COVID-19

Supply Chain Management in a Time of Crisis

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GE Healthcare, which is ramping up ventilator production, is using 3-D printing both to make parts directly and to make molds for injection molding.  However, the chief engineer for advanced manufacturing at Healthcare says that some of the 3D-printing companies he has been talking to are shut down due to government edicts that deemed their work nonessential.

It sounds like they will get around this barrier…“We have a map of all the companies that have excess capacity, and so we’ll divert whatever print work we need to whatever company has got the ability right now, on top of the equipment we have at GE”…but I expect that there is going to be a lot of this sort of thing. There is no way that local or state officials can understand the supply chain dependencies that exist between a seemingly-minor local business and a major national priority somewhere up a level or two (or more) in the product structure. In some cases, all it might take is a letter from the top-tier manufacturer certifying the importance of the work the supplier is doing, but in many cases I suspect that the only rapid solutions will require Federal involvement.

Madness and Maddow

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The Navy hospital ships promised by President Trump to deploy to New York and Los Angeles arrived on-station as ordered a few days ago. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, presumed for some obscure-to-me reason to be associated with the provision of news to the public, and most recently famed through peddling Russian conspiracy theories regarding Trump’s election for the past three years, had ridiculed the President’s proposed schedule as “nonsense. ” She, or whatever pronoun she goes by, had loudly and publicly claimed that it would be “weeks” before the hospital ships arrived. Instead, the hospital ships arrived more or less to schedule. A lesser news-person would have the decency to be embarrassed over how transparent a prediction-flop this was. Not this Maddow person, it appears. This is not a good thing, and not for the reason first assumed. PBS’ Yamiche “Rolie-Polie-Olie” Alcindor baldly admitted, and in nicer words, that the name of the game for the national establishment news media is “Get Trump!” and anything goes, fair or foul (mostly foul) will serve that end. Well, really those of us who have been paying attention, especially for the last decade and a half (or longer) have known very well that the name of the game as far as the establishment national news media is concerned, is to enthusiastically smear Republicans and their conservative supporters (no matter how mild or harmless) the pretext, and to excuse Democrats and their supporters, no matter how vile the offense and actions. Nothing new here, move along. SSDD, as we used to say in my active duty days. (Same sh*t, Different Day.)

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Signs of the Times

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6 feet
 
unavailable
 
UPS driver
 
power grabs

One Million Health Care Workers

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As I was driving to work today I heard on Bloomberg that presidential candidate Andrew Cuomo requested a million health care workers to help with the crisis in New York. “A million!” I said to myself in my car.

I looked at the population of New York City and it looks like there are around 8.5 million people there, where most of the problems are. Lets say ten million to make the math easy. So one health care worker per ten patients, assuming every single person in New York City gets sick. Really?

Where would you put them all? Aren’t most of the hotels closed? That would be importing a city the size of San Jose or Austin into New York. Of course it is stupid, so my question is why does Cuomo say something like this?

“A Fresh Perspective on the Covid-19 Numbers”

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Robert Prost emails:

I wanted to share with you, my take on the corona virus situation in the United States.
 
But first, a brief introduction. I am professor emeritus at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee.
 
I have a PhD in Biophysics and spent my career in MRI-based research, mostly on brain tumors.
 
I check the Johns Hopkins’ website every day for the progress of the epidemic and I had a feeling about the numbers I’ve been seeing.
 
The website: https://www.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda7594740fd40299423467b48e9ecf6 is very good.
 
The daily case number totals can be extracted by mousing over each plotted point in the graph in the lower right hand corner of the screen.
 
The curve at first looks daunting, it seems to be shooting straight up. But being at least in part a mathematician, I wondered about the velocity of this upward move in cases.
 
If the velocity was going up, the epidemic would be accelerating, the epidemic would be worsening. If going down, it would be getting better (slowing).
 
So I plotted the data and took the first derivative with respect to time. What it shows is that the velocity of the epidemic in the US is definitely slowing, and quickly.
 
While the number of confirmed cases continues to rise, it is rising more slowly. If there were a confounding effect from increased surveillance (more testing revealing yet more cases), the apparent velocity should be going up.
 
Instead, it is going down. So I believe the effect to be real, and thus I believe we are witnessing the beginning of the end of the epidemic. While this data says nothing about the potential for re-emergence in the fall or following spring, it does suggest that we have in fact, flattened the curve.

US Covid-19 Cases and Rate of Change

UPDATE: A follow-up email from Robert is posted here.