A. I did "Our County" since all of our neighbors and friends here keep asking.   I'm showing that today.

B. I did 8 counties around our old farmstead in Iowa, which I mentioned in the post yesterday

C. I did Santa Barbara County, seeking to help answer the question "Should UCSB open this fall?"

D. I couldn't help myself, because I lived many years in Southern California, and I hear so often "What's wrong in LA (or Riverside, or Orange County, or ....)?"   I'll treat Los Angeles County in the next post.  This is actually an amazing story.   LA County is 10 million people, in 88 incorporated towns and cities. Los Angeles City is almost 4 million of those 10 million folk, divided into 140 Districts and 133 listed Unincorporated Areas.    And the County Health Dept publishes Confirmed Cases and Deaths and rates for each for every one of the 361 areas.    So you can actually find out a lot.   Cook County (Chicago and 127 municipalities) has a great website for each township as well, in fact better than LA because they have lots of graphs for each township, that show trends, etc.

E. I have long been a member of the Fellowship Forum in Palo Alto, a group of 55  honorees (honored partly for their geriatric mobility) who have met weekly for lunch and a topical presentation.  Covid has stopped the lunches, but permitted me to attend again from 'far away'.   And when Stanford canceled all in-class instruction (except for the Business School) yesterday, I thought, "Why not Santa Clara County?"  Or maybe the next door San Mateo County.

The key variable to understand is that not all cities report their data, but sometimes the County Health Dept steps in and does so for them.   In Tulare County, they publish a pseudo-map, abetted by others, that somewhat inaccurately, but at least suggestively, shows what each town is experiencing.

So here is a map from August 2 that shows a Confirmed Cases number beside each town and/or zip code.   I added the current estimated population, and calculated the per capita Cases/100K number.

Just for reference, 5,000 caess per capita translates into one of every 20 people in that town have been confirmed.   If you believe the CDC estimate that for every KNOWN case, there are 10 untested--that suggests that one of every two people in a town with confirmed 5,000 cases per capita have Covid.  Those estimates were early; I like the current estimates of 45% of total cases are unidentified.   That says only one out of ten citizens in towns with 5,000 confirmed cases are affected.

WOW!   One out of ten?   That's like one in every two or three homes around here.   Here's the data:

So, pretty clearly you don't want to live in Dinuba or Earlimart or Pixley.   We live 'near' Woodlake and Exeter, one of the better situations.   Visalia is our "big town" a little more than 130,000 folk.    And using the 45% estimate, ONLY one of every 25 residents there has/had Covid.   One out of 25?  Whew

Iowa. Iowa?

 When my father was called up for the Army in October 1944 for World War II, we moved to Iowa where he had been born, to be near family while he was gone.   I remember the humid nights, the chiggers that bit if you rolled on the lawn, and the beautiful snows until the coal soot turned the snowdrifts black.

And I remember the 'family farm' halfway between Jewell and Webster City.   No running water, an outhouse 'restroom' and the steep cold stairs to my attic bedroom in the crisp autumn days.   Not yet four years old, I collected eggs from the chicken coop, fed the pigs 'corn on the bone' not knowing what a 'cob' was, and milked the two daily cows we had with my great-uncle Fred and his son "Buddy".

The road to 'town' was newly paved, and you could put your ear to the ground and listen for an approaching car--one came by nearly every hour.

I went back with my wife Jenny fifty-five years later, and I was surprised by how close the barn was to the house--back then, it seemed a long ways away, but at three, I had shorter legs.

All of these memories came flooding back when I saw the headline "COVID-19 surge moves to Midwest" on the bulletin from the Center for Infectious Disease Research at the University of Minnesota  https://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2020/08/covid-19-surge-moves-midwest-young-people-fuel-us-case-rise

"Many states initially spared from the COVID-19 pandemic is March, April, and May, are now reporting increasing transmission rates in non-metropolitan counties fueled by community spread.   According to the Wall Street Journal, ... the weekly change in COVID-19 cases has been higher in rural regions compared to metro areas, and outbreaks are linked to social events, rather than workplace exposure or congregate living situations."

Since I had just done an analysis of eight counties in Iowa, aggregated around the Webster City and Jewell areas, and had found substantially what they were now reporting, I felt both vindicated for what our Dashboard can help discover, and satisfied that I was able to detect this before 'reading about it'.   

So, I thought it might be worth sharing a couple of those points herein:

A. Absolute numbers are relatively meaningless when it comes to Covid.  Of course, Los Angeles County is very high, as was New York City.   There are more people there--re Los Angeles County, which is composed of a hundred towns and cities, the county has more people than all but six other states besides California.

B. Per capita numbers are not usually reported, or appreciated, but these in fact measure the relative impact on people in YOUR community by comparison with any other community.

C. Time-scales matter.   Are we talking rate of infection per day, per week, per month?  This obviously changes the odds, sometimes dramatically.

