Tag: covid19

~ Chris Wolverton

Today I installed Zotero on my newly-refreshed system. It had a bit of work to do to download and sync references in my library, but it didn’t seem to sweat too bad while it was doing it. I’m still sticking with the semi-automated way of adding references by DOI using the ‘Add Item by Identifier’ button on the toolbar after copying the DOI (in text) from the article page. This seems to work great, even better in some ways than using a bookmarklet or extension, which is still not well supported in the new version of Safari. 

A while back I read about how to use a CO2 sensor to estimate the air exchange rate in a room. So I bought their recommended sensor, the Aranet4, and set it up in one of the teaching labs for last Thursday and today’s afternoon sessions. I am really surprised and impressed at the lack of change in CO2 levels in the lab during a lab session. At no point did it go above 600 ppm, and most of the time it stayed in the 400’s, indicating a very high rate of air exchange in the room.

Graph of CO2 (ppm) as a function of time. Yellow highlights were periods in which the room was occupied by 8 students.

Finally coming around?

~ Chris Wolverton

Apoorva Mandavilli writing at The NY Times:

As many as 25 percent of people infected with the new coronavirus may not show symptoms, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warns — a startlingly high number that complicates efforts to predict the pandemic’s course and strategies to mitigate its spread.

I’m not sure what’s taken the C.D.C. so long to realize this, I saw the same reports weeks ago coming out of research in China, South Korea, and Vo, Italy. This is the Achilles Heel in our current approach to dealing with this virus, and I’m afraid we won’t move past it until we have widespread testing.