One. Million. Deaths.

I have been pondering this all week.

There are several ways to count the covid-19 deaths. One is the official count, where people can legitimately argue about whether a death was “by covid” or “with covid”. That count in the U.S. is at 943,000.

A better way is “excess deaths” which the health authorities (Centers for Disease Control in the U.S.) have been routinely counting, long before covid-19. Historically, the number of deaths follows a consistent pattern—not level throughout a year, but pretty consistent from one year to the next. Against this baseline, it is straightforward to find the excess deaths—and one can argue that these are ALL, directly or indirectly, due to the pandemic. Last week, the U.S. excess deaths topped one million. The Keene Sentinel had an excellent story (from the Washington Post) observing this tragic event: Sentinelsource.com 2/19/2022

They included this picture of a man near his brother’s gravesite in Arizona. It gave me goosebumps—what a perfect way to encapsulate the one million deaths tragedy.

As far as I can tell, today is exactly two years since the Sentinel’s first mention of the “novel coronavirus”. On March 2nd, I wrote in my diary “corona virus hysteria is building …” Then, of course, things happened fast: the local schools closed on the 16th, Vermont began stay-at-home on the 25th and New Hampshire on the 28th, the same day I emailed a friend and speculated that this would lead to one million U.S. deaths.

But even though I expected it, now that it has come to pass, the whole pandemic is astounding to me—the most important historical event since World War II. While case rates and hospitalizations have plummeted in the U.S., the disease continues to kill about 10,000 people a day throughout the world, now totaling at least six million deaths.

We have become numb to these kinds of numbers. But we must never become numb to these kinds of numbers.

The pandemic is not over. We now have greatly improved tools and understanding for moving forward. Fresh air ventilation. Meters for measuring it. Masks that work. Methods for calculating the overall safety of multiple measures.

Let us remember the ongoing human costs—the dead, the injured, and the survivors. Let us appreciate and use the gifts we have, and work together to create the new normal.

We welcome your thoughts - please email us at Safetulator@kohlerandlewis.com.

Beware of Clear Masks

The purpose of a mask is to filter the incoming and outgoing air, and capture at least 95% of any virus particles in the air.

But—there is a lot of junk out there. Masks like the one shown below don’t actually do any filtration—the air just leaks in and out along the sides.

Then there are some that look like they partially work, and may meet surgical mask standards, but this tells us nothing because surgical masks are for big droplets and they don’t filter the air effectively because they leak around the edges.

The only clear one I know of so far that maybe does it OK is this one--at least it has 99% rated filter material behind the opaque pieces. I’m testing one of these now, and I’ll let you know!

For a full discussion of masks, go to the blog for Jan. 4th. The only mask I wear for more than ten minutes is the BROAD AirPro Mask, the one with the external fan and HEPA filter.

We welcome your thoughts - please email us at Safetulator@kohlerandlewis.com.

Masks Off! (Not)

The City of Keene rescinded its mask mandate last week. I don’t know which data they might have looked at, but there is still a lot of virus around in the air. In my small grocery store example I presented in the Feb. 11th posting, where the odds were 99% to have one or more covid-positive people there in the store when I’m there, now it’s down to 96%!

Hooray, let’s celebrate and rip off those masks!

Below is a chart with some historical context, showing the two Keene mask mandates. Of course I would have waited for a hospitalization rate down to that of last July, or the grocery store odds down to 10%. If the next variant doesn’t get here too soon, I am hopeful that we might see similar low levels this coming summer.

We welcome your thoughts - please email us at Safetulator@kohlerandlewis.com.

A New Way to Think About Air

We are, I hope, at the beginning stage of a revolution in the design of buildings and fresh air ventilation systems. Yes, spurred by covid-19 but, in my opinion, long overdue. This article from The Atlantic (my favorite magazine!) should be required reading of anyone involved in covid-19 policy or research, and anyone who wants a deeper understanding of practical measures you can do to reduce your risk of covid-19 and other air-borne illnesses.

I’ve been saving this article since September 7, 2021. That was before the Omicron surge, of course, but readers now may be able to appreciate even more, the wisdom presented here. To set the stage:

"The 19th and early 20th century saw a number of ambitious public-health efforts … The United States eliminated yellow fever and malaria, for example … One by one, the diseases that people accepted as inevitable facts in life—dysentery, typhoid, typhus, to name a few more—became unacceptable in the developing world. But after all this success, after all we’ve done to prevent the spread of disease through water and insects, we seem to have overlooked something. We overlooked air.

This turned out to have devastating consequences for the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic. The original dogma, you might remember, was that the novel coronavirus spread ... through droplets that quickly fell out of the air. We didn’t need ventilation or masks; we needed to wash our hands and disinfect everything we touched. But a year and half of evidence has made clear that the tiny virus-laden particles indeed linger in the air of poorly ventilated areas. It explains why outdoors is safer than in, why a single infected person can super-spread to dozens of others without directly speaking to or touching them. If we are to live with this coronavirus forever—as seems very likely—some scientists are now pushing to reimagine building ventilation and clean up indoor air. We don’t drink contaminated water. Why do we tolerate breathing contaminated air?"

The Atlantic, 9/7/2021 Article: Coronavirus Ventilation - A New Way to Think About Air

When Will It Be Safe To Go Back In The Water?

Of course, there is no one right answer. I’ll have a future blog post on “endemic” and what it means. For now, I was thinking of last summer, pre-Delta, when the case count in New Hampshire was as low as 20 a day. I was tentatively venturing out then, even risking a vacation to the beach. Now those look like the good old days.

As I hope you know by now, comparing case counts pre- and post-Omicron is not valid because the number of Omicron cases is way higher, per hospitalized person for example, than pre-Omicron. So I looked up the valid comparison measures of hospitalizations and deaths. See Covidactnow.org charts below:

Of these, to me, hospitalization is the best metric. (People stay multiple days in the hospital, so the 20/day count of hospital patients, compared to the 20/day cases, does NOT mean that 100% of cases end up in the hospital.) I’ll be looking for hospitalization rates down in the 20’s. That will be about 10% of the current numbers, so we have a ways to go.

The other excellent metric to follow comes from the well-known Georgia Tech site (covid19risk.biosci.gatech.edu), where they predict the probability of encountering one or more people currently with covid-19, based on the community spread numbers. So if I go into a small grocery store, let’s say assuming 100 people in the building, and the odds are less than 10% that there are one or more covid-positive people there, I would feel pretty good about that.

I don’t feel good at all about the current risk, which says that there is definitely some covid-19 virus in the air of that grocery store—see the graphic below. But we are moving in the right direction, as shown by the graphs above!

We’d like to hear your thoughts - we welcome those thoughts by email at safetulator@kohlerandlewis.com.

BinaxNOW on the Shelf at Walgreens in Keene!

Walgreens on West Street in Keene has over 100 BinaxNOW test kits sitting on their shelves as of today at noon, Thursday, 2/3/2022.

Reminder of our company policy for how to use antigen tests properly: if you have symptoms, wait until day 5 after having symptoms to do the antigen test (twice) for best accuracy - although it’s hard to wait that long and it’s better to get a PCR test as soon as possible.

If you have no symptoms and you want to use the test to see if you've got covid-19 or not, you need to do 2 tests, 24 hours apart, and they both have to be negative.

The best use of antigen tests is after you have had covid-19 - as per the February 2, 2022 post, wait at least five days after the onset of symptoms and do one test per day until you get two negative results.