D. Choropleths (geo-spatial maps) are being increasingly used, but are not well understood.  The 'cutting points' that determine color shadings are crucially important for conveying the 'right message'--who'd have thought that, especially if you're not practiced in reading these?

So, herewith some Iowa graphs, comparing two time-intervals (the first five months of the pandemic in America, with six weeks from mid-June to the end of July), call them Group A and Group B

The key to note in these graphs is that for three of the four, it appears that there is little change, or else that things are getting better (albeit that the time-scales are not equivalent).  But SIGNIFICANTLY in my view, the third set--PER CAPITA CASES--shows that it has actually gotten WORSE recently, meaning it is much more widespread even with fewer cases.

      1. Absolute CONFIRMED CASE numbers--Group A is 20% higher than Group B

2. Absolute DEATHS numbers--Group A is 208% higher than Group B

3. Cases Per Capita--Group A has 18 'very low' counties;  Group B has only 3

4. DEATHS per capita -Group A has 6 VERY HOT and 13 HOT spots

Group B had NO VERY HOT, and only 5 HOT spots

SO, WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM THIS that might be surprising?

The most important lesson for me was that Figure 3 is NOT INTUITIVE.    Number of cases is down 20%, but the spread is MUCH WIDER.    This phenomenon does not show up in the tabular data (I looked repeatedly at it), and it certainly doesn't show up in Figures 1, 2, and 4.

What is indeed going on here?   The answer is a bit complicated.   Yes, the urban areas (and in Iowa, there are not many) were one locus of the Case reduction.   The other is that localized 'hotspots' happened in the Group A period to a much higher degree than in Group B--these were feedlots, food processing plants, nursing homes, and prisons.   Yes, the Webster county prison outbreak (113 prisoners and 15 staff) was in the Group B time, but almost all of the Group B transmissions were 'community spread'.    

Iowa has 99 counties, and 3.17 million residents.  8 counties account for 50% of the population, and within those 8 counties, cities account for 63% of their population.    So, 8 counties with roughly 190,000 residents on average, and 91 counties with 17,000 residents on average is what the state demographics look like.

The top 2 counties (Polk, with Des Moines; Woodbury, with Sioux City) were 8,182 cases in Group A, but only 4,881 in Group B.    That is 3,301 case reductions of the 3,594 total.   

CONCLUSION:  Choropleths can be quite revealing, especially for counter-intuitive matters.   As in so many other avenues of life, the details are crucial, and tools that help us see them are indeed valuable for analysis and perspective.

Your thoughts?

Sometimes it 'hits home"

My first cousin called not long ago, after he'd done some genealogy checking about his namesake, Thomas Coates.   He said, "I don't get it.   He died at 23 on the last week of conflict in southern France for World War I,  and he had been a college freshman at Rice that year.   Why was he so late going to college?   Was he a delayed learner, or a little bit slow?"   This from a Caltech graduate.

My cousin, bless his heart, had never been to "the ranch" on the salty marshes of Carancahua Bay on the southern shores of Texas, 120 miles east of Galveston, and 100 miles north of Corpus Christi.   Think Padre Island without the beach (which is 30 miles further south from Corpus).    

 I don't often think of myself as "Texan"--I never lived there, and my parents weren't born there either.   But . . . I do have heritage there, actually.   My great-great grandfather, Lafayette Ward, took his young Baltimore-bred bride there six weeks after the infamous Alamo massacre in 1836.  Enlisting in the rebel army as a Texas Ranger with General Sam Houston, he was awarded two sections of land (1,280 acres), while his unmarried brother got 640 adjacent acres.   After Texas independence, and when Texas later joined the United States (recall that 6 Flags got its name for how many flags have flown over Texas lands), they became 'gentlemen cattle ranchers'.   Their holdings at one point were larger than the King Ranch today; they were responsible for helping create barbed wire, for example.  They also introduced Hereford, Brahman, and Jersey cattle to Texas.  His son, Lafayette Ward Jr. was prominent for years http://usgenwebsites.org/TXJackson/family_ward_lafayette.htm 

My great-grandfather, Henry Clay Coates, born in 1853 in Indianola, Texas (then the capital of Calhoun county until a hurricane blew the town away in 1875) was old man Ward's chief 'cowboy.'   He led Ward's cattle on the Chisholm trail to Kansas City some 850 miles away, eight different years.  He also married the boss' daughter, Susie, which begat my grandfather Henry Mitchell Coates, and another son, Thomas, the WWI victim.

Lafayette Ward died young, 51, of Yellow Fever, but his son founded the town LaWard (one of three incorporated towns in Jackson County today--population 200), and eventually opened a school there in 1911, bringing in a new schoolteacher from a Nebraska 'normal school'.   So Thomas, born in 1895, never went to school until she arrived.   His brother married the school teacher--my grandmother Ethel.

