Corona Daily 046: The Billionaire Boom

If extreme poverty is at one end of the spectrum, “extreme wealth” is at the other. The coronavirus pandemic has truly helped those belonging to that category. Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerburg and six American tech titans added $360 billon to their already extreme wealth, $1 billion every day.

FB Zuckerburg is worth more than $100 billion. Tesla’s Musk competes with Amazon’s Bezos for the first spot, usually decided by the moods of the stock market.

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In most countries, rich and poor, the unemployment rate now exceeds 15%. The pandemic has provided the biggest economic shock since the Great Depression. In the USA alone, 20.5 million Americans lost their jobs. Low wage earners, manual workers have been disproportionately affected, struggling for economic and emotional survival.

This has led some economists to talk of the “K shaped recovery”. The wealth of the rich and the extreme rich going up and the poor classes staring at a financial abyss.

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Even experts now assert that stock markets are completely divorced from reality. Covid-19 numbers and share prices are capable of reaching peaks at the same time. However, for the extreme billionaires, stock markets are always real. Why did their shares boom during the pandemic? Because you and me and everybody else was helping the super rich. Just six stocks; Amazon, Facebook, Netflix, Google, Microsoft, Apple were responsible for 60% of the market boom. Even those of us who are not Americans made increasing use of these brands.

Since 2014, tech stocks have dominated share markets. But the pandemic was an unforeseen gift for them. Work from home, online schools and universities (Google classrooms), bored people running marathon film sessions on Netflix, people ordering every little thing from Amazon, food delivery apps, and flourishing social media (WhatsApp owned by FB) meant we were all helping the extreme billionaires get richer every day.

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The total wealth of billionaires went from $8 trillion (twelve zeros after eight) to $13 trillion in twelve months.

The central banks of the world injected an unprecedented $9 trillion stimulus to save the economy. It is suspected most of this stimulus went into financial markets and from there into the pockets of the extreme billionaires.

Elon Musk is a special case. He is considered by some as a visionary hero who will make the world clean with his electric vehicles. The gullible young who invested in Bitcoin, succumbing to Musk’s tweets, consider him an evil manipulating genius. (Bill Gates’ wise advice: invest in Bitcoin only if you are richer than Elon Musk). Until the pandemic, Musk was never part of the top 10. Tesla’s share had lingered around $60 in 2019. During the pandemic, it rose 15 times, peaking at $900 a share; making Musk the world’s richest man. He then went and bought $1.5 billion worth of bitcoin, like going to a Gap store and buying a pair of jeans. Unlike Gates, Bezos and Zuckerburg; Elon Musk is eccentric and volatile. I suspect he can go down as rapidly as he went up.

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What do these ultra-rich need so much money for, is a question frequently asked by those who don’t have much money. In fact, it is often observed that the ability and willingness for charity are inversely proportional.

Bezos, accused of risking the lives of Amazon workers, donated $150 million (0.26% of the profits), Musk reportedly gave $5 million (0.004% of the wealth windfall) and a few dozen ventilators, Zuckerburg’s wife gave $104 million (0.36%) to support covid research, testing and treatment.

Bill Gates, known for his philanthropy, donated $1.75 billion (7.3%). Other noteworthy exceptions were McKenzie Scott, Bezos’s ex-wife and Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s CEO, who continue to donate substantial amounts.

Most other American extreme rich resorted to what is known as “zombie philanthropy”. They donate to trusts created and controlled by themselves. The money will stay in those trusts until the pandemic is over, and then be quietly taken back. It is the same with taxes. Most extreme rich are able to use their financial muscle to find enough loopholes to pay little or no taxes.

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I won’t blame those guys if they wish the pandemic to continue forever.

Ravi 

Corona Daily 047: The Case of the Naked Deer Men

Last Sunday, on 27 June, two grown men from Sydney decided to go sunbathing. This is winter time in Australia. Even temperatures of 15C can tempt people to go to a beach. The two unnamed men, (and it will soon be clear why they are not named) went to the beach, took off their clothes and lay in a state of nature, their eyes closed. They would have needed only a few hours to develop a nice darkish tan.

