No Sunrise Walk

That's because at nineteen minutes before sunrise I was online for the Advancing the Response to COVID-19: Sharing Promising Programs and Practices for Racial and Ethnic Minority Communities symposium; it started at 12 noon Eastern Time. And ran for 6 hours; my butt is sore again! Today I will share the opening and the 1st speaker of the 1st session that I watched, What Data Tell Us About COVID-19 in Racial and Ethnic Minority Communities. Over the next few days I will share information on the other sessions that I watched.

The opening page was really like walking in to a convention hall!

But of course, it wasn't.

This is the Resource Hall.

This is the Q & A Corner.

This is the Plenary & Breakout Sessions.

Alex Azar, Secretray of Health & Human Services opened the symposium.

We were welcomed by RADM Felicia Collins; these 1st 3 were pre-recorded.

ADM Brett Giroir also welcomed everyone; the number of flags kept changing.

Then we went to our breakout sessions, which were live.

Dr. Thomas presented first.

Black barbershops are community hubs.

One thing I realized is that I still have my old MacBook laptop; I kept it around after I bought my current MacBook Pro 2 years ago because Kai had loaded the Harry Dresden series audio books on it. So even after I got the MacBook Pro I would listen to the Harry Dresden books on the MacBook; I think I finished listening to the last book by the end of February in 2019. So I had not turned it on since then. When I first turned it on today, the screen was totally black and it would not respond; I decided to see if I could get the battery to charge up again. An hour & 10 minutes later it started to show some signs of life! It took a little bit but I finally got it to respond normally; I was even able to get it to stream the symposium!

When I plugged it in at 6:48 am.

It started to respond at 7:58 am.

I entered my password and got this at 7:59 am.

At 8:02 am it was searching for the old wifi.

I hooked it up to the new wifi at 8:05 am.

By 8:27 it had my correct calendar. Itʻs working for now.

I can't remember exactly what the problem was, but it had something to do with it getting ready to crash. I'll have to see if Kai remembers why he told me I needed to get a new laptop. In the meanwhile, I think I am going to clear a space on the desk so that I can have 2 laptops running. It was handy this afternoon when I was on another Zoom webinar about iwi kupuna and I was able to look up the State ordinances about historic preservation on the old Mac while listening to the webinar on the new(er) Mac. My plan is to just use it as a standby to look up things when the MacBook Pro is busy doing something else for me, but not do any work on it that I want to save. (This means I really didn't have to borrow Justin's laptop. But I did not remember it still being around and definitely had never used it for streaming much of anything before so I did not know it could really do that until today.)

The meeting on Iwi Tapu was very interesting; there are a lot of parallels with the culturally and archeologically significant sites that I worked with when I was doing environmental reviews. One big difference, however, is that there we only worked with 1 or 2 tribes; here individual families can be involved with the process so there could be a whole lot more people involved in finding a viable solution.

I pulled up the ordinance and was skimming it as they talked about these problems.

 

 




While poking around the resource "room" for the symposium I came across more online contact tracer trainings. Two I can take at my own pace; the other I have to sign up for a specific time, so I did. And I sort of misspoke, 2 classes are actually for investigators; I figured if they're not going to hire me I'm going to get more training at an even higher level!

This is the one I have to register for.

I read a great article about the Marshallese in Arkansas and how health disparities has allowed COVID-19 to kill many Marshallese.


Cohort 1v2 of the Community Contact Tracing Training started a Facebook page to share information with all the cohorts; I signed up the day I finished the contact tracing class. Jeannine from Cohort 1v2 posted the You Tube video "Why Masks Work BETTER Than You'd Think". It's great! They have a series of other informative videos; I will try to remember to share one with you every day or so.

The math is very simplified for this video explanation.

These examples assume a mask filters out 50% of the virus particles.

If the efficiency of the mask changes, the outcome changes.

There is a disturbance about 500 miles south-southwest of us; it is moving westerly at about 10 to 15 mph. Over the next 5 days it has a 40% chance of becoming an organized storm.


The number of new COVID-19 cases has gone up again, there were 160 today, plus 4 additional deaths. The total number of known cases is now 11,105 with a total of 107 deaths. There are 6750 active cases. I wonder if the increase in cases is from the Labor Day weekend which was about 1&1/2 weeks ago? Two days ago we had the lowest increase (66) in months, it had followed what had previously been the lowest increase (80) in months. Now the count has increased on 2 consecutive days. We shall have to wait and see.





The next 2 graphs look similar, they both are looking at beds in hospitals. The upper graph is from the Hawaiʻi Data Collaborative and shows the number of beds occupied by COVID-19 patients (red) vs non-COVID-19 patients (blue). The lower graph is from the prototype department of health dashboard, I believe they are using real data. It appears to be showing the number of ICU and the number of regular beds being occupied by COVID-19 patients; I wish they had used different colors so they could be easily distinguished from each other.

COVID-19 vs non-COVID-19 patients.

ICU beds vs regular beds occupied by COVID-19 patients.