A brief glossary of COVID-19 words and jargon

The COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic has introduced a whole host of new words, phrases and concepts into our daily vocabulary. Most of us know what most of them mean, but just for interest here is as quick glossary of some of those new phrases and jargon:

• COVID-19 - this is the name of the infectious disease that infected people suffer from, not the name of the virus itself. It is short for coronavirus disease 2019. 
• SARS-CoV-2 - this is the (rarely-used) name of the actual virus that spreads COVID-19. It is an acronyms for severe acute respiratory sydrome coronavirus 2. Why the COVID-19 disease is not therefore called SARS2 is a bit of a mystery to me - the 2003 SARS epidemic (which was spread by the SARS-CoV virus) was just called SARS, after all - but that's just how it happened. In the early phases of the epidemic (and even now), it was often referred to as simply "novel coronavirus", and often used interchangeably with COVID-19.
• Coronavirus - this is the general name for a family of viruses that cause diseases in mammals and birds, usually manifesting as respiratory tract disease in humans. This includes SARS, MERS and COVID-19, but also some cases of rhe common cold, pneumonia, bronchitis, etc.
• Pandemic - an extensive infectious disease epidemic that affects many large regions, or even the entire world. This includes the Black Death plague of the 14th Century, smallpox, tuberculosis, various cholera outbreaks, the 1918 Spanish flu, HIV/AIDS, and more recently the 2009 H1N1 swine flu outbreak and now COVID-19. (Here's an interesting graphic of how the main historical pandemics stack up). SARS and MERS did not quite make the World Health Organization definition for a pandemic, and neither did Ebola or Zika, but COVID-19 just did.
• Self-isolation - deliberate vountary separation of a person from the general public, as a means of preventing, or at least slowing, the spread of a virus. This typically involves staying home as much as possible, only venturing out for emergencies, having groceries delivered, and avoiding gatherings of large numbers of people. Also known as self-quarantine. Preventive self-separation is yet another term, used mainly for people at high risk (the elderly, immuno-compromized, etc).
• Social distancing - a conscious effort to reduce close contact between people in order to reduce community transmission of a disease. This can include any number of different activities, from literally leaving more space between people  (2 metres is the usual distance considered "safe", the maximum distance that droplets from a cough or sneeze typically travel) to not kissing or shaking hands to not going out at all. Now often referred to as "physical distancing" because some literalists objected to the suggestion that all social interaction should stop.
• Shelter in place order - a more stringent measure available to authorities, to compel citizens to stay in their home as and limit movement to essential trips. This would normally mean that all "non-essential" businesses are closed so that employees do not have to leave their homes, although the definition of "non-essential" may vary from place to place and situation to situation. This is a term mainly used in the USA.
• Lockdown - see shelter in place order above.
• Quarantine-shaming - public criticism (such as on social media) of people who, deliberately or through ignorance, flout the rules on social distancing. The popular Twitter hashtag #COVIDIOTS is just one example.
• Flattening the curve - slowing down community transmission of a disease (largely by social distancing and self-isolation, as described above), thereby preventing the rate of new cases, especially serious ones, from overwhelming the emergency medical services. "Planking the curve" is a variant: REALLY flattening the curve. The idea is not to let the number of serious cases spike so fast that it exceeds the capacity of a country's or region's health care system.
  
• An abundance of caution - a commonly-used phrase indicating a carefulness over and above the normal, but justified under the circumstances. It carries a slightly apologetic air, but the suggestion that such apparently excessive prudence is nevertheless necessary.
• R0 - the reproduction number or reproductive ratio or rate of an infection is the expected number of cases generated by each new case, essentially the rate at which an infection spreads. It's a measure of how communicable and virulent the infection is. The R0 for COVID-19 is estimated at anywhere between 1.4 and 3.9, about the same as SARS, more than MERS and H1N1, but significantly less than measles, smallpox, mumps, etc.
• Herd immunity - the idea that, when enough people become infected with a disease (often estimated to be around 60% of the population) and either die or become immune, then the disease will fizzle out on its own.
• Behavioural fatigue - a less commonly-used term, but one currently coming under heated discussion in Britain among other places, this is the (unproven) idea that people will eventially get tired of restrictive measures like social distancing, and rebel against them, or at least will not be able to maintain the new patterns of vigilant behaviour for very long.
• Personal protective equipment (PPE) - accoutrements needed by front-line healthcare workers (NOT everyone else), including rubber gloves, face masks, face shields, respirator masks, gowns, shoe covers, etc.
• YOLO (You Only Live Once) - not specifically COVID-19 related but often-mentioned of late, this refers to a carpe diem, live life to the fullest attitude, often exhibited by younger people, and often entailing a degree of risk or wilful ignorance, particularly in times like these when community conformity is at a premium.
• Fomite - a term occasionally encountered in some more technical articles, fomite just means any inanimate object that can be used to transfer a viral infection, i.e. anything from doorknobs, kitchen surfaces, faucets, snd light switches to medical equipment and, of course, human skin and clothing.
• Furlough - originally a military term, this has come to be used for any temporary lay-off from work, with the right to be reinstated at some future time. Furloughed workers are not paid, but they do typically retain employment benefits like health insurance.
• Contact tracing - a process used to identify and monitor individuals who have had close contact with someone who is infected with the virus, with the goal of reducing infection transfer within the population. This may be done automatically by a phone app, or manually by trained staff.
• Double the bubble - a controlled relaxation of quarantine measures whereby a family can choose to socialize at close quarters with one other family (but no-one else).

