COVID-19 in Boston

I posted on the general Architecture and Urbanism forum too. Some encouraging words of hope about construction in Boston maybe?
www.wcvb.com

Mayor Walsh goes 'On The Record' about coronavirus: 'This was unthinkable'

Boston Mayor Marty Walsh began his appearance on WCVB's "On The Record" on Sunday with the stark prediction that the biggest increase in coronavirus cases is still yet to come.
www.wcvb.com www.wcvb.com

"I want to make sure that every construction worker in the city of Boston in safe. There is no difference between a construction worker working on a construction site or a banker working in a bank," Walsh said. "We're working with the state to make sure the policies are in place that there's proper washing stations and there's proper procedures on site so that a construction worker has the same protections as our first responders do."
 
Java King said:
I posted on the general Architecture and Urbanism forum too. Some encouraging words of hope about construction in Boston maybe?
www.wcvb.com

Mayor Walsh goes 'On The Record' about coronavirus: 'This was unthinkable'

Boston Mayor Marty Walsh began his appearance on WCVB's "On The Record" on Sunday with the stark prediction that the biggest increase in coronavirus cases is still yet to come.
www.wcvb.com www.wcvb.com

"I want to make sure that every construction worker in the city of Boston in safe. There is no difference between a construction worker working on a construction site or a banker working in a bank," Walsh said. "We're working with the state to make sure the policies are in place that there's proper washing stations and there's proper procedures on site so that a construction worker has the same protections as our first responders do."
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As we go forward over the next weeks and months, different industries are going to gradually re-activate -- and then, probably but unfortunately, re-quarantine -- at different times and according to different schedules. Once this initial surge of cases is behind us, it's going to be a gradual process of finding the right balance as ensuing COVID diagnoses ebb and flow over time. We aren't just all going to stay locked down for x number of weeks and then all open back up and go back to normal at a given date. If we did that, we'd probably just end up right back where we were in mid-February, where transmission would take off and we'd all find ourselves back in our homes a few weeks later.

It makes sense that, when industries do begin to get back to business, construction will be one of the first to re-activate. Plenty of construction workers already practice "social distancing" every day just by the nature of their jobs, and plenty of others wear PPE (masks, gloves, goggles, etc.) even when there isn't a global pandemic. A think it's a safe bet that construction sites will be back to active months before bars are packed and sporting events are sold out.
 
Would the idea of temporarily closing select side streets to non-local vehicular traffic and converting them to woonerfs every fly during the COVID restrictions? I live near the Somerville Community Path which is an asset in ordinary conditions, but is overcrowded (like beyond rush hour peak) as people are escaping their homes for fresh air during the stay at home order. When I walk now, I’m using the parallel streets instead of the path. They’re mostly devoid of vehicle traffic since most people are gone and when people are heading my way, either I or they head out into the middle of the road to keep distance.

It works as-is, but I think with something more official from local cities in place you could thin the herd on the bike paths and in parks and encourage people to safely spread out. It’d also be an opportunity to try this out in select areas (albeit under abnormal circumstances) for potential long-term application. It could be an opportunity.
 
The MA Building Trades Council exec board, which represents over 75,000 construction industry workers, voted unanimously to support work stoppage on all “non-essential” construction projects in the state. I doubt their call will be heeded.

This will continue to be a tricky issue. Delicate financing means that builders want their projects to keep moving, but worker safety has to be considered as well. Are job sites actually enforcing the health safety directives in the Governor’s orders?
 
George_Apley said:
The MA Building Trades Council exec board, which represents over 75,000 construction industry workers, voted unanimously to support work stoppage on all “non-essential” construction projects in the state. I doubt their call will be heeded.

This will continue to be a tricky issue. Delicate financing means that builders want their projects to keep moving, but worker safety has to be considered as well. Are job sites actually enforcing the health safety directives in the Governor’s orders?
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DOT is probably exempt because the very nature of the job--all-outdoors and spread out linearly--makes them the best-practicing by nature type of work for the safety directives. Since the biggest municipalities have already choked off most non-essential building construction, all that's going to do is hasten all the holdout towns/cities to follow suit behind Boston's and Somerville's lead and put the same kibbosh. So this vote is just catalystic confirmation bias for where things were already headed.

