Last week version 3.0 of coronavirus modeling for Minnesota was finally released, and the governor announced somewhat loosened restrictions.
I skimmed through the technical document for the model, and there are some interesting points, although it seems that the governor’s most recent order—beginning next Monday—was driven mostly by political considerations. One of them being having Wisconsin for a neighbor, where many things have been opened up, thanks to judicial intervention. A large fraction of Minnesotans live within easy driving distance of the Wisconsin border, and many were already accustomed to going to Wisconsin to buy fireworks banned by Minnesota. (Some of those fireworks are also illegal to fire off in Wisconsin, but can still be legally purchased there.)
So the governor is going to allow retail businesses to open, at half capacity and with other restrictions, and is also allowing small gatherings of up to ten people.
The modeling timeline is that they built the latest version of the model in April, took data from March 22 to April 25, did calibration and runs, and then stopped on May 1 to write up results, which were released on May 13. So data from the last two weeks was not included, perhaps for the better in terms of calibration, since recent weeks have been dominated by the spread of the virus in nursing homes, while the model does not yet have the capability of working with “hot spots”. Or co-morbidities. Or most combinations of interventions.
A couple of numbers from the technical document and slides keep appearing out in the media: a 37.6% reduction in people’s social contacts under social distancing, and a 55.1% reduction in contacts under the stay-at-home order. The media portrays them as a failure of Minnesotans to achieve the government-planned reductions of 50% and 80%, but the numbers above simply did not come out of the real world, not at all. They came from the modelers’ attempts to tweak these and other parameters to make the model’s output match the data that they had.
One surprising thing I found in the technical document is that according to the Department of Health, 65% of the deaths attributed to the virus have happened outside of hospitals; at home or in a nursing home. Even the model predicts nearly 70% for this.
In an earlier post, I guessed a long-term care rate in Minnesota of 1.5%. It is actually under 1%. If I put that together with the dying-out-of-hospital rate, that suggests that over 6,000 Minnesotans are going to die at home over the course of the pandemic.
The one very definite indication from the scenarios that were modeled is that Minnesota should not follow the CDC guidelines for re-opening, which according to the model would delay the peak in coronavirus cases for several months, and then spread it out so widely that half of the 2200 ICU beds with ventilators that the state has arranged for would never be used.
Under more realistic conditions, the virus is expected to peak in Minnesota in late June or early July.
Saturday, May 16, 2020
Wednesday, May 13, 2020
Sent outside
We have a free-from-the-side-of-the-road table that is not needed in the house, but which could be useful on the deck. I don’t know whether to call it a large end table or a small coffee table, but it is a little over two feet square.
To help it weather the outdoors, at least for this summer, it needed its grooved top protected, and the shelf underneath mostly removed.
I did the shelf part first, since the table would have to be upside down for that. I drilled holes at the corners with a bit brace, started cutting with a keyhole saw, and finished each cut with a regular hand saw. Otherwise, I could have used my husband’s jig saw, but I prefer hand tools, which are usually much quieter, safer, and cheaper than power tools.
For the top, my preference would have been to cover it with sheet metal, but what I had was fabric left over from the latest armchair project: some sort of canvas with a waterproof backing. I had to piece it together a little, and for this I did flat seams by overlapping two pieces, and then running two parallel lines of stitching down through the overlapped part. This particular fabric was a bit difficult to maneuver through my sewing machine with the size of pieces that I was working with, so the end result does not lie perfectly flat. Just good enough for a temporary solution.
Having run out of upholstery tacks with the chair project, the best solution for securing the fabric to the top was staples, along the sides of the top. I folded the edges of the fabric under before stapling. Like always, I found it difficult to hold the staple gun firmly enough to make all the staples to go in smoothly; many of them got some assistance from a hammer afterward.
And that was it. Ideally, I would like to paint both base and top, in different colors, but that is not a priority at the moment.
To help it weather the outdoors, at least for this summer, it needed its grooved top protected, and the shelf underneath mostly removed.
I did the shelf part first, since the table would have to be upside down for that. I drilled holes at the corners with a bit brace, started cutting with a keyhole saw, and finished each cut with a regular hand saw. Otherwise, I could have used my husband’s jig saw, but I prefer hand tools, which are usually much quieter, safer, and cheaper than power tools.
For the top, my preference would have been to cover it with sheet metal, but what I had was fabric left over from the latest armchair project: some sort of canvas with a waterproof backing. I had to piece it together a little, and for this I did flat seams by overlapping two pieces, and then running two parallel lines of stitching down through the overlapped part. This particular fabric was a bit difficult to maneuver through my sewing machine with the size of pieces that I was working with, so the end result does not lie perfectly flat. Just good enough for a temporary solution.