Saudi's oil price-slashing decision makes no sense, even to them

If, like me, you've been trying to make sense of the recent Saudi oil production increase, and its associated price cut, then I think you may as well give up. There is no sense.
Behind the scenes, there is the ongoing spat between Russia and the USA, over Vladimir Putin's belief that the propped-up price of oil was effectively subsidizing the US shale oil industry, which has led to the USA becoming the world's biggest oil producer, as well as over Donald Trump's use of sanctions to stop Russia from completing its Nord 2 pipeline to Germany (yes, Trump had to be involved somewhere in any international crisis!)
But the most immediate "cause", if it can be described as such, grew out of the recent OPEC+ meeting (OPEC+ is the Saudi-dominated OPEC group plus Russia), in which Saudi Arabia was arguing for a further cut in oil production, which would lead to a price increase. Vladimir Putin, however, did not want to agree to more production constraints that may not be in Russia's own long-term interests. So, in retaliation against his refusal to kowtow, and for apparently no other good reason, the Saudis lurched completely the opposite way, and announced that it would substantially INCREASE its oil output, and started offering deep discounts to its global customer base.
This sent oil prices, already down about 30% so far this year, spiralling down to around US$32 a barrel yesterday, before recovering somewhat to US$35 a barrel, but still representing a 24% fall in just one day, the largest single-day loss since the 1991 Gulf War.  It is now at a 21-year low. Given that prices have hovered between about US$60 and US$80 since early 2018, this was a huge shock to the industry, and has led to a rout on global stock exchanges, which were already reeling from the coronavirus hit. Some heavily-indebted US fracking companies may not survive, which would please Putin, and the Canadian oil sands sector, already struggling, will be almost as badly hit. Even shares in Saudi Arabia's national oil company, Saudi Aramco, have been decimated, and the company has lost an estimated $500 billion in value since December, putting its plans for international listing this year in jeopardy.
So, all this was just a hissy fit by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman? Basically, yes. What's even less easy to understand is that Russia can actually withstand low prices better than Saudi Arabia can (according to analysts, Russia needs an oil price of US$38 a barrel to balance its budget, while Saudi Arabia needs a price of US$80 or more!) It was a high-stakes, tone-deaf, reckless, destabilizing, and probably self-defeating move. So, what was MBS thinking? We may never know.

A quick primer on Alberta's carbon tax (or not)

If you have had problems understanding Alberta's position viz-à-viz carbon taxes, you're probably not alone. I, for one, couldn't figure it out, but then I often have difficulty figuring out things that happen in Alberta...
Anyway, I finally managed to track down a document that adequately explains it (courtesy of accounting firm PriceWaterhouseCoopers, as it happens), and now I think I more or less understand. Sort of.
Alberta used to have a perfectly good carbon tax system, called the Carbon Competitiveness Incentive Regulation (CCIR), under Rachel Notley's NDP government. When Jason Kenney's Conservatives took over in April 2019, pretty much the first thing they did was, predictably enough, cancel it. So, then they didn't have any carbon tax, and so the federal "backstop" carbon tax clicked in, which Kenney obviously didn't like.
He therefore instituted his own carbon tax, called the Technology Innovation and Emissions Reduction (TIER) system (because heaven forbid it be called a carbon tax!), which only applies to greenhouse gas emitters exceeding a 100 kilotonne CO2 annual threshold, and which is pegged to the levels of the federal carbon tax. Unlike the old carbon tax, there is no income tax rebate to individuals; it is a straight tax retained by the provincial government, some of which is to be put towards carbon reduction schemes in the province (maybe).
However, because TIER does not apply to all companies, the federal backstop tax applies to those smaller emitters not already covered by TIER, thus necessitating two completely separate accounting systems, and unnecessarily complicating the whole exercise.
So, what then is the point of having  the TIER system? Ah, I've not been able to pin that down, I'm afraid. Because ... well, because Alberta.