Except for the two naked Australians, the beach was empty. Eerily silent. In that silence, they both heard an unfamiliar sound. When they opened their eyes, they saw a deer darting in their direction. The startled men jumped to their feet. The younger naked man, 30, took his backpack which he was using as a pillow and ran for his life. The older naked man, 49, ran with just his t-shirt in his hand. Neither of them looked back. They kept running and entered a nearby forest. They stopped only once they were certain the deer was nowhere near.

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Not known if the nude dudes were aware they had entered the Royal National Park, some 25 miles from central Sydney. As can be expected of Australian forests, this park is a 15,000 hectare (37,000 acre) coastal stretch. The naked men spent the first hour trying to find each other. That proved impossible. Then they tried to find the way out. Their clothes and footwear were still lying far away on the beach where the deer had charged at them.

Unfortunately, the newspaper reports are stripped off many details. For example, were the two men wearing masks as required by the regulations?

At 6 pm, with the forest getting dark, the 30 year old called the police. Presumably, he had his cell phone in the backpack. He gave to the police the bare sequence of the events. When the police asked where they were, he replied he didn’t know where his friend was. Neither could he give his location.

The State Emergency Service of New South Wales deployed 18 members to assist with the search. The police rescue team, an NSW ambulance, and a Polair helicopter began the search. In an hour or so, they found the young caller, still in his birthday suit, near Lady Wakehurst Drive. Though nothing on him, he was carrying his backpack.

After a further search, they found the 49 year old man as well. The police statement says he was “partially clothed”, though the statement could have been more specific.

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Both men were taken to St George police station. Each was fined $1,000 Australian for the breach of lockdown orders that prohibit residents of greater Sydney from travelling outside the city. (It is noteworthy they were not fined for not wearing masks.)

Mick Fuller is the NSW police commissioner. At yesterday’s news conference, he described the incident and said “it was difficult to legislate against idiots.”

Only one journalist spoke in defence of the two men. “Running from a deer surely counts as strenuous physical exercise, and thus permissible under the stay at home orders.” Said ABC journalist Casey Briggs.

Australia is such a coronavirus-cautious country that a single Australian coughing is capable of throwing the entire state into lockdown. The Australian public is sick of listening to the daily bulletins giving the list of restrictions, the delta plus variant, absence of vaccines. They expressed their thanks to the naked men who ran from the deer and got lost in the forest. The public has demanded more such stories in the government’s daily broadcasts.

Ravi 

Corona Daily 048: Russia’s Booming Business

Tanya, the Russian doctor, read the serial number on the Sputnik V vial twice before entering it into the system. The scanned copies of the person’s passport and SNILS (individual insurance account number) were in the file. Tanya made sure they were accurately input.

That evening, Oleg, to whom that passport belonged, logged in to his medical portal account. He was delighted to see the information about his first shot of Sputnik V. The Russian government’s lovely software provides space for the vaccinated people to write comments in the portal on a daily basis. They can write any symptoms, allergic reactions, vaccine side effects. As per protocol, they should write 1, 2,3,7,14,21,22,23,28 and 42 days after the first dose. Any serious comment may automatically trigger a call from the doctor. Oleg wondered if he should write something there. Maybe: left arm sore. Head aching.

Finally, he decided against it. He was getting late to drive to the night club.

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Precisely three weeks later, Doctor Tanya, dressed in her uniform, once again was looking at copies of Oleg’s identity papers. She fed in the system the serial number of the vial in her hand. She verified the details in the system. This was the gentleman’s second shot. Having done her job, she poured out the vial. She then took out the next set of papers, and the next vial. There was nobody else in her room.

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Oleg, who lives in the south of Moscow, logged in the same evening, his heart in his mouth. In a business transaction there is never any guarantee the other party will perform as promised. Bravo! It was there. The certificate that said he was fully vaccinated with Sputnik V. There was an accompanying QR code. Now he would retain his job in the supermarket. He can enter any restaurant, club. If he really were to fall ill, he would have access to the free medical service.