For any remaining single-site work where you would think some level of monitoring is needed to ensure they're taking precautions, I bet the slow choke-off of their supply chain is going to be self-regulating the risk by simply sending more crewmembers home with nothing to do. Because ultimately you can only work as fast as the trucks are delivering your supplies, so everything is going to naturally get slower as the global shutdowns, self-shutdown private firms, and general unevenness of shipping schedules start exerting their effect bottom-up on the civil engineering supply chain. I think you're going to increasingly see tasks pivot more to busywork wholly accomplishable with what's onsite rather than the more instantly measurable signs of material progress because crew scheduling vs. inconsistent supply chain is going to get ever harder. Which means there'll be incremental progress as long as those sites are open and have reshufflable tasks to do, but frustratingly fewer publicly-confirmable signs of new steel/concrete going up. To the roving aB photographer it'll start looking like a total shutdown even when it's very much not.
 
F-Line to Dudley said:
At least we don't freak out about urban wildlife sightings here like they did with the "OMG, coyotes are roaming the STREETS OF SAN FRANCISCO" story last week. I mean, the Staties fish a trapped 'yote out of the Ted Williams Tunnel at least once a year, there's deer as far in as the South End, and the Attack Turkeys of Brookline have been a reliable internet meme for close to a decade. We're used to it here. I'm just wondering if the sparser human crowds are going to invite more predators in than usual. And not just the already-urban red tail hawks that will chow down a squirrel on a street corner oblivious to the crowds around them...but the great horned owls and other raptors that usually stick to the quiet leafy areas like the Arboretum or Alewife Reservation. Or maybe some bobcats from Neponset Reservation taking the same Amtrak route the coyotes and deer use to get into town.

Bears in Boston...that would be downright unusual. Packs of coyotes taking residence instead of the odd loner...unusual and unsettling.
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Anything (within reason) to dilute the pernicious oversupply of turkeys, deer, squirrels. If it can't be wolves and bears because, well... obvi... then, why not many more raptors? Don't they like to munch on all of those as newborns? Turkey vultures are definitely on the upswing, I spotted 2 or 3 the other day. Maybe they might help... also, this reminds me that a red-tailed hawk used to lord it over the woods right at BB&N and Alewife Brook Pkway... it was glorious to see it come flapping down from the canopy.
 
DBM said:
Anything (within reason) to dilute the pernicious oversupply of turkeys, deer, squirrels. If it can't be wolves and bears because, well... obvi... then, why not many more raptors? Don't they like to munch on all of those as newborns? Turkey vultures are definitely on the upswing, I spotted 2 or 3 the other day. Maybe they might help... also, this reminds me that a red-tailed hawk used to lord it over the woods right at BB&N and Alewife Brook Pkway... it was glorious to see it come flapping down from the canopy.
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I once came face-to-face with a turkey vulture in Orlando. It was sitting on top of the trash can at the vacation rental I was staying at when I came around the corner taking out the trash...all 3 ft. tall, 8 lbs. of it. I have never seen an uglier or more menacing God's creature in my entire life, not least of all with only 2 feet's separation in eye contact. I dropped the trash bag on the sidewalk and backed away slowly. I'm pretty sure the way it was eyeing last night's pizza that was all it wanted from me. Seriously stuff of night terrors.😱


Alewife is prime red-tail watching territory. They'd perch on top of the football field light towers at Danehy Park at dawn and scream like the fist of an angry god over all who walk beneath its territory. Then it would spot a bunny, divebomb into the tall grass...and maybe you heard a muffled squeak upon impact but otherwise it was all silence as they began the meal. One of those awful winters when the snow cover lasted for months unbroken there was an ungodly explosion in the rabbit population (because they burrow and do particularly well in perpetual snowcover), and I swear the local RT population were all pot-bellied by the end of April from all the wabbit season. Used to be this real fat boy of a red tail that hung around low in the trees around the side path at Danehy and would people-watch. I mean, like raptor diabeetus obese it was so well-fed; thing had to get winded just attempting to fly. One day I was walking the path some distance behind a woman and her baby stroller, saw fat boy eyeing them intently from his perch, and was like "He's totally going to eat a baby, isn't he?"
 