So the riddle for my cousin, "Why didn't his namesake go to school earlier?" is that there was no school within 40 miles of their home until he was 16.  And they didn't have cars before 1910 in 'those parts'.  So he made up 16 years of 'schooling' in six years, to gain college admission at 22.

The point of this relatively long anecdote is that this part of Texas was, and remains, relatively remote. Taking three local counties--Jackson where Edna and LaWard are (population 14,874); Calhoun with Port Lavaca (pop. 21,504) and Matagorda (pop. 36,643, mostly in Bay City), their population is one-seventh of my current county, Tulare in California, in an area 75% as big.   You can look a long ways down any road to see a home.   So the density of population in that area is one-fifth of our rural county; and one-fiftieth that of rural Morris County in New Jersey.   

And guess what?

These three VERY RURAL counties (out of 254 Texas counties) had practically NO COVID for the first five months of the pandemic--148 total cases, and 8 deaths.    After the governor "re-opened" the state for Memorial Day, things got explosive.   They now have 1,426 cases and 28 deaths--case load up in 45 days by 900%.    What the 'ell happened?

Some graphs show this story.  It is a tragic Texas story:  

Some say "the ship has sailed"

We've been asked recently by several chancellors and other leaders of academic institutions how to use our Covid19 database and dashboards to help them with the crucial decision that they face: "How do we decide the criteria for the re-opening of our school?"

I can and do tell them: "Well, we can show you the background, history, current status and trend-lines for your county in terms of Covid incidence and prevalence, and thus total exposure for the students, their parents, the faculty, staff, and the administration, plus of course the concerned local business people and the community at large."    

It is harder to do by specific locale--e.g. to their own town, hospitalization rates, age and gender and ethnic composition of cases and deaths to date, which stores are open or closed, and which depend mostly on the college students for income, etc.   But there are ways to get this information mostly from the local health department,  and those can have bearing on the question.    

The AnywhereAnytime folk (developers of Covid Dashboard  https://anywhereanytime.io/covid19/ ) held a session on these topics last week.  They invited me, and it went something like this:

1. What criteria will matter mostly?    The four obvious ones: Health, Learning, Economy, Legal.

2. Who cares?   Students, parents, faculty, staff and administration, leadership (including the Board), community, and separately, the business owners and staffs who are dependent on the school students.

You could do a spreadsheet with cells for each criteria for each group, and get a long laundry list of issues on the table pretty quickly, but our conclusion was that it boils down quickly to three points:

A. Human Life and Long Term Health of our students, faculty, and staff is PARAMOUNT.  This is very different and much more deadly and long-term injurious than any flu since the 1918/19 pandemic.

B. The economic impact to the university itself is huge, as well as to the businesses nearby.   The challenges are immense, especially for colleges without large endowments, dependent on tuition money.

C. The impact on the Learning Experience is key--after all, THIS is our mission.  How can you learn, without cohorts, without labs, without the admixture of collegial sutdents....

Note that we must make tradeoffs among these three points in order to re-open, and whatever answer is selected is necessarily a compromise.    We just don't know enough about Covid to properly assess risks.

What we DO KNOW, is that we are increasingly confident that we KNOW HOW TO CONTROL the spread of the Virus, but we also KNOW with a high degree of certainty THAT THE STUDENTS WILL NOT FOLLOW THE RULES.   Ample evidence has been displayed in the past couple of weeks that should curl the hair for any chancellor who still has hair.

Well, that sort of "ices the cake", so to speak.   If the students will not play by the rules, then the school cannot safely re-open until something dramatic happens, like a vaccine becomes widely available.

WHAT, THEN, CAN WE DO?

Our answer was to outline 3 phases:

1. EMBRACE ON-LINE LEARNING until a vaccine is available and utilized widely

2. WHEN CRITICAL MASS of immunity is achieved, bring students and faculty back on a volunteer basis

3. WHEN Covid19 cases/deaths diminish to the level of annual flu's, re-open with a mixed model with students making the choices.

The trick is WHAT DO WE DO NOW?   in PHASE 1?

And the answer is not easy, but it is doable with four steps:

A. Dramatically improve on-line learning.   After all, if our mission is education, we should be able to learn ourselves or conduct research on how to do this.   Businesses are having to do it; so must the universities and colleges.  There are plenty of great examples--model them, improve on them, build gamifying into them....

B. Provide incentives for students to continue their education (don't let them all take a 'gap' year), with tuition breaks, low-cost loans, more counseling attention, etc.

C. Provide incentives for professors to learn 'on-line' skills, and to design courses better for on-line

D. Cut costs dramatically--shutter facilities, provide early retirement packages, lay off staff

THE REALITY, we felt, is that this is a STRUCTURAL CHANGE, not a temporary or cycical issue.   This is a Blockbuster vs. NetFlix moment, an inflection point for the university and college scene as we have known it.   It will never be as it was.   Businesses face this periodically, and some don't make it, while others emerge stronger and new forms win.    

Those wishing for "normal times to return" are doomed.   The ship has sailed.