The whole thing was worth paying 25,000 rubles for.

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Russia is battling with several pandemics. Despite suppressing covid-19 data, cases and deaths are surging dramatically. Moscow has reached new records this week. Putin has repeatedly said vaccines won’t be mandatory. He has never worn a mask, neither is there a picture of his getting vaccinated. His spokesman confirmed today that vaccination was not mandatory, not de facto nor de jure.

However, Moscow’s mayor has made vaccination mandatory for people working in trade and service industries. Employers must ensure at least 60% employees are vaccinated with first dose until 15 July, and second dose before 15 August. Many regions across Russia have introduced what is called a “voluntary mandatory vaccination”. Though it is not a crime, unvaccinated people can lose their jobs. They can’t go on vacations, because trains, flights, and hotels won’t accept unvaccinated Russians.

This has created a huge demand, and a booming black market, for the vaccination certificates.

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Initially, the vaccination certificates were available relatively cheaply in paper form. For up to 3000 rbls, they would be sent in envelopes home. A negative PCR coronavirus test results are even cheaper, and readily available.

But the Russian government is smarter. The electronic QR code will be needed even to enter a restaurant or a bar in Moscow. The brilliant Russian software engineers can easily forge QR codes to fool a waiter in a restaurant. But in other places, such as airlines, they may be allowed to verify the code in the central system.

The resourceful Russian black marketers have started creating what I would call “genuine fake vaccination certificates”. This online vaccination is accomplished by doing everything exactly as it would be done, except throwing the dose out rather than in the person’s arm.

Any simple Google or Yandex (Russian Google) search for “buying vaccination certificate” would direct a person to the messaging app Telegram and dozens of forums on Dark Net. Several investigative reporters posing as clients paid and obtained the vaccination certificates and the QR codes successfully. One reporter got a certificate saying he was vaccinated both times in Saratov, a town where he had never been in his life.

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Ravi 

Corona Daily 049: Nightmare Scenario

Next Tuesday, HarperCollins will publish a book “Nightmare Scenario”.  Written by two Washington Post journalists, Damien Paletta and Yasmeen Abutaleb, the book documents the behind-the-scenes panic over Trump’s covid-19 illness. Some excerpts and reviews of the book are out.

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On 1 October, Alex Azar, the health secretary, received a call from the White House requesting help with an experimental treatment “monoclonal antibody”. The drug was in clinical trials, not yet available to the public. Azar was not told who the drug was meant for. He speculated it was Trump’s advisor, Hope Hicks, who had tested positive.

A little later, Stephen Hahn, the FDA commissioner received a call. Could he please immediately sign off a “compassionate use authorization”? In life-threatening emergencies American doctors can apply to the FDA for unapproved medicines. But nobody directly calls the FDA commissioner. Hahn, just like Azar, did not know who the patient was.

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On the previous Saturday, 26 September, Trump had held a mask-less, distance-less party in the White House garden to announce Amy Barett as the Supreme Court Justice. The party had moved indoors. No mask was the unofficial policy. If the head of the house never wore a mask, how could others? Trump actually asked aides to take them off. In news conferences, he didn’t want any masked people behind him in the same frame.

On 27 September, Trump hosted military families at the White House. He complained to his security guards later. Why were they letting people get so close to him? “If these guys had covid, I’m going to get it, because they were all over me.” He said.

On 29 September, in the first debate with Biden, Trump was more incoherent than his usual self. By the following evening, he was terribly ill. His fever shot up, his oxygen level started falling, at one point dipping into the 80s. He was immediately given oxygen.

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Trump initially refused to go to the hospital. His aides gave him the two possible options: either he went that day while he could still walk on his own, or wait and let the TV cameras capture him in a wheelchair or stretcher. There is no easy way for the president to hide his condition.   