I was going a little bit stir crazy so I did a multi view Boston skyline drive-by, staying in the car the whole time. On Memorial Drive there were an absolute TON of people walking or running by the river, not observing 6' distancing, with only maybe 5% wearing masks. It's like they all had no idea what was going on. This is why we can't have nice things!
 
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BCEC retrofit
 
tysmith95 said:
Interesting. A game changer would be a vaccine though, which I think will eventually come. Might take a year or more though.
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Vaccine's not going to matter much, because this is a one-time mutation like a super-flu strain that only has a 1-2 year lifespan in the wild before the human population develops enough collective antibodies for it that the active strain quickly runs out its opportunity and goes almost immediately near-extinct. Normal everyday coronavirus that's always around us 24/7/365 is simply one of the Top 4 common-cold viruses...and not even one of the more prevalent ones. There's no common-cold vaccine like with flu because it's the proverbial catch-all "other" category of too-dissimilar source viruses, and flat-out isn't serious enough symptom-wise for the effort. "Regular" coronavirus is not a target worth expending bullets on like flu families are, so it won't ever be vaccinated in the same annual form.

The utility in a coronavirus vaccine is not for today. It's for safeguarding against the fact that this otherwise super-benign second-fiddle common cold player that's always around us has made 3 titanic mutation leaps to serious epidemic in the last 1-1/2 decades: SARS (2002-04, extinct since '04), MERS (2012-18...peak outbreaks in 2015 & 2018, considered non-extinct but no recorded cases in 2 years), and now COVID-19. SARS had the highest mortality rate of all, but was comparatively relatively difficult to transmit which is why it went extinct so fast after its main outbreak was contained. Symptomatic COVID is way less life-threatening than SARS, but by comparison is silly-easy to transmit. MERS was somewhere in the middle, and had more stratified tiers of mild (negligible-concern) vs. severe (life-threatening) symptomology than SARS or COVID. The horribly scary projection is that if standard benign ever-present background coronavirus has already made 3 titanic mutation leaps to deadly-and/or-contagious superbug like that in such a compressed timeframe, it's only a matter of time before the next such mutation manages to combine the infectiousness of COVID with the lethalness of SARS and go full-on 1918 scorched-earth killing millions across the planet. Therefore all the SARS and MERS vaccine research that was plodding along underfunded in the background is going to get swept up in research overdrive with COVID vaccine research and be 'the' front-burner med research initiative of the next couple years.

The end goal of researching vaccine production for the existing strains is NOT to ultimately come up with a shipping vaccine to inoculate the population against this current strain. COVID's very infectiousness means it'll be functionally extinct in 18 months from all the new antibodies the population builds up; in virology terms it bet too heavily on infectiousness for long-term survival of this particular mutation. The intense ongoing vaccine effort is so the next time plain-old benign corona mutates into a superbug they've got their shit sorted from *well-funded* vaccine research to be able to produce the on-demand vaccine that actually blunts the next outbreak's curve before it peaks...i.e. the savior that's missing right now. Because at the rate the virus is making these quantum-leap infectious mutations every few years we're going to have another one of these in anywhere from 5-15 years near-guaranteed. It's only a matter of chance luck whether the next one skews infectious exclusively, skews deadly exclusively, is neither here nor there, or manages to hit that doomsday jackpot of mix of worst-case infectiousness AND worst-case deadliness that delivers historic plague-level killing spree. We now have all the reason in the world to get our R&D house sorted so we're supremely well-prepared to pounce when the next one hits, because right now those future odds look pants-shitting scary.
 
F-Line to Dudley said:
Vaccine's not going to matter much, because this is a one-time mutation like a super-flu strain that only has a 1-2 year lifespan in the wild before the human population develops enough collective antibodies for it that the active strain quickly runs out its opportunity and goes almost immediately near-extinct. Normal everyday coronavirus that's always around us 24/7/365 is simply one of the Top 4 common-cold viruses...and not even one of the more prevalent ones. There's no common-cold vaccine like with flu because it's the proverbial catch-all "other" category of too-dissimilar source viruses, and flat-out isn't serious enough symptom-wise for the effort. "Regular" coronavirus is not a target worth expending bullets on like flu families are, so it won't ever be vaccinated in the same annual form.