Having run out of upholstery tacks with the chair project, the best solution for securing the fabric to the top was staples, along the sides of the top. I folded the edges of the fabric under before stapling. Like always, I found it difficult to hold the staple gun firmly enough to make all the staples to go in smoothly; many of them got some assistance from a hammer afterward.
And that was it. Ideally, I would like to paint both base and top, in different colors, but that is not a priority at the moment.
Sunday, May 10, 2020
Bed week?
Last week I:
Turned and repaired the mattress.
Stitched up some rips in the mattress cover.
Mended a corner of the sheet.
And patched worn-out areas of the quilt.
Turned and repaired the mattress.
Stitched up some rips in the mattress cover.
Mended a corner of the sheet.
And patched worn-out areas of the quilt.
Wednesday, May 6, 2020
Lampshade
I finished re-covering an old lampshade, after a great deal of fiddling.
It sat for a long time, while I thought about a lining for it. I was going to use large sheets of watercolor paper, but they were too inflexible and difficult to fit to the lampshade’s slightly tapered shape. Finally I resorted to Cheryl Mendelson’s Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House* for ideas on materials. She mentioned parchment, which made me think of kitchen parchment paper...but it was too fragile. I also experimented with freezer paper a bit, but soon got tired of wrestling with it and decided to just use fabric.
I had the outer fabric picked out already. After many false starts, it became clear that the best way to proceed for both the inner and outer fabrics was to machine sew them into tubes, hemmed at the lower edge, and hand sew that end to the frame. Then I could trim the top edge neatly, and sew that down, gathering or tucking as needed, since the top of the frame is narrower than the bottom.
I did all that for the lining first, since it made sense to work from the inside out. At the top, I gathered it to fit. For the outer fabric, tucks looked better.
Where I needed to sew them together, I used the “Frankenstein stitch”/antique seam mentioned in this post.
I was careful at all stages to keep the edges very neat, and to remove all stray threads and lint from the fabrics, because as Mendelson warns in her book, when you turn on the light, you can see everything that’s in the lampshade.
Still, I could have done better with that; out of the four sides, only one came out as the “good” side. But one is enough, and there is always the possibility of adding some opaque trim.
———————-
* A book which is a good reference, but exhausting to read, unless you replace every instance of “should” in it with”could”. The claim in the beginning that she is describing ideal housekeeping, and not prescribing it, are insufficient against the bulk and sense of the text.
It sat for a long time, while I thought about a lining for it. I was going to use large sheets of watercolor paper, but they were too inflexible and difficult to fit to the lampshade’s slightly tapered shape. Finally I resorted to Cheryl Mendelson’s Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House* for ideas on materials. She mentioned parchment, which made me think of kitchen parchment paper...but it was too fragile. I also experimented with freezer paper a bit, but soon got tired of wrestling with it and decided to just use fabric.
I had the outer fabric picked out already. After many false starts, it became clear that the best way to proceed for both the inner and outer fabrics was to machine sew them into tubes, hemmed at the lower edge, and hand sew that end to the frame. Then I could trim the top edge neatly, and sew that down, gathering or tucking as needed, since the top of the frame is narrower than the bottom.
I did all that for the lining first, since it made sense to work from the inside out. At the top, I gathered it to fit. For the outer fabric, tucks looked better.
Where I needed to sew them together, I used the “Frankenstein stitch”/antique seam mentioned in this post.
I was careful at all stages to keep the edges very neat, and to remove all stray threads and lint from the fabrics, because as Mendelson warns in her book, when you turn on the light, you can see everything that’s in the lampshade.
Still, I could have done better with that; out of the four sides, only one came out as the “good” side. But one is enough, and there is always the possibility of adding some opaque trim.
———————-
* A book which is a good reference, but exhausting to read, unless you replace every instance of “should” in it with”could”. The claim in the beginning that she is describing ideal housekeeping, and not prescribing it, are insufficient against the bulk and sense of the text.
Tuesday, May 5, 2020
Let's see
According to Power Line, only 83 of the 428 total deaths in Minnesota as of yesterday have been of people living outside of long-term care facilities.
At the same time, the official stance is that there could be 100 cases for every known positive. As of yesterday, that was 7234, with possibly as many as 80% of them outside long-term care. So maybe over 580,000 Minnesotans have already had it...that would almost 11% of the state's population.