I can understand panic buying, but why toilet paper?

My sister-in-law recently sent us a picture of a completely empty toilet paper aisle in her local supermarket in New York, and my first thought was "why toilet paper?"
But apparently it's a scene that has been encountered many times in recent days, and right across the world. Australia has a particular problem with it, and so so have Singapore, Japan, Hong Kong, and of course the USA. Armed robbers stole pallets of the stuff in Hong Kong, and it has led to fisticuffs and at least one knife incident in Australia. Some toilet paper aisles are guarded by armed security officers. Other paper tissues and kitchen rolls are often still widely available, but the toilet rolls sections have been stripped bare. For what it's worth, my local Toronto supermarket's shelves are fully stocked as usual, but maybe we use less toilet paper here?
Now, I can understand a tendency to stock up on food essentials in uncertain times such as we have with the current novel coronavirus outbreak. Anti-bacterial hand sanitizers and masks, sure. But toilet paper?
I have yet to see a convincing explanation for the phenemenon. The best the BBC can offer is that it is all an extreme case of FOMO - that guy is stocking up on toilet rolls, so maybe I should too, maybe he knows something I don't. Otherwise, it may be just people wanting to hold on to the last shreds of their dignity, represented in this case by the ability to use real toilet paper after a bowel movement.
Other theories suggest: that it is a way for people to maintain control (over hygeine, bodily functions, etc) when chaos appears to be descending all around; that it is a relatively cheap way for people to feel as though they are "doing something" in a crisis situation; that toilet rolls are big, bulky products, so it just looks worse than panic-buying of other, smaller products.
None of this sounds very convincing, does it? It's bewildering, really. If you want my theory, I just put it down to mass hysteria.

Fatalities from COVID-19 overwhelmingly among the elderly

I heard yesterday that the average age of South Koreans who have died from the COVID-19 coronavirus is around 80, so I got to wondering about the overall age profile of those who die from the virus outbreak. The answer it turns out is "old".
The best data I could find shows that the likelihood of death ramps up exponentially as age increases. So, while those in their teens, twenties and thirties have a death rate of just 0.2%, those in their forties increases to 0.4%, fifties 2.3%, sixties 3.6%, seventies 8%, and eighties-plus a whopping 14.8%. Interestingly, no deaths have been reported in children under 10, who make up just 1% of confirmed cases. And, although the overall death rate is 3.4% (higher than earlier estimates of around 2%), the rate among those confirmed cases who have no pre-existing health problems or chronic illness is just 1%. The fatality rates may actually be even lower than these figures suggest, as they rely on the numbers of reported and confirmed cases. Also, within these figures is a lot of variation - the death rate in Italy, for instance, may be over 7%, possibly due to Italy's age profile.
Compare this with a fatality rate for ebola (1976 outbreak) of about 40%, nipah (1998) 78%, SARS (2002) 10%, and MERS (2012) 34%, and suddenly COVID-19 doesn't seem so bad. For comparison, the fatality rate for influenza is around 1%, again mainly among the very old and those with pre-existing conditions. With COVID-19, at least 80% of cases are mild. Unpleasant, but not life-threatening.