Few people in the White House knew the severity of Trump’s condition. Pence and his team were never informed the vice president may have to take up Trump’s job at short notice. By now, realizing who the exceptional patient was, Alex Azar and Stephen Hahn had authorized the unapproved drugs for compassionate use.

Trump was 74, never exercised, ate junk food, drank Coca-Cola and was medically obese. Ideal prey for the coronavirus.

After FDA’s sign-off, Trump was given an eight gram dose of two monoclonal antibodies through an intravenous tube. He was also given through IV the antiviral drug Remdesivir. (But not hydroxychloroquine, his pet). Remdesivir was in such short supply that ordinary Americans had no access to it.

On 3 October, on becoming worse, Trump was given dexamethasone. This is given when someone is extremely ill. Every hour, doctors consulted Fauci, Hahn and others whom Trump had openly hated, opposed and insulted.

The cocktail of medicines, available only to a single person on the planet, helped. Monoclonal antibodies proved to be a miracle.

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Fauci, Birx, Redfield and other health experts felt the illness was a blessing. The near-death experience would make the president change the course of his message. Now he would tell his millions of followers how dangerous the virus was. He could perhaps announce a mask mandate.

On his return, Trump faced the cameras from the balcony, and triumphantly pulled the mask off his face. He was heavily made up that morning, with additional orange colour added to his face. He made a military salute, and still contagious, entered his house without a mask.

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While reading the excerpts, I felt sorry the extraordinary, rare and expensive treatment which saved this undeserving man was not available to the 3 million+ victims of covid-19.

On the other hand, I am happy Trump didn’t die that week. America and the world needed his defeat and not death.

Ravi 

Corona Daily 050: Cosplay

The pandemic has revealed certain hobbies and professions I was not aware of. Cosplay is one of them. This Costume Play is about wearing costumes, make-up, hair-do to represent a certain character - from comic books, a cartoon, a television series or video games. (Homer Simpson, Mickey Mouse, Charlie Brown, Flintstones, Scooby-do, Pink Panther, Winnie the Pooh, superman, Spiderman, batman, Yogi Bear, Donald Duck are some names I can recognize with my limited knowledge). This phenomenon is big in Japan where it is called ‘Cosupure’. Japan has a cosplay culture, fans, competitions and championships.

The World Cosplay championship that began in 2005 is different from Halloween or fancy dressing. Cosplayers are trying to replicate a particular character. They are expected to mimic not only costume and make-up but also represent body language and mannerisms. Dressing up as Spiderman may not look attractive if the cosplayer’s body is not nimble, and he or she can’t move like a spider.

Costumes are available online, but in many cases they are custom-tailored. Costumes, props, wigs, hair dye, body paint, prop weapons and jewelry are often designed by the cosplayers themselves. Japan has two fan conventions every year, in summer and winter, where professional cosplayer models appear, at times giving short performances.

The best known event, the world cosplay summit, selects the best players from among forty countries. This event happens in Nagoya, Japan. The points are based on accuracy (how close the player looks to the character), craftsmanship (how well is the costume made), presentation (is the cosplayer” in character”) and audience impact.

Once the pandemic began, all these events were cancelled.

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Yaya Han is a Chinese American, a professional cosplayer for the past twenty years. She paid her bills and staff salaries with her event appearances. At the events, she would also sell signed merchandise, cosplay patterns, fabric and trims, and had three full-time employees to assist her. Suddenly, her income stream dried. On one hand, she was worried about her relatives in China, on the other the rising racist sentiment in the USA. Instead of firing her employees, she began sewing masks. In the early days of the pandemic, it was difficult to get the cotton fabric and elastic ties. Yaya and her team had ample materials and expertise to sew masks for the entire neighbourhood.

Yaya has also been appearing online. She has done a few modeling assignments.

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Some cosplayers found ways to meet in person. They found photographers who could play tricks with modern cameras. Chuang, a Chinese American photographer, arranged multiple socially-distanced photo shoots. By shooting with a long lens, he could photograph characters keeping six feet distance but the photos showed them next to each other.

