EPISODE 9. THE LAST DAY.
By: Lawrence Kuznetz
Tags: Coronavirus, NASA, Forecast, Warning Signs, Reproduction

EPISODE 9. THE LAST DAY.

Excerpts from Save the Shuttle on Amazon.com.

The official line was the nation couldnʼt afford the Shuttles anymore. Their demise was sealed by a floundering economy; a shift in emphasis from government to privately built space vehicles and a President who had other things on his mind.

The handwriting was on the wall! Project Constellation, the funding line that paid me would dry up on September 30, 2010 (the last day of the fiscal year) and it was already April. Mike Gernhardt, my golden boy astronaut boss tried to reassure me. He had other funding sources, he said. I wasnʼt so sure so I came up with 3 other ways to try and save my job. The first was an Op-Ed letter to the New York Times. Perhaps if they printed it, it might help get Constellation reinstated. They didnʼt and it wouldnʼt have made any difference if they did (what was I thinking?)

Number 2 was a music video tribute I composed to the Space Shuttle (http://youtu.be/4V32TcJMujc). Set to the Blue Danube waltz and mimicking the famous Pan Am Shuttle ballet in 2001 Space Odyssey, perhaps it would endear me to upper management and they would save my job (that was even more delusional than the NY Times letter).

Number 3 was a ceremony.

The anonymous building where I worked, Building 37, had once been known as the Lunar Receiving Laboratory. It was there in the days following Apollo 11 where Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins had been placed in quarantine to prevent potential Moon bugs from escaping to the atmosphere and wreaking havoc on Earth. Hundreds worked in Building 37 now but few knew its history. I thought a ceremony to commemorate it might somehow help me.

“Who would you invite?” asked DF, the Life Science Bureaucrat in charge of such affairs (name omitted but he knows who he is!)

.

“I was thinking the crew and some of their friends.”

“Neil Armstrong?” the bureaucrat said with a smirk. You may as well invite Obama and the pope for good measure, his unsaid words implied. To him and many others at NASA, Neil Armstrong was a legend, a reclusive god who walked on water, not into Building 37.

I knew better, I knew him as a person. A sensitive, private, extraordinary person but a person nonetheless. So when I called and described the ceremony, he immediately agreed to attend.

After several false starts regarding schedule, we set the ceremony for August 10th 2010. A surprised DF (who also happened to control a chunk of Mike Gernhardtʼs funding, and by extension, mine) decided to cloak it in secrecy. He put a clamp on access, limiting it to 60 people. If the word got out, the entire Johnson Space Center would descend on us with thousands trying to crash the party, he said.

When the big day finally came, I had the honor of introducing Neil and Buzz, and described the history of the building. Everyone reveled in the chance to reunite with old friends afterwards and tell stories of the past and present. The highlight came when Neil, Buzz and Jack Schmidt of Apollo 17, the last man to set foot on the Moon, affixed commemorative plaques I had prepared, by the rooms where theyʼd slept under quarantine — where Command Module Columbia had been docked, where the Moon Rocks had been offloaded and so on. A touching sidebar came when Lunar Scientist Chiu Wing Lam, whoʼd been a child during Apollo and had baked the ceremonial cake and helped me design the plaques, had a chance to shake hands with his hero, Neil Armstrong. He had tears in his eyes.

Three weeks later, I found myself in DFʼs office. I had high hopes. The ceremony, carried out without a hitch, had been special and poignant. At a minimum I expected an Atta Boy, and at a maximum, a job extension. I got neither. The new fiscal year starts October 1st, he warned, and when Gernhardtʼs funding for you runs out, youʼre out the door. I still see the smug look on his face when he said it.

I called Mike immediately but he was at Desert Rats, a spacesuit test in the Arizona desert and hard to reach. When I finally managed to get through, he tried to reassure me that he had alternate funding but suggested I apply for a grant just in case. October 1 was only a week away, I reminded him in near panic.

Scoring a grant is daunting enough with months to prepare but itʼs a Hail Mary with a week to go. Nevertheless I hunkered down at home next to the 10 year old Mac G5 the office had lent me to give it my best shot, a long shot.