The absurdity of the Buffalo Declaration

A bunch of four Alberta Conservative MPs have issued a document they are calling, a little over-dramatically, the Buffalo Declaration. It was actually published a couple of weeks ago, I just didn't get around to commenting on it.
The MPs, most of whom you will probably never have heard of, are Michelle Rempel Garner (the one whom you might have heard of, given that she was a cabinet member under Stephen Harper), Blake Richards, Glen Motz and Arnold Viersen. Most other Conservative MPs, even those from Alberta, have conspicuously managed to avoid publicly commenting on it.
The Buffalo Declaration is the latest, and perhaps most egregious, in the series of Alberta politicians whingeing and whining (see this article of mine for another such). It is not so much a declaration as a list of complaints about how badly treated Alberta has been by the central (read "Liberal") government, from the National Energy Program of the 1980s (for which an official apology is demanded), through the provincial equalization system to the carbon tax and, the final insult, the lack of oil pipelines. It even sees the current Indigenous blockades over the BC gas pipeline project as an example of government mistreatment of Alberta!
It claims that Alberta has always been treated as an inferior member of confederation, that the province has contributed a disproportionate amount of wealth to Ottawa, that its resource industry has been deliberately starved and held back, and that it is under-represented in Parliament, in the civil service, and even in the media. If all this were not enough, the prospect of Alberta seceding from Canada is mooted, and finally, the coup de grâce, a claim that Alberta be recognized as "culturally distinct", just like its nemesis, Quebec.
There is no mention of that old climate change thing, and the fact that low global oil prices are nothing to do with federal government policies. And there is definitely no mention of the fact that, if Alberta had a sales tax like everywhere else, the province would have a surplus not a deficit. All in all, it's a laughable document, were it not for the sobering thought that, crikey! a plurality of Albertan voters actually supported and voted for this mob. That is perhaps the scariest thought of all.

Coronavirus outbreak is making people seriously question globalization

We are all (well, all North Americans and Europeans at least) used to being able to obtain pretty much anything from anywhere in the world at any time of year. This is the boon that is globalization. By the same token, people think nothing of just hopping on a plane and crossing the globe.
However, globalization does not come without drawbacks, some of them profound. Ever wonder why a bombing in Iraq or an attempted coup in Venezuela pushes up the price of gas in Canada overnight, even though Canada is all but self-sufficient in oil and gas? That's globalization, baby! Most of the drawbacks of globalization we do not even think about on a day to day basis, although the climate change impacts and the environmental challenges of globalization are becoming better understood as we struggle to come to grips with global greenhouse gas emissions.
And now, the latest coronavirus outbreak, which has rapidly progressed from a localized epidemic to a global pandemic (depending on your definitions), has caused further soul-searching about the merits of, and justifications for, globalization. Indeed, no less a personage than arch-conservative Eric Reguly, in the business pages of the Globe and Mail, is now expressing severe reservations about the whole globalization project.
Most of the world has been affected by the virus one way or another. For one thing, it spread from China to other countries with unprecedented rapidity, first to nearby South Korea and Japan, but then to an estimated 67 countries at last count, despite precautions. Because everywhere is so inextricably connected, it is almost inpossible to stop it from spreading further.
But COVID-19 has also made the world face up to just how reliant it is on China, and Chinese manufacturing in particular. As large segments of Chinese industry have shut down overnight, many other industries around the world have ground to a halt, even though they are not directly affected by the outbreak. Here is just one report about how much the loss of  Chinese parts is affecting business in other countries, to the tune of around $50 billion in February alone according to this report.
As people used to say about Canada's unhealthily close relationship with the USA, when China sneezes, the rest of the world gets a cold, in both a metaphorical and an all-too-literal sense.

We touch our faces 23 times an hour - we're doomed!

The latest information on the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus that causes the COVID-19 disease suggests that it is probably spread person-to-person by droplets, not through the air (this in spite of the fact that Canada's official response to the outbreak seems to be assuming that it is airborne). So, inhaling other people's coughs and sneezes, and hand-to-mouth/nose/eyes. It may be able to linger on hard surfaces, to be picked up by hands, but can probably not linger for long in the air.
The best we can do, then, is to manically wash out hands as often as possible, and refrain from touching our faces. It is the latter that presents the more insuperable problem. Research suggests that we touch our faces way more than we probably think. One American study concluded that we touch our faces an average of 15.7 times an hour, while another study in South Wales yielded 23 time an hour.  Maybe Welsh people are more touchy-feely than Americans, or maybe the results are not totally reliable. A third American/Brazilian study suggests we touch our faces as little as 3.6 times an hour, at least in public places.
None of these studies were very large (10, 26 and 250 subjects respectively), which only goes to show how little this has been studied. But it seems like we probably do touch our faces way more than we might think, and my guess is that kids do it even more than the average. Furthermore, changing such ingrained habits may be next to impossible to achieve (especially in the case of kids). And yet that is exactly what we are being asked to do.
So, put away that mask (next to useless, we are told), and tie your hands behind your back. If that is not a practicable option for you, then wear a mask, so that when you do touch your face you don't touch your nose or mouth. Oh, wait, we're being told that masks are useless, and we should not be using them.
Like I say, we're doomed...