But let's be conservative, and say that it is half that; 83 deaths divided by 290,000 cases would be a death rate of 0.03% (outside long-term care).
Some of those cases are people who recovered, but some cases are still in progress, and because the pandemic has still been spreading, the number that will die soon could be much larger than the number that already have died; I will make a guess of 1000 additional people here. That raises the death rate to 0.4%; about 21,300 (outside long-term care).
The epidemic in the long-term care facilities is basically separate. I guessed above that they were 1.5% of the population, or 81,000, but maybe it is only 1%. [EDITED TO ADD: It is under 1%.] Clearly their death rate is much higher than the general population, my guess at present would be 10%*. So say 8100 additional long-term-care deaths, for a total of 29,400.
The latest I've seen from the state's model, which they are supposedly running again this week, is a projection of about 22,000 deaths. The governor's orders don't exactly match the modeling assumptions, so this is probably too high.
Now, to make a more liberal estimate, 83 deaths divided by 580,000 cases would be a death rate of 0.01%. If I stay proportional to my earlier guess, and say that there maybe are 2000 additional infected people who will die soon, then the guess overwhelms the number of actual deaths, and I'm back to an estimate of a 0.4% death rate, and the same prediction for the state overall.
If I keep my guess at the same 1000 as before, then it would be a death rate of 0.2%, with total deaths of about 18,800.
These numbers partially confirm what my intuition has been telling me: some level of shutdown is helpful, but the state has been locked down too much for too long. Put more safeguards around the nursing homes, but most of the restrictions on the general population should be eased. People will still act according to their personal risk tolerance, which will do much to "flatten the curve" without any government action.
A couple of days ago, by the way, the health department representative when questioned revealed that 99.24% of the people who died had underlying health conditions. They're sitting on a lot of data that they're not sharing freely, and they are trying to get even more, legally or not.
That 580,000 is also the last number that I've heard for the number of unemployment applications in the state.
-----------------------------
* I noticed while writing that an estimate of a rate of 10%, for something that must be at least 1%, mathematically cannot be off by more than a factor of 10.
At the same time, the official stance is that there could be 100 cases for every known positive. As of yesterday, that was 7234, with possibly as many as 80% of them outside long-term care. So maybe over 580,000 Minnesotans have already had it...that would almost 11% of the state's population.
But let's be conservative, and say that it is half that; 83 deaths divided by 290,000 cases would be a death rate of 0.03% (outside long-term care).
Some of those cases are people who recovered, but some cases are still in progress, and because the pandemic has still been spreading, the number that will die soon could be much larger than the number that already have died; I will make a guess of 1000 additional people here. That raises the death rate to 0.4%; about 21,300 (outside long-term care).
The epidemic in the long-term care facilities is basically separate. I guessed above that they were 1.5% of the population, or 81,000, but maybe it is only 1%. [EDITED TO ADD: It is under 1%.] Clearly their death rate is much higher than the general population, my guess at present would be 10%*. So say 8100 additional long-term-care deaths, for a total of 29,400.
The latest I've seen from the state's model, which they are supposedly running again this week, is a projection of about 22,000 deaths. The governor's orders don't exactly match the modeling assumptions, so this is probably too high.
Now, to make a more liberal estimate, 83 deaths divided by 580,000 cases would be a death rate of 0.01%. If I stay proportional to my earlier guess, and say that there maybe are 2000 additional infected people who will die soon, then the guess overwhelms the number of actual deaths, and I'm back to an estimate of a 0.4% death rate, and the same prediction for the state overall.
If I keep my guess at the same 1000 as before, then it would be a death rate of 0.2%, with total deaths of about 18,800.
These numbers partially confirm what my intuition has been telling me: some level of shutdown is helpful, but the state has been locked down too much for too long. Put more safeguards around the nursing homes, but most of the restrictions on the general population should be eased. People will still act according to their personal risk tolerance, which will do much to "flatten the curve" without any government action.
A couple of days ago, by the way, the health department representative when questioned revealed that 99.24% of the people who died had underlying health conditions. They're sitting on a lot of data that they're not sharing freely, and they are trying to get even more, legally or not.
That 580,000 is also the last number that I've heard for the number of unemployment applications in the state.
-----------------------------
* I noticed while writing that an estimate of a rate of 10%, for something that must be at least 1%, mathematically cannot be off by more than a factor of 10.
