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COVID-19 Contact Tracing Training

I finished the COVID-19 contact tracing course from Johns Hopkins online last Friday. This Monday morning I was surprised to find an article in Wired by a journalist who has taken the same class, an article in the New York Times on the huge numbers of people who have applied to become contact tracers, and the MIT Technology Review had both an item on why contact tracing may be a mess in the U.S., and a piece on what it is like to be a contact tracer.

Sonofagun. Sandbagged by a zeitgeist.

The class was easy but contact tracing is not. When I started taking the class, I thought it might be a nice way to volunteer and do my bit in the pandemic crisis. But as I began to learn what a contact tracer does, I began to have doubts that I am tough enough to be a one. If an opportunity arises, I’ll give it a try, but I am not nearly as confident that I can help as I was before I took the class.

Washington State already has a robust contact tracing program in place. Close to 1400 tracers have been trained. Most are from public health services. Around 400 come from the state Department of Licensing which has been idled by the virus, another 350 are National Guard volunteers. I may still have an opportunity to volunteer because experts estimate 30 contract tracers are needed per 100,000 population, in other words, our state may need another 850 tracers. However, an arthritic C++ coder with no background in healthcare is not likely to be among the best candidates.

Contact tracing has been used for centuries for controlling infectious diseases. Recent victories over the Ebola, SARS, and MERSA epidemics are the result of contact tracing. Social distancing slows the spread, but contact tracing defeats epidemics.

Essentially, contact tracers question each person with COVID-19, discover whom they could have infected, phone each of these, warn them that they could contract the virus, and ask them to stay home until the danger that they will infect others stops.

A number of things make contact tracing a tough job. Sometimes, a contact tracer is the first to tell a victim that they have tested positive. Asking someone to stay home from work and away from their family is hard. Tracers also warn victims of symptoms like shortness of breath, chest pain, or turning blue (yes turning blue) that mean they may die soon if they do not get help immediately. Some people will need help getting food, paying bills, and getting child or parent care. None of this is fun.

COVID-19 has some nasty characteristics. Each infected person appears to infect 2-3 others, some estimates are higher. Hence the soaring number of cases and deaths in just a few months. At present, evidence shows that a person can infect others from 2 days before they get sick. The danger continues until they are well. If you are exposed to COVID-19, it can take as long as 2 weeks for symptoms to appear. In other words, you are a threat to others and should quarantine for two weeks after you are exposed.

Perhaps the scariest part is that you may never show symptoms and still pass the disease to others. Remember the Typhoid Mary story? She was a cook who had typhoid, but no symptoms. She refused to quarantine and continued to spread typhoid, leaving a trail of misery and death. This is why we should all wear masks when we are out and about and close to others. The mask prevents you from becoming a COVID-19 Typhoid Mary.

One of the reasons I feel compelled to volunteer is that the virus is so deadly. Best estimates are that people infected with COVID-19 die 2 to 3 times more often than flu victims. The flu kills 12 to 60 thousand Americans each year. And that’s with a vaccine. COVID-19 has killed over 90,000 in 4 months. Early on, it was said that the virus doesn’t affect children, but cases have turned up in which children get severely sick and a few have died. There is some evidence that death rates increase where more people are infected. That is, in ten square miles where 100 people are infected, 2 or 3 may die, but in the same area where 10 times as many are infected, many more than 20 to 30 die. We have to stop the spread of COVID-19.

As is to be expected in 2020, a robust contact tracing plan is accompanied with a haze of vicious misinformation. Isolation and quarantine, contrary to what is being said in some circles, is not mandatory. A National Guard volunteer may call you, but they are calling to trace your contacts, not to force you into quarantine. If asked, quarantine yourself to protect your family, friends, and neighbors from misery and death from the virus. But no one will force you to do the right thing. The information collected by a contact tracer is confidential like health records in your doctor’s office and your name will not be passed to your contacts.

This is the way contact tracing is done in a free democracy. Places under authoritarian regimes force victims to stay inside at gun point and publicly shame them. Not here.