Two all-nighters later, my brand spanking new personal monitor went black. Pissed, frustrated and near exhaustion, I rushed across the street to JSC to find a replacement. An hour later with the sun setting, I found one at the bottom of a box of hand-me-down monitors hidden in a file cabinet in my office. It was dusty and old, but it matched my G5 and I crossed my fingers it would work. But when I exited the building and put it in my trunk, all hell broke loose. NASA security cops surrounded me.

“You have paperwork on that equipment?” one asked suspiciously.

And so began an investigation that scuttled the grant proposal; relieved me of my NASA badge and was the NASA equivalent of a CSI shakedown replete with the reading of Miranda rights.

It took 2 days for the NASA cops to verify that official permission to take the G5 and monitor home had indeed been given, during which time DF made it official. You have 24 hours to turn in your keys and exit stage left. And don’t try going back to your office. We’ll package up any personal equipment that belongs to you and mail it.

“Can you imagine?” I asked my friend and colleague Grant Bue,” who tried to intercede on my behalf by signing me in as a visitor and escorting me into my own office. We’d been there less than 15 minutes when there was a bang on the door and Security cops rushed us as if I was Al Capone and Grant was Baby Face Nelson. Five minutes later, there we were, 2 Ivy League leaguers, one from Columbia, the other from Harvard being subjected to an embarrassing shakedown orchestrated by the mean-spirited DF. Had NASA really come down to this?

Numbing is the only word to describe that final exit. But I’m the resilient type. One phone call from my old NASA buddy Keith Hudkins was all it took to shed my last tear. Keith needed help sailing his 38-foot sloop from Grand Exuma to Port Canaveral Florida, a “piece-o-cake” adventure through the sunswept Caribbean that it would turn into a 500-mile trek dodging hurricanes. The only thing that mattered now was after 50 years in the trenches, thereʼd finally be time to plan a life ahead without NASA.

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CORONAVIRUS Update 33:

HAS ANYTHING IMPROVED SINCE WE STARTED TO REOPEN?

If you live in Spain or Italy, hell yes!

See how everything’s cascading down in figure 1?

Figure 1

But if you live in the good ol USA, the UK or Russia, hell no!

Figure 2.

Isn’t it amazing how much the US (top) and UK (middle) look like each other? I know we have a special relationship but this is over the top (no pun intended). Oh well, it could be worse. We could be Russia (bottom) which got a late start but is now heading for the moon.

By now most of you know that looking at the US is not like looking at each state. You also know that when you extract the New York New Jersey area out of the total, US cases are still rising and haven’t even hit a plateau yet. I talked about dwell-time in the last update but you can toss that out the window now. After the last few days of data, it’s clear we’re not even peaked as a country yet as well as in many states. There are exceptions (such as New York) so let’s take a look at them: The below image shows case counts for all the states compared to each other:

Figure 3.

The data appears to be all over the map but if you drill down a little deeper, you can see how the states compare. Now bear with me on this one. You might’ve heard the term Ro or reproductive number. It’s an indicator of how many people one person can infect. From figure 4 below you can see it varies from a high of 11 to 18 for measles to a low of 1.3 for seasonal flu. For Covid 19 it was originally thought to be between 1.5 to 4 but it is now decreasing, depending on the level of intervention.

Figure 4.

With more data coming in, we now have a better idea of this variation state to state which is shown below in Figure 5.

This figure shows the states where the virus is spreading the fastest (red and orange bars), the slowest (green and black bars) and everything in between. Notice also the scale to the left ranging from 0.5 to 2.0. They call this the effective M number and it’s pretty much the same as Ro. So for example South Dakota is highest, with 2 people infected per person contacted and Montana (black bar) is lowest with less than 1 (meaning 1 person doesn’t infect another equally causing the virus to eventually die out. It’s also called herd immunity). Two points should be made here: A. There are many states above 1.5, and B. You can expect this virus to spread from the higher numbers to the lower numbers. Reopening in states with 1.5 and above will make this worse for the rest of us sooner or later. Reopening in states lower than 1 should be fine for now because the spread and the virus are heading down…FOR THE MOMENT!