Monday, May 4, 2020
Fine adjustments
I have been thinking about something from Cozy Minimalist Home which says that our furnishings should have both presence (style) and breathing room. That was why I was working recently on decorating and painting a cardboard box for the children's paper supply: the papers are in a very central position on the bookshelves, and without the box, they tended to spread widely.
The puff paint embossing worked out well, aside from the paint coming out of the bottles rather unevenly. I did have to wipe off and redo a few parts before it dried, because I smeared them while working on other parts. After it dried thoroughly, but before painting over it, I did a pencil rubbing, to see how the relief turned out. The paper stuck to the paint in a few places, but only slightly.
The whole thing got two coats of paint, with paint that I wanted to use up as the undercoat, and craft paint for the top coat. Dried and in place, the box does add style to that part of the room.
I also made one or two other small changes to the arrangement of things on the bookshelves, to help with the breathing room issue.
The puff paint embossing worked out well, aside from the paint coming out of the bottles rather unevenly. I did have to wipe off and redo a few parts before it dried, because I smeared them while working on other parts. After it dried thoroughly, but before painting over it, I did a pencil rubbing, to see how the relief turned out. The paper stuck to the paint in a few places, but only slightly.
The whole thing got two coats of paint, with paint that I wanted to use up as the undercoat, and craft paint for the top coat. Dried and in place, the box does add style to that part of the room.
I also made one or two other small changes to the arrangement of things on the bookshelves, to help with the breathing room issue.
Friday, May 1, 2020
House arrest continues
The governor extended the stay-at-home order until May 18, while allowing retail businesses to open up curbside service and delivery. Earlier this week, many non-retail businesses were allowed back to work.
The problem with opening businesses, is that their customers may or may not come back. And many businesses have other businesses as their customers.
The governor believes that Minnesota’s coronavirus peak has been delayed until late May or early June. I believe that it is likely to come a bit later than that, just because of the time needed for it to spread that widely. Even when things are opened up, people will still be doing a lot of social distancing.
The best analogy here is to the way that a fire spreads, by fits and starts, flaring up under some conditions, while barely smoldering under others. I have been wondering about computer models of fire spread. They are probably not very accurate either, because of the element of chance that must frequently come into play.
At present, they are doing more tests and finding more positives, but the ICU population is remaining just about flat, reflecting the fact that the worst cases are coming out of the nursing homes, and aren’t hanging on to life very long after hospitalization.
In any case, I finished up a household inventory this week, and we clearly have plenty of things that we can be doing at home. I sewed a baby sling from fabric that I was intending to use for quilt backing. I divided one hosta plant that really needed it, and moved another that was awkwardly situated in relation to the other plants.
I also used the legs of the coffee table as a frame for winding rug warp, for the little rug that is half woven. This time, I have real cotton rug warp yarn from the thrift store; I had a lot of trouble before with the crochet cotton breaking during weaving.
There are a number of little mending, maintenance, and repair jobs on my list. I have been making progress on those.
Finally, I have been looking for something in the house to paint, and noticed that the box holding the children’s paper supply could use some embellishment. My plan is to lay on a design with puff paint, and then to paint over it all.
The problem with opening businesses, is that their customers may or may not come back. And many businesses have other businesses as their customers.
The governor believes that Minnesota’s coronavirus peak has been delayed until late May or early June. I believe that it is likely to come a bit later than that, just because of the time needed for it to spread that widely. Even when things are opened up, people will still be doing a lot of social distancing.
The best analogy here is to the way that a fire spreads, by fits and starts, flaring up under some conditions, while barely smoldering under others. I have been wondering about computer models of fire spread. They are probably not very accurate either, because of the element of chance that must frequently come into play.
At present, they are doing more tests and finding more positives, but the ICU population is remaining just about flat, reflecting the fact that the worst cases are coming out of the nursing homes, and aren’t hanging on to life very long after hospitalization.
In any case, I finished up a household inventory this week, and we clearly have plenty of things that we can be doing at home. I sewed a baby sling from fabric that I was intending to use for quilt backing. I divided one hosta plant that really needed it, and moved another that was awkwardly situated in relation to the other plants.
I also used the legs of the coffee table as a frame for winding rug warp, for the little rug that is half woven. This time, I have real cotton rug warp yarn from the thrift store; I had a lot of trouble before with the crochet cotton breaking during weaving.
There are a number of little mending, maintenance, and repair jobs on my list. I have been making progress on those.
Finally, I have been looking for something in the house to paint, and noticed that the box holding the children’s paper supply could use some embellishment. My plan is to lay on a design with puff paint, and then to paint over it all.
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