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Marie Chante Ramos has cosplay as a passionate hobby. But she works full time as an ICU nurse. In her New Jersey hospital, she began doing night shifts. It was stressful to see people they were treating die every day. Ironically, Marie was wearing a PPE costume which was never before part of any cosplay.

To relieve the stress, Marie found fellow cosplayers in the health industry. They formed a chat group. She told the chat, “Wouldn’t it be cool if we did a video in our PPE garb?” Patients and the public saw them as faceless health robots. Along with twenty-two other cosplaying nurses, Marie created a video called “Heroes behind the PPE”. It already has half a million views.

“I liked being able to shine some light on these health care professionals who also have a creative side.” Said Marie. “The hospital is not the only thing going on in our lives.”

Ravi 

Corona Daily 051: On the Recovery Road

Throughout the pandemic, I have been running a private research, just for myself. I ask the self-employed, my businessmen friends, restaurant owners, carpenters, taxi drivers, shopkeepers what their recovery has been like. Usually they give a percent figure. Last year, when lockdowns were strict, the percent never went beyond 30%. Now the luckier ones talk about 50%. Only a single friend, a sales manager for a medical equipment company said their sales have grown 250%. He has been working day and night, trying to meet the demand.

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Yesterday, YELP has published in a formal manner similar data for the USA. Yelp is a San Francisco company that is a data king. It publishes crowd-sourced reviews about restaurants and other businesses. There are more than 200 million reviews on its business listing pages. Recovery of consumer interest can be measured by counting the actions consumers take to connect with businesses on Yelp: the number of time a page is viewed, photos or reviews posted. If reviews for a certain restaurant suddenly double, it is safe to assume its business is recovering well. In this research Yelp analysed millions of data points across 1200 categories in all 50 American states.

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One big danger of the growth numbers you see in 2021 is that they are compared to the lockdown period of the previous year. The April-June quarter in particular was so abnormally depressed last year; that year-on-year numbers in April-June 2021 for anything will look rosy to miraculous. That growth number can be fallacious.

To avoid that pitfall, Yelp studied consumer actions in three periods: (1) Pre-pandemic: March-May 2019 (2) The onset of the pandemic: March through May 2020 and (3) the start of recovery: March through May 2021. The 2019 pre-pandemic period is used as a baseline, with the 2019 data expressed as 100%. Below, in brackets are the 2021 percent as compared to 2019 (and not 2020).

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After a dramatic drop in 2020, American restaurants have now bounced back to 86% of 2019. Food business recovered to 92%. People are less worried about in-person dining as well as shared food experiences. Conveyer belt sushi (97%), tapas (82%), hot pot (75%), dim sum (84%) have rebounded. Buffets, not surprisingly, have recovered only 52%.

While this is happening, people can’t give up the lockdown addiction of home orders. Food delivery services are 189% compared to 2019.

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Americans are out for revenge shopping. Personal savings level is at their highest since the 1960s. Consumer interest in shopping is almost complete, it is 92%.

Shoes (79%), jewelry (88%) and clothing (76%) are doing well. As far as shopping venues are concerned, antiques (100%), flea markets (94%), vintage shops (87%) and charity shops (101%) have reached the consumer interest levels of 2019.

Home service professionals are in high demand, partly because of workspace in houses that needs maintenance or upgrading. Consumer interest in carpenters (151%), handyworkers (147%), plasterboard (147%), refinishing (133%), and tiling (132%) is booming, surpassing pre-pandemic levels. The heated housing market in the USA has completed recovery for real estate agents (104%) and mortgage brokers.

Many Americans are presumably planning to return to offices. Shoe repair (77%) and watch repair (99%) services suddenly surged in the past three months. While childcare services (71%) are slowly recovering, the demand for pandemic pet care has grown as shown by interest in pet sitting (114%), and pet boarding (121%).