The utility in a coronavirus vaccine is not for today. It's for safeguarding against the fact that this otherwise super-benign second-fiddle common cold player that's always around us has made 3 titanic mutation leaps to serious epidemic in the last 1-1/2 decades: SARS (2002-04, extinct since '04), MERS (2012-18...peak outbreaks in 2015 & 2018, considered non-extinct but no recorded cases in 2 years), and now COVID-19. SARS had the highest mortality rate of all, but was comparatively relatively difficult to transmit which is why it went extinct so fast after its main outbreak was contained. Symptomatic COVID is way less life-threatening than SARS, but by comparison is silly-easy to transmit. MERS was somewhere in the middle, and had more stratified tiers of mild (negligible-concern) vs. severe (life-threatening) symptomology than SARS or COVID. The horribly scary projection is that if standard benign ever-present background coronavirus has already made 3 titanic mutation leaps to deadly-and/or-contagious superbug like that in such a compressed timeframe, it's only a matter of time before the next such mutation manages to combine the infectiousness of COVID with the lethalness of SARS and go full-on 1918 scorched-earth killing millions across the planet. Therefore all the SARS and MERS vaccine research that was plodding along underfunded in the background is going to get swept up in research overdrive with COVID vaccine research and be 'the' front-burner med research initiative of the next couple years.

The end goal of researching vaccine production for the existing strains is NOT to ultimately come up with a shipping vaccine to inoculate the population against this current strain. COVID's very infectiousness means it'll be functionally extinct in 18 months from all the new antibodies the population builds up; in virology terms it bet too heavily on infectiousness for long-term survival of this particular mutation. The intense ongoing vaccine effort is so the next time plain-old benign corona mutates into a superbug they've got their shit sorted from *well-funded* vaccine research to be able to produce the on-demand vaccine that actually blunts the next outbreak's curve before it peaks...i.e. the savior that's missing right now. Because at the rate the virus is making these quantum-leap infectious mutations every few years we're going to have another one of these in anywhere from 5-15 years near-guaranteed. It's only a matter of chance luck whether the next one skews infectious exclusively, skews deadly exclusively, is neither here nor there, or manages to hit that doomsday jackpot of mix of worst-case infectiousness AND worst-case deadliness that delivers historic plague-level killing spree. We now have all the reason in the world to get our R&D house sorted so we're supremely well-prepared to pounce when the next one hits, because right now those future odds look pants-shitting scary.
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Very well outlined, nice summary. The only thing I'm confused by is that all of the hype/lurid sensationalizing years ago was on the Ebola/Marburg viruses being the ones with the most alarming potential to mutate to develop the diabolical combination of effortlessly transmitted via droplets and hyperlethal once absorbed within the system. Unless I'm misremembering?

They, of course, emerge out of a radically different tropical rainforest climate and human/biome interface than the coronavirus family. So: is the scale actually tipping now more toward the coronavirus vs. Ebola/Marburg, in terms of which could produce the unthinkable catastrophe (yet which we must vigorously plan for)?
 
DBM said:
Very well outlined, nice summary. The only thing I'm confused by is that all of the hype/lurid sensationalizing years ago was on the Ebola/Marburg viruses being the ones with the most alarming potential to mutate to develop the diabolical combination of effortlessly transmitted via droplets and hyperlethal once absorbed within the system. Unless I'm misremembering?

They, of course, emerge out of a radically different tropical rainforest climate and human/biome interface than the coronavirus family. So: is the scale actually tipping now more toward the coronavirus vs. Ebola/Marburg, in terms of which could produce the unthinkable catastrophe (yet which we must vigorously plan for)?
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That's still accurate...those are still more dangerous viruses overall with extremely fast-paced and volatile mutation rates. Some of the confusion and overhype is because one of the protein tricks that the COVID-19 mutation developed to become so highly contagious was taken straight from Ebola's protein/cell-bonding playbook. But they are still extremely, extremely different virus types on polar opposite sides of the "species" tree, so one's mutation techniques do not inform the others.

Coronavirus overall continues to be a stable family that's always around us and 99% of the time has no greater illness association than simply the mild common cold. Its mutation rates are not constant and prodigious by any means, which is why even when it does pandemic it's got a shelf life in the wild not much longer than seasonal flu before the human population's antibodies inevitably catch up. But this thrice-in-18 years pandemic trend is a new feature we haven't seen before (though it'll probably be back-traced at some point to other past pandemics we never isolated to specific pathogen with accuracy), and each of those 3 most recent pandemics has exploited transmission weaknesses directly stemming from 21st century globalization. That's where we have to prepare. "Doomsday" odds still require an extremely high degree of luck to line contagiousness perfectly up with lethalness in one mutation that bursts out enough to gain traction. Odds are that if this continues to be a periodic pandemic generator (no reason to think it won't given current trending) that most of the time the virus will continue to 'whiff' in one direction on its mixture and not have outbreaks with potential to be gloval mass killers. What we need to be afraid of is that now the odds are indeed calculable--if still slim--that one of these times it could hit the jackpot of perfectly-balanced properties and bust out like a 'millennial'-level plague a la 1918. Simply because it's stuck in a roughly 5-year pattern of rolling the dice on big-jump mutations since start of the century. "1918" potential is still many decimal places too extreme-low on the overall odds to get off-deep-end paranoid about. But the fact that we can even peg it at that much odds now through the newly-recurring nature of the pandemic mutations is a downright chilling prospect. On the back end, this has to remain a very dynamic and well-funded public health effort for foreseeable future. Like Ebola and Marburg are, but much more visible here in the First World and also chugging along in high profile the majority of years between mutations where (unlike Ebola/Marburg, which never fully take a break) there's zero superbug cases being logged at all.

So...we shoot gangbusters for vaccine development--this and extinct SARS/MERS--not so we can inoculate the current pandemic. But so we can do a live-drill practice for doing this way faster next time when a vaccine might actually be quick-on-draw enough to flatten the curve. Any mass-producable COVID vaccine in R&D now is going to be 1 year late for the end of the pandemic, with cases well into trace numbers by then. But they will get some decent live trials on the trace numbers, which is better than with SARS/MERS which were already gone from the wild by the time labs had anything to trial. And the exercise in doing this vaccine now despite it being too late will beneficially means-test against these 'giant-leap' 5-year mutations, which gives us a leg up on anticipating what the next one might look like and enhance the early-warning accuracy when they do see that next pandemic mutation. Which will not only make the real-deal vaccine get produced faster next time, but also inform across-board better ways to contain the next outbreak on first spotting. Our overall preparation will be worlds better from the effort (arguably it should've been better than this already, but all that SARS/MERS research that could've helped this time around was woefully underfunded and too slow-paced).
 
Mike said:
This sucks
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It does. My daughter in NYC had it 3 weeks ago and recovered. She got it while giving blood at a clinic. Now my sister who lives in a nursing home has it, but she seems to not be exhibiting severe symptoms (yet). This whole pandemic is like a freaking nightmare for a lot of people.
 
F-Line to Dudley said:
Vaccine's not going to matter much, because this is a one-time mutation like a super-flu strain that only has a 1-2 year lifespan in the wild before the human population develops enough collective antibodies for it that the active strain quickly runs out its opportunity and goes almost immediately near-extinct. Normal everyday coronavirus that's always around us 24/7/365 is simply one of the Top 4 common-cold viruses...and not even one of the more prevalent ones. There's no common-cold vaccine like with flu because it's the proverbial catch-all "other" category of too-dissimilar source viruses, and flat-out isn't serious enough symptom-wise for the effort. "Regular" coronavirus is not a target worth expending bullets on like flu families are, so it won't ever be vaccinated in the same annual form.

The utility in a coronavirus vaccine is not for today. It's for safeguarding against the fact that this otherwise super-benign second-fiddle common cold player that's always around us has made 3 titanic mutation leaps to serious epidemic in the last 1-1/2 decades: SARS (2002-04, extinct since '04), MERS (2012-18...peak outbreaks in 2015 & 2018, considered non-extinct but no recorded cases in 2 years), and now COVID-19. SARS had the highest mortality rate of all, but was comparatively relatively difficult to transmit which is why it went extinct so fast after its main outbreak was contained. Symptomatic COVID is way less life-threatening than SARS, but by comparison is silly-easy to transmit. MERS was somewhere in the middle, and had more stratified tiers of mild (negligible-concern) vs. severe (life-threatening) symptomology than SARS or COVID. The horribly scary projection is that if standard benign ever-present background coronavirus has already made 3 titanic mutation leaps to deadly-and/or-contagious superbug like that in such a compressed timeframe, it's only a matter of time before the next such mutation manages to combine the infectiousness of COVID with the lethalness of SARS and go full-on 1918 scorched-earth killing millions across the planet. Therefore all the SARS and MERS vaccine research that was plodding along underfunded in the background is going to get swept up in research overdrive with COVID vaccine research and be 'the' front-burner med research initiative of the next couple years.

The end goal of researching vaccine production for the existing strains is NOT to ultimately come up with a shipping vaccine to inoculate the population against this current strain. COVID's very infectiousness means it'll be functionally extinct in 18 months from all the new antibodies the population builds up; in virology terms it bet too heavily on infectiousness for long-term survival of this particular mutation. The intense ongoing vaccine effort is so the next time plain-old benign corona mutates into a superbug they've got their shit sorted from *well-funded* vaccine research to be able to produce the on-demand vaccine that actually blunts the next outbreak's curve before it peaks...i.e. the savior that's missing right now. Because at the rate the virus is making these quantum-leap infectious mutations every few years we're going to have another one of these in anywhere from 5-15 years near-guaranteed. It's only a matter of chance luck whether the next one skews infectious exclusively, skews deadly exclusively, is neither here nor there, or manages to hit that doomsday jackpot of mix of worst-case infectiousness AND worst-case deadliness that delivers historic plague-level killing spree. We now have all the reason in the world to get our R&D house sorted so we're supremely well-prepared to pounce when the next one hits, because right now those future odds look pants-shitting scary.
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Sigh. F-Line, I usually enjoy your posts but a lot of this is either conjecture or just plain wrong. Yes, in general, viruses that are both highly lethal and very infectious tend to burn themselves out (like Ebola outbreaks) or are able to be contained (like SARS). But nothing is clear on Sars-CoV-2 at this point, and, among other factoids, it's probably going to turn out to be not that lethal after all. Furthermore, it's incorrect to say that SARS (ie, Sars-CoV-1) became naturally extinct; it was only due to unprecedentedly heroic contact tracing that SARS was contained and extinguished, not due to natural circumstances at all. And, as an aside, COVID is less, not more, infectious than SARS, at least in terms of R0, although of course the higher lethality probably meant an overall reduced transmission on a societal scale... Additionally, there is neither any evidence, nor any major virologist or ID expert saying at this point that we think that Sars-CoV-2 is going to mutate its way into becoming just another common cold virus. Nor is there anything to suggest that the endemic coronaviruses that cause seasonal URIs started off as more lethal coronaviruses. Suggesting this is nothing short of wishful thinking. The family of corona's that's given way to SARS and COVID-19 (essentially the same virus, Sars-Cov-1 and -2) come from a lineage that's different enough from the cold-causing coronaviruses that we really know very little about them. And, furthermore, we don't know if lasting immunity if conferred from infection. It's flat wrong to state that
F-Line to Dudley said:
The end goal of researching vaccine production for the existing strains is NOT to ultimately come up with a shipping vaccine to inoculate the population against this current strain. COVID's very infectiousness means it'll be functionally extinct in 18 months from all the new antibodies the population builds up; in virology terms it bet too heavily on infectiousness for long-term survival of this particular mutation
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; nobody is saying this, and there's nothing to suggest this at all. This statement, by the way, is also implying that not only is lasting post-infectious immunity conferred, but that herd immunity will have been acquired in 18 months. Given the likelihood of widespread social distancing measures to continue in some fashion for a good long while (whether you think they're justified or not; a separate issue), societal infection at least in developed countries is unlikely to approach anything close to what's required for herd immunity (which is dependent on onw infectious the virus is; a greater % of immune people is needed the more infectious the virus is)... An additional point of note: humanity always has partial immunity to influenzavirus; therefore flu pandemics are a different animal regardless of what HxNx they may be. COVID is hitting a totally virgin population and the longer term trajectory of this pandemic is very much unclear at this point. Yes, the world should and, at least for a brief few years, probably will devote much needed research to virology, but there is very little that is conclusively known at this point.
 
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