With the above in mind, you can expect the number of deaths in each state to also shift in time. This is what it looks like today but it won’t stay that way for long.

Figure 6.

In the past few weeks these updates and many others have warned against premature reopening. These warnings have been largely ignored and different states, indeed different municipalities are beating to their own drum. No matter where you are, if you drill down deep enough you’ll find warnings. Case in point, look at Northern California (below) where I’m fortunate enough to live. Because of strict adherence to social distancing, sheltering in place and other measures, we‘ve had just 10,600 cases and 390 deaths in an area with a population of 15.6 million people, a mortality rate of 3.7% compared to the rest of the United States at 5.8%. But if you look a little closer at the red squiggly lines to the right, you see quite a few of them are steady or heading up, a harbinger of worse things to come perhaps.

Figure 7.

Today’s Numbers:

There were 23,488 new cases reported yesterday and 1,218 deaths. Total reported US cases now stand at 1,577,936 with 93,894 deaths, an overall mortality rate of 5.9% compared to the worldwide average of 6.5% (5,039,529 cases with 326,893 deaths.)

Forecast:

The number of total deaths using the combined methodology described in Update #32 is now predicted to be 119,935 by June 17th. The estimated age breakdown is as follows: 71,082 deaths for the 80 and above age group; 35,000 in the 70–79 age group and 9,900 in the 60–69 age group. Deaths in the 50–59 age group are forecast to be 2360; 590 in the 40–49 age group; 721 in the 30–39 age group and 195 for ages 0 to 30. Keep in mind that this is a dynamic model that changes frequently. While its total predictions are in agreement with most of the models out there, the distribution of deaths by age group is a rough estimate indicative of data trends collected to date.

Summary:

This is the 33rd Update of the series and things could get ugly out there before they get better. It could be the wild west with masked men on the street shouting at unmasked men who might tell them to F off in return. It mirrors the dispute on vaccines in my mind, with the word “scared” being most appropriate. People on the right think people on the left are frightened eggheads too scared to go back to work and re-open the economy. People on the left think people on the right are frightened of vaccines because they’re more scared of side effects than they are of the disease which the vaccine eradicated in the first place.

It’s all become madness to me and there’s not much more I can say or do. So I’ll issue one more coronavirus update and get back to something useful — trying to design a COVID-19 fighting suit. Be on the lookout for that last update-I’m guessing it will surprise you. Until then, stay safe, be careful and prioritize your personal protection preferences. If you don’t have any, here are some guidelines I use to maximize safety.

1. You’re safest if your area shows 14 consecutive days of single digit cases and deaths/day

2. You’re safer in an area with a population density of 1 person per football field or less.

3. If you live in a high density population area, you should self evaluate before traveling to restaurants, schools or public common areas (see #5 below). Before frequenting restaurants, businesses and other establishments, make sure they practice social distancing.

4. Carry masks with you at all times in case you are put in a potentially contagious situation. Don’t give up on masks, social distancing and sheltering in place unless you absolutely positively must.

5. Measure and record your following health metrics at least once a week:

General well-being. pulse oximetry (should be in the high 90s) body temperature (should not exceed 100 F or 37.7 C for sustained periods) Resting Respiration rate (should not exceed 15 breaths/minute

6. One other metric that has not been verified but could be a valuable indicator is cold frequency: How many colds have you had in the last year or two and how long did they last? Answer honestly. The common cold is a coronavirus. Your immune system may be COVID-19 compromised If you’re cold-susceptible.

7. If you suspect that you’ve been in contact with the virus but show no symptoms, take proactive action at home. This consists of social distancing with your family members (several feet apart at the dinner table), frequent hand and face washing, use of hand disinfectant’s and minimizing hand to face contact.

8. Don’t shout or engage in lengthy conversations unless essential. The louder you talk, the longer you talk, the greater the aerosol density leaving your mouth and the further it travels. In the presence of someone who has the virus but doesn’t know it, your odds of catching it go up!

That’s it till next time. Stay safe, LK

PS: the Save the Shuttle excerpts on Medium.com will continue under coronavirus spaceman stories. The book is available in it’s entirety on Amazon.com