With people itching to leave houses, interest in campervan dealers (125%), motorcycle dealers (126%), and used car dealers (110%) presents a picture of America on the road.

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In terms of geography, Idaho, Wyoming and South Dakota (110%) are the leaders in recovery. Florida (98%), Georgia (91%) and Texas (91%) are getting there.

Washington DC (54%), New York (63%) and Massachusetts (71%) are the laggards. They have densely populated metro areas, and lingering pandemic restrictions.

I must point out that the Yelp report data is about consumer interest, not necessarily consumer action. That is measured by actual purchases of goods and services. However, consumer interest is a good indication of the direction of the recovery graph. It shows that the American consumer sentiment is optimistic again.

Ravi 

Corona Daily 052: Where Do You Get Your News From?

Where do we learn about the crime stories from our city, the latest lockdown restrictions, local and global politics? My parents, in their eighties, watch Indian TV channels and read two mainstream local newspapers. My wife reads an English language newspaper, and uses WhatsApp. I digitally subscribe to a few newspapers, but read them in a non-linear fashion. My 17-year old daughter gets news on her mobile before anybody else in our family does.

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Based on data from six continents and 46 countries, the Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2021 was published yesterday. It tells us how the coronavirus pandemic has quickened earlier trends. The pandemic shook the news industry, particularly printed newspapers. Initially the lockdowns severely restricted their distribution. More worrying was their loss of advertising revenue. There have been large scale layoffs in the news industry. In the USA, sixty local news organizations were shut off. Free sheets like Metro or the Standard in London have lost 40% of their income. New business models ask readers to subscribe, take membership or donate. These attempts have been unsuccessful in replacing the lost ad revenue.

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 The good news for traditional media is that the trust gap between news media and social media has grown. TV channels like BBC news inspire trust in their viewers. Trust levels vary. Finland has the highest overall trust in the news (65%), and USA has the lowest (29%). After 2016, the US news media experienced a Trump bump, now it is replaced by a Trump slump. Both Fox News and CNN have lost large number of viewers. (Biden is boring).

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Young people and people with low level of education use social media as their source of news. TikTok now reaches 24% of under-35s, many of them using the platform for news.

Generation Z (18-24) has little connection to newspapers, websites or news apps. They get their news from social media, aggregators (Google news, Apple news) or mobile alerts. Mobile aggregators play little role in the Western countries, but are strong in India, Indonesia, South Korea and Thailand. AI-powered apps like Daily Hunt, Smart News, Naver, and Line Today are important sources of discovering news.

Most young people across the world feel they are not fairly represented in mainstream media. There is little coverage of the issues they care about. That is why they embrace social media. They neither pay money nor attention to the media that is unfair and uninteresting for them.

Online newspaper subscribers tend to be more educated, richer and older. As a rule, nobody under 40 digitally subscribes to a newspaper.

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Overall, the leading channel of misinformation is Facebook (28%), followed by news websites (17%), WhatsApp (15%), Twitter (6%) and YouTube (6%). In India, Brazil, Indonesia, South Africa and Nigeria, WhatsApp is the big culprit. Its closed, encrypted nature prevents fact-checkers from spotting the origin. UK and USA cite Facebook as the prime worry for misinformation.

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Smartphone dependence has grown during lockdowns. Now 73% access news via smartphones. Mobile phones are rapidly replacing laptops and desktops. In the pandemic, government has further boosted smartphone use for covid messages and vaccine appointments. In the UK, the computer-smartphone gap has grown to 25 points. In the past ten years, computer use fell from 67% to 43%. Smartphone use went up from 29% to 68% in the same period.

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When asked about their motivation, people said Twitter was good to access and debate news. Facebook was used for other reasons. Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok are seen as fun and time-killers. YouTube users were looking for alternative perspective on the news.

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Aggregators like Google news or Apple news simply take you to links. Some journalists still have to create original content. If nobody under forty is interested in reading news in the mainstream media, printed newspapers have another fifty years to live.

