My Summer Vacation: LG Talks Story with Dr. Fauci

I started out the morning watching the LG do a live interview with Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health on COVID-19. It was very enlightening. When asked about his thoughts on opening up to transpacific travel, Dr. Fauci said although a 2nd test once passengers get here would catch a few more people, it was better to strategically do surveillance testing rather than completely test everyone again, especially since the testing capacity here is limited. Surveillance testing is like subsampling. LG Green has already said that is part of the pre-travel testing program but people seem to conveniently forget that.

A couple hours later I got a call from Omnitrak! I have an interview this Saturday for a Research Associate position in their First Caller Program. In the job description it sounds like a contact tracer but they call the person being contacted a "Patient" and it also says, "Conducts initial contact calls on behalf of the Hawaii State Department of Health," so I am not really sure whether the calls are being made to cases or close contacts. Or may be both? I guess I will find out on Saturday.

For the Unicorn Challenge that I am doing for the Warrior Goddess Kettle Bell Training I have decided to restart next Monday, 10/12. It turns out all their planners are based on a Monday start so it is easier to do it that way. I wish all the emails had been scheduled so that it would turn out to be a Monday start, instead of them being sent the day following when you signed up. They could have designed it so that the first email you get says something along the lines of, "Beginning next Monday, ..."

The exercise regimen.

The eating plan paired with the exercise regimen.

Starting next Monday also allows more time for the Nutribullet blender to arrive. Our current Oster Versa blender has a problem. There is a hairline crack in the jar; The Potential Most Favorite Roommate tried to fix it with silicone sealer and it looked like it did the trick. You can fill it up with liquids and it won't leak; but once you apply the torque to spin the blade and start blending it forces fluids out the crack. The leak is much less than before but still bothersome.

The repair.

My breakfast, before.

My breakfast, after.

Still leaking.

Old Blogger is now gone. For good. So I am forced to use New Blogger. It has not been fully cooperative today; notice the uneven spacing between lines and photos in this post. It also will not allow me to left-justify the photos so they don't overlap with the text in the column to the right; if it is the last photo in a series it pulls text from the paragraph below the photo to fill in that space! Auē! Hopefully the Blogger folks will correct these bugs and it will get better.

It almost always starts out with this page.

Which should look like this when it loads properly.

I am sort of on the Warrior Goddess Kettle Bell Training carb cycling plan using the Rule of Thumb. It is a way of measuring out how much food you are eating using your body parts. I have seen the palm of your hand as a measure for proteins before, but not the others; a fist for dense vegetables, a handful for carbs, and a thumb for fats. For lunch I had salad with chicken & beef fajita meat and bacon bits with some potato salad. For dinner I had a piece of Pizza Topping Casserole with salad.

The Rule of Thumb.

Lunch.

Dinner.

I made a logistical mistake in my training today; I did the Tabata HIIT-style swings after lunch. Since I have to bend over that was not a good plan. But it is for only 4 minutes so I just went with it. Today's training involved swinging the kettle bell for 20 second, resting for 10 seconds, then repeating for a total of 8 repetitions. As I get in to better shape I am to build it up to 4 rounds of 8 reps. So far, so good; the back is not complaining about swinging the 10 lb weight.

I have started measuring my ketones again to see how the change in diet is affecting ketogenesis.

At 6:05 am upon waking.

At 9:15 am.

At 11:10 am just before lunch.

At 13:16 about an hour after lunch.

At 4:36 pm, just before dinner.

I watched the vice presidential debate this afternoon. It was much more presidential than the presidential debate. But the big question is can plexiglass protect the Veeps? The experts say no; we shall have to see if anything develops.

One of the 3 winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics is astronomer Andrea Ghez. She has been using the Keck Observatory on Mauna Kea in her study of the central region of the Milky Way galaxy for over 2 decades. She is only the 4th woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics.

Hawai'i women rule! One of the 2 winners of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry is Jennifer Doudna who grew up on Hawai'i Island! She shares the prize with a French woman, they developed the CRISPR-cas9 process for gene splicing. This is only the 4th time that a Nobel award in the sciences has been given exclusively to women.

Today the Department of Health issued some Halloween advice. Don't. Yup, just don't. They said trick-or-treating is a high risk activity. Let's see, generally you are in large groups, mingling with strangers whose COVID hygiene you are not familiar with, too close together, accepting things touched by people outside of your ʻohana bubble, with frequent yelling or screaming. Sounds like a potential superspreader event. I guess we will find out sometime in mid-November how well people listened to the advice.

If you're wondering why there was an outbreak at the White House with all the testing they do (or say they do); read on. The White House outbreak was not a failure in testing; testing alone will not keep you safe from COVID-19. Testing is just one tool in the tool box; you need them all to be successful. What are those other tools? Wearing a mask, keeping 6 feet away from others, outdoors is better than indoors, good hand hygiene, and not going to work when you have symptoms. And there is also the accuracy of the tests used; for each type of test used there are pros and cons. The pros of the rapid tests the White House used are that it's fast, results can generally be obtained in about 15 minutes; the trade off is accuracy, it can't detect the low levels of virus being shed when someone is in the early stages of being infectious. The PCR tests, on the other hand, can catch those in the early stages; but the fastest you can get a test back is 24 hours though sometimes it may take a week. But even the PCR will miss people if they are tested after they have been infected but before they start shedding the virus. Moral of the story: wear a mask, keep minimum 6 feet apart, outdoors is better than indoors, good hand hygiene, don't go to work (or anywhere else) when you are not feeling well.

I'm glad to see that the plan developed for vaccine distribution has been designed to be more equitable. Obviously since vaccine production and distribution will not be instantaneous once a vaccine is approved (unlike what one person wants you to believe), there will be 4 phases of distribution. It will probably be the middle of next year before vaccines are able to be distributed to people in Phase 4. In the meanwhile, wear a mask, keep minimum 6 feet apart, outdoors is better than indoors, good hand hygiene, don't go to work (or anywhere else) when you are not feeling well. Actually, you should continue to do that until the incidence of new cases drops below the level that epidemiologists feel it is safe. Although if you are in a vