Italy's success likely foreshadows California's Italy's Success! There was another blockbuster positive development in the trajectory of COVID-19 today. Like other good news stories over the past two weeks, this one sadly received little attention: Italy is increasingly confident that it has flattened its curve. As the Wall Street Journal reported today, the Italian government has started studying ...
Making Sense of COVID-19 Data, Graphs, and Models
For anyone who has been following the modeling projections for the spread of COVID-19, there was an apparent bombshell in the last few days: The Imperial College model that was released roughly two weeks ago - and which generated massive media and policy maker attention -- was updated. Based on more data, the modelers were ...
How Many COVID-19 Cases Can the California Healthcare System Handle?
Model 1.0 The rationale for California’s extraordinary stay at home order is to ensure that the number of COVID-19 cases requiring hospitalization does not overwhelm the capacity of the healthcare system. This raises a number of modeling questions: 1. What data do we need to model hospital capacity during the COVID-19 pandemic? 2. When would the State have ...
9 Questions Everyone Should be Asking the Media and their Elected Officials about COVID-19
In my first Post on COVID-19, I wrote about the importance of putting the spread of the virus in perspective, which requires careful consideration of the data we have and the data we do not have. In this Post, I am encouraging everyone to ask the media and their elected officials to fill in these ...
Gaining Some Perspective on COVID-19
These are unprecedented times. The information coming from policy makers and the media can be overwhelming, misleading, and contradictory. Are we over-reacting or under-reacting? How much worse than the flu is COVID-19? Will public health measures last for weeks, months, or years? The answers to these questions at this point in time are not entirely clear. This ...
Back Again
After taking another break for very good reasons, I’m restarting and restructuring 2040Matters Although Posts on 2040Matters haven’t ceased, they have slowed to a trickle in the last 16 months. This was not my intention, but it was the result of two important developments. First, I spent much of 2018 trying to build Driving2Save into a ...
Time to Bite the Bullet and Kill the Bullet Train
The potential environmental benefits of the bullet train cannot justify its exorbitant costs. The hits just keep on coming for the California bullet train, which is supposed to run between Los Angeles and San Francisco. First, the estimated completion cost has ballooned to over $77 billion and there is no viable plan to raise this money. ...
Offsetting the Hidden Costs of California’s Wildfires
The 2017 wildfires that ravaged California not only claimed lives and destroyed property, they released millions of metric tons of greenhouse gases. Like thousands of others, we were forced to evacuate Santa Barbara because of the Thomas Fire. Thankfully, this was merely an inconvenience, and we are now back in our homes and able to work ...
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