Ravi 

Corona Daily 053: Unhappy Birthday to You

Since last March, there is another epidemic taking place – that of academic studies and research papers. Since we live in emergency times, every researcher is keen to come up with creative ideas, test them quickly, and get a paper published. Normally, reputed science journals insist on greater scrutiny and peer reviews. Not any more. Just like drugs and vaccines, research papers are granted emergency authorizations.

Many studies, though of little practical relevance, are highly amusing. A paper published on 17 September 2020 described the effect of singing and talking on the spread of covid-19. Twelve volunteer singers, including seven professional opera singers (2 basses, 1 baritone, 2 altos, and 2 sopranos) were invited. I presume the researchers as well as the opera singers were out of work. The researchers, who were from Sweden’s Lund university, observed the trajectory of aerosols emitted by the twelve singers singing different songs. During the tests, singers sang into a funnel. The aerosol particles were measured at the other end of the funnel.

At the beginning of every epidemic, scientists ask people to wash their hands thoroughly. To time the hand washing with soap, you are expected to sing the ‘happy birthday’ song in full.

The September study discovered that the happy birthday song can cause wider transmission, because the lyrics are heavy on consonants, and the hard Ps and Bs send more droplets into the air.

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 Compared to that entertaining study, the paper published this week is serious and clever. In an intelligent way, it investigates what might have happened in three million American households without entering a single house.

The researchers gathered private health insurance data from nearly 3 million households in the USA. The data included the birthdates of everyone in the house. This was the first data point.

They also collected the administrative health care data giving the covid-19 positive test records. The time frame was 1 January to 8 November 2020. This was another data point.

This large scale study was approved by authorities for waiver of informed consent. The data was de-identified, meaning researchers knew only code numbers and not the names of the individuals.

The two data points, birthdays and the covid-19 positive tests were studied together to see if there was any correlation between them.

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The data analysis revealed that in counties with high rate of transmission, households were 30% more likely to test covid positive within two weeks after someone had a birthday. In households where a child’s birthday occurred, the incidence was even higher. Out of 10,000 people, almost 6 excessive positive tests were found within two weeks of an adult’s birthday, and nearly 16 excessive positive cases after a child’s birthday.

In formal settings, such as corporate or political meetings, people take more precautions, with masks and distance. However, when we are with our close family or friends in an informal setting, our guard is down. It is harder to imagine our infecting our own family members.

The world has been focused on mass gatherings, crowds and superspreader events. This study showed that even under strict lockdown conditions, a large number of American families was secretly celebrating birthdays, particularly kids’ birthdays. After the child blew out the candles spreading aerosols on the large cake, the family and friends sang the happy birthday song with its hard Ps and Bs, completely contaminating the room.

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From a researcher’s viewpoint the beauty of the birthdate is that everyone has one. In places where infections are still raging, people will do well to read this research paper. That should hopefully stop them from arranging a secret birthday party during a red-level lockdown.

Ravi 

Corona Daily 054: How will the Covid Pandemic End? When? Part Final

Today, I come to the most exciting part of the pandemic forecasting exercise – predicting the precise date when the pandemic ends. By ending I mean social ending, with no masks, no social distancing, crowded bazaars and trains, and traffic jams. There will still be a few cases and deaths, but they will not be front page news. Remember, 20,000 people died of respiratory diseases (flu and pneumonia) EVERY DAY in 2019. The official daily covid-19 figure has never surpassed that count.

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WHO says the pandemic won’t end unless 70% of the global population is vaccinated. Considering that 30% of global population (younger than 16) doesn’t yet have a vaccine developed for them, this is a gloomy forecast. WHO is probably thinking of eradicating the disease.

Dr Fauci predicts that 75-80% vaccination would allow America enough herd immunity to exit the pandemic before 2021 ends.

Renowned Indian astrologer Bejan Daruwalla projected the pandemic’s end in May 2021. But one year before verifying it, he died of suspected covid in May 2020.

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From my reading, I can recommend two sources that have done serious work on the subject.

