Tag Archives: math

Notes on Coronavirus Trends

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10

How can we open our economy when fewer than 2% of all Americans have even been tested?

There’s a disturbing notion going around right now. A lot of folks seem to think that because a few major COVID-19 hotspots are past their peak — or close to that point — we’re ready to open up the U.S. economy, get back to work, and get things back to normal.

The people saying this are obviously out-of-touch with reality.

Don’t get me wrong. I’d love things to go back to normal. Part of my income comes from selling the jewelry I make at art shows. I’ve already had four shows cancelled — Borrego Springs in California in March, Art Under the Elms in Idaho and Apple Blossom Days in Wenatchee in April, and the Guild B Art Show in Chelan in September. I’m on the calendar for Leavenworth’s Village Art in the Park for two weekends in May, including the exceedingly profitable Memorial Day Weekend, but I suspect they’ll be cancelled, too. And even my helicopter business took a hit: the big airport event in June where I do hundreds of rides with one or two other pilots was cancelled. So yes, this is hurting my bottom line a bit, although admittedly not as much as the folks who have lost their primary (or sole) source of income because of business closures. (My main business is agricultural flying and that’s still essential here.)

But let’s be real here. Despite the constant steam of misleading information coming out of the White House multiple times a week, the U.S. is far behind many other countries with its testing for COVID-19. Just the other, the new official liar press secretary claimed on Twitter that over 4 million Americans had been tested. There are two problems with this:

  • It doesn’t jive with the numbers being reported on the far more trustworthy Johns Hopkins COVID-19 Dashboard, which is updated throughout the day every day for every country on earth. As the White House was claiming “over 4 million,” Johns Hopkins reported 3.7 million.
  • The percentage tested — even if it were 4 million — is still less than 2% of the total U.S. population of 331 million people.

One of the more insidious traits of COVID-19 is that a person can be infected and not show any symptoms. Or just show minor symptoms. So they could be walking around, infecting people around them without even knowing they’re sick.

And get this: under the rules in place in the U.S., these people don’t even qualify for testing!

Indeed, you have to be pretty sick to get tested, which is probably why nearly 20% of those tested actually have the virus and nearly 5% of those people die from it.

Wondering where I got those numbers? They’re from Johns Hopkins with a little extra math applied. I built a spreadsheet yesterday and will try to update it daily. Here’s what I have so far:

Covid Math
Percentage testing can only rise as we test more people, but I’d like to see it over 50% and we have a long way to go. I color coded (using conditional formatting) the other two percentages; green is good and red is bad.

My little spreadsheet doesn’t just offer numbers. It calculates percentages and identifies trends. The way I see it, we want the percentage of population tested to rise, the percentage of confirmed cases to drop, and the percentage of deaths among confirmed cases to drop.

Based on this data, we’re not even close to opening the country for business again.

The only way we will be ready is if we #TestEveryone, quarantine those who have the virus, and trace those people’s contacts to ensure they’re tested and, if necessary, quarantined, too. We need to keep those who carry the virus away from the general public and the only way we can do that is to (again) #TestEveryone.

So as much as I’d like to set up my show tent in Leavenworth for Mother’s Day weekend next month, I’m hoping that the U.S. can do what it needs to do to get this virus under control before then. And with the amount of misinformation and finger pointing coming out of the White House, I seriously doubt that will happen anytime soon.

How to Extract GPS Coordinates for a Google Maps Location

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It’s a lot easier than you might think.

Like most folks who depend on the Internet as a source of information, I use Google Maps a lot. But rather than use it to track down street addresses and get driving directions, I use it to pinpoint places out in the middle of nowhere that I need to visit by helicopter. There are usually no street addresses, and even if there were, they wouldn’t help much while flying. What I need are GPS coordinates.

You might be in a similar situation. You see a place on a map and, for one reason or another, you need to know its exact GPS coordinates. Fortunately, Google Maps can help. Here’s how to get those coordinates.

  1. Use Google Maps (not Google Earth) to display the location you want GPS coordinates for. In my example, I’ll use satellite view to find a dirt airstrip I know along the Verde River north of Phoenix. You could search for an address if you needed the coordinates for a street address.
  2. Google GPS Step 1Hold down the Control key and click right on the spot you want the coordinates for. A menu pops up. (You may be able to simply right click, but I’ve had limited success with that on my Mac using Firefox; Control-click always works.)
  3. On the menu, choose Center Map Here. The view will probably shift a bit.
  4. Google GPS Step 2Above the map area, in the blue bar, click the Link button. A window appears with two text boxes in it. The contents of the top text box, which are selected, includes a link to the map that you might paste into an e-mail message. It also includes the GPS coordinates, which I’ve indicated with a red box around them. Sometimes the GPS coordinates are not so obvious and you’ll need to scroll through the contents of the box to find them.

Note that the coordinates are in digital format. In this example, they’re 34.160043°N 111.727266°W. (West and South are negative numbers.) Some GPSes use this format; you can usually specify the format you want to use in your GPS’s settings.

If you need coordinates in degrees, minutes, seconds format, you’ll need to do some simple math. Let’s take a look at how it works for the first number: 34.160043.

  1. Take the whole number (34) and set it aside. That’s the degrees.
  2. Take the number after the decimal point and multiply it by 60: .160043 x 60 = 9.60258
  3. Take the whole number from that calculation (9) and set it aside. That’s minutes.
  4. Take the number after the decimal point and multiply it by 60: .60258 x 60 = 36.1548
  5. Take the whole number from that calculation (36) and set it aside. That’s seconds. Keep in mind that if you want a more precise number, you can include the decimal places after it. You might also want to round the number up or down depending on what comes after the decimal point. In this example, the number after the decimal point is 1 so I’d round down and use 36.
  6. Put the numbers you set aside together in degrees° minutes‘ seconds” format. In this example, you’d have 34° 9′ 36″.

My helicopter’s GPS uses a degrees° minutes‘ format, so I’d stop calculating after step 2 and wind up with 34° 9.60258’.

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