On the other hand, for the time being, the authoritarians are doing much better than we are against the virus. They will be glad to take over if a free nation can’t handle COVID-19.

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Online Training For Covid-19

We are in trouble. Folks are dying. Washington State, thankfully, has a bit better control of COVID-19 than most states, but the death toll is bad. As I write this, 870 are dead in Washington State, nearly 75,000 nationally. In the U.S., unemployment is the highest its been since the Great Depression in my grandparents’ day.

On top of the pandemic, Intalco appears to be closing

I remember when Intalco was built. Neighbors who struggled on twenty-acre dairy farms shipping a few cans of Grade B milk, took a leap and got good jobs when Intalco opened. But I’m afraid that’s over. They used to say Intalco came for the cheap hydroelectricity, but Amazon, Microsoft, and Google data centers are the high profit hydro users now.

Businesses that were sound in January are up on the jacks today. Whole industries, like restaurants, airlines, and retail department stores, are severely curtailed and on the verge of failure. Even if a treatment or vaccine for the novel coronavirus appears tomorrow, a share of these enterprises will never return.

On the other hand, many online businesses, from Amazon on down, are thriving. I’ve seen numbers from the grocery and big box stores that look good. I notice that yards here in Ferndale look better tended today than they did this time last year.

Not everything is bleak

There are opportunities out there. Not the same ones as last year or the year before, but the breaks are waiting, and some people will find them and come out of this meat grinder better off than they were before they ever heard of a coronavirus. Like those struggling Grade B dairymen.

I know something you can do today

Level up. Improve your skills. Whatcom County Public Library System offers some very high-quality help. With a WCLS library card you can access Lynda.com courses.

These are the real thing. Premium LinkedIn subscribers pay close to thirty dollars a month for access to these courses and businesses pay even more to make them available to their employees. The library offers them to you for free. I was glad to pay for several of these courses myself before I realized I could get them on my library card. All you have to do is go to WCLS.org, click on the Digital Resources tab, then click on Lynda.com. Enter your library card number and pin, then choose which course to take first.

Some of the courses are just fun: Ukulele, for example. But some are very serious.

Construction trades

I happen to be an over-educated and snobbish intellectual, but it annoys me that American culture is obsessed with college degrees. At one point in my rambling life, I became a carpenter, going through a four-year formal apprenticeship with both on-the-job and classroom training. Having experienced both higher and trade education, I know that a trade is nothing to sniff at. I learned at least as much in my apprenticeship as I did in four years of college. I display my journeyman’s certificate right beside my college diplomas.

If a construction trade in the post-COVID-19 building boom sounds interesting, Lynda.com has a course for you: Skilled Trades: Construction Apprenticeship Foundations. It offers up-to-date and realistic lessons on choosing a trade and finding an apprenticeship.

Online business

Do you have, or work in, a business that is struggling under lockdowns? Consider putting the business online.

The opportunities for local online businesses have never been better. The pandemic has forced people to shop more online, but you don’t have to hand your local customers to the biggies.

Here’s a software industry insider tip: Google recently changed its shopping search algorithm to favor local online businesses over Amazon and Walmart. And I’ll bet your customer neighbors want to buy from you.

Setting up a Shopify online storefront is not hard or expensive. The no frills route is almost entirely financed by a 2% cut taken on each sale with little upfront investment. Lynda.com has a course for you: Learning Shopify. You could get your online business running in less than a week.

Want to learn how to set up and hold a Zoom meeting? Check out Learning Zoom.

Thinking about jumping to the front of the curve? UC-Berkeley instructor, Dr. Jonathan Reichental’s course, Introduction to Quantum Computing, will put you waaaay out there.

Yes. May 2020 is bleak. But the library is ready to help you make it better.

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Living with Screens During Lockdown

In the covid-19 pandemic, everyone has entered my world of working from home, online meetings, and spending most of both night and day in in front of a screen. In my career as a software architect, I worked regularly with online teams spread over every continent but Antarctica. The last decade of my career, I worked from our old farmhouse on Waschke Road most of the time. Since I’ve retired, I spend as much time writing in my home office as I did when I was gainfully employed.

I have some advice on how to be comfortable and even enjoy the online screen life. Mind you I am not a physician, ophthalmologist, or physical therapist, only an opinionated coder, but you might find some of my suggestions useful.

First, let me say that everyone is different. The saying is that “your mileage may vary” and I have found that my mileage usually varies widely. For me, when it comes to wellbeing, it works better to experiment than to find an expert’s rule and stick with it. So, this is my first suggestion: try different strategies; pay close attention to how you feel, both physically and mentally. Go with whatever makes you feel the best, but try reasonable strategies as they occur to you. Also be aware that change is constant. What worked well yesterday may not be optimal today. A tiny pain can turn into a screaming wildcat in a short time.

The most important consideration for me is my eyes. I think there is a good reason for this. We live in a three-dimensional world and our eyes are designed (or evolved, if you will) to move constantly, continually refocusing on objects at different distances, and adjusting to different colors and intensities of light. Screens are flat and most of the time they are at a fixed distance from our eyes. The intensity and color of the screen stays the roughly the same. Our bodies are simply not made for this fixed environment. We have to compensate.

I have found that if I take care of my eyes when I am online, the rest of my body tends to take care of itself. That doesn’t mean that I intentionally ignore the recommendations of the ergonomic experts, but I find that when I take care of my eyes properly, the rest of the ergonomic rules fall in place and I can quickly adapt to changing circumstances, like a new piece of furniture or moving to a different room without looking at charts and getting out a tape measure.

Now for some bullet points:

  • Frequently look away from the screen and into the distance. It helps to be near a window with some action outside. There are apps available that remind you to look away every few minutes, but I personally can’t abide those bonking timers. The antics of the crows, seagulls, and assorted avians outside my window works much better for me. I also like a room with some visual interest—like shelves of familiar books and other memorabilia (clutter).
  • I avoid using a laptop for any length of time. Put your laptop on a stand (or a stack of books) and get an external keyboard.
  • Position your screen so that you are looking at the upper third of the display with your neck in an unstrained position and at a proper distance. That’s about two feet for most people. I have three pairs of glasses. One pair for screen distance, one pair for reading, which is closer for me than screen distance, and a pair of lineless bifocals. For me, the bifocals are a disaster for serious reading or screen work. The area of lens that is the right focus is too small and forces me into contortions. But they are great for normal life.
  • Invest in the highest resolution monitor you can afford. I find hi-res much more important than size. I like using a twenty-two-inch display and I’ve thought about getting an even larger one, but forced to choose between resolution and size, I feel better after a long day with a hi-res screen.
  • Position lighting carefully. I find having my desk perpendicular to a north facing window with the window on the left to be perfect. If I were left-handed, I’d want it to the right, so my dominant hand does not cast shadows when I am writing by hand. I seldom print anything, but I like to draft and plan on paper. Facing a window is not bad, but it places the screen in a shadow, which is not ideal. A window behind me is a disaster because glare on the screen is straining and forces body contortions.
  • Avoid too much blue in your screens. On Windows 10, you can change the color balance in the “night light” settings and turn on the night light all the time. But remember to turn it off when you are shopping online, or you’ll be surprised at colors when they arrive.
  • Give yourself opportunities to move. I use three different computers and switch between them. One on a normal desk, another set up for standing, and a third on a lap board in an easy chair. In the course of the day, I use all three. I use Dropbox to keep my working files in sync so I can switch from one computer to another without messing around with copying files or thumb drives.
  • An adjustable office chair with good lumbar support helps. You can spend thousands of dollars on a luxurious ergo chair, but I like one I bought at Ikea. I prefer chairs without arms.
  • As far as I am concerned, the best keyboards were made by IBM in the 1980s. My favorite keyboard is over thirty years old and still the best.

This covers the most important stuff. I still put in long days in my home office, but I have fewer aches and pains today than I had ten years ago.

However, I repeat: your mileage will vary.