One is an article by McKinsey & company dated 26 March 2021. Based on seven variables, the company predicts the pandemic will end in the UK and USA in the second quarter of this year, EU in the third quarter and the rest of the world in 2022.

The other source is an academic paper by a group of computer engineers from Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Ethiopia. Their “covid-19 pandemic prediction study” is based on machine learning models. The model uses ARIMA and SARIMA, which are not the names of Egyptian queens, but acronyms. ARIMA is AutoRegressive Integrated Moving Average. S in SARIMA is Seasonal.

For some odd reason, if you love reading papers with tables and formulas, you may want to read their two papers, one published in October 2020 and another in April 2021. Their projected pandemic end dates are November 2021 for USA, India, Europe, UK, and September 2021 for Brazil. Unfortunately, after their April paper, severe waves happened in India and Brazil. They made the predictions unrealistic, certainly for those two countries. The Saudi-Egyptian model ignores vaccination levels.  

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My method is a simplified one. I have assumed a bell curve (remember normal distribution?) where the virus after peaking, declines in a symmetrical fashion so that the peak is exactly in the centre of the bell curve. (Since all models can go wrong, simple is better than complex).

I give here the dates of peak cases and peak deaths for nine countries. The last column is the latest vaccination data until yesterday. First figure is the % receiving at least one shot, second % fully vaccinated. (If you are number-immune, you may jump to the next table.)

Source: Worldometer	Peak cases (date)	Peak deaths (date)	Vaccination % (one shot/fully)
World	902,022(23 Apr 21)	17,498(20 Jan 21)	Negligible
USA	305,067(8 Jan 21)	4,463 (12 Jan 21)	53/45
Brazil	98,135 (18 Jun 21)	4,211 (6 Apr 21)	30/11
India	414,433 (6 May 21)	4,930 (15 May 21)	16/3.6
Russia	29,935 (24 Dec 20)	635 (24 Dec 20)	14/11
UK	67,808 (8 Jan 21)	1,823 (20 Jan 21)	65/47
France	58,581 (6 Nov 20)	932 (13 Nov 20)	48/25
Germany	32,546 (14 Apr 21)	1,244 (29 Dec 20)	51/31
Poland	35,246 (1 Apr 21)	954 (8 Apr 21)	43/29

 

(Note: Brazil has reached another peak this week. We don’t yet know when Brazil will peak. Russia’s figures are not trustworthy. Both cases and deaths peaked in December, but the curve was suspiciously flat after that and is now growing. Russians don’t trust vaccines either. Only 14% have opted to take a shot despite plenty of supply. Germany is an anomaly in that the deaths peaked in December, but cases had another surge in April.)

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Taking the peaks from the table above as the mid-point between the first case and the pandemic ending, I get the following pandemic end-dates.

	First Case	Peak	End date
World	1 Dec 2019	23 April 2021	16 October 2022
USA	22 Jan 2020	8 Jan 2021	25 Dec 2021
Brazil	26 Feb 2020	18 June 2021	10 October 2022
India	30 Jan 2020	6 May 2021	12 August 2022
Russia	31 Jan 2020	24 Dec 2020	17 Nov 2021
UK	31 Jan 2020	8 Jan 2021	16 Dec 2021
France	24 Jan 2020	6 Nov 2020	19 Aug 2021
Germany	27 Jan 2020	14 April 2021	1 July 2022
Poland	4 March 2020	1 April 2021	28 April 2022

 

There you have the joyful dates: Christmas 2021 for the UK and USA. 12 August 2022 for India. I am more confident about dates for these three countries than others. There may be additional waves. As long as they don’t alter the peak; the end date should not change much. This assumes the weakening of the virus severity because of the ‘self-limiting’ nature, natural immunity and vaccination.

If your country is missing from the table here, find the date of the first case (Wikipedia), the peak (worldometer), and calculate the end date taking the peak as the mid-point. The result would be more scientific than an astrologer’s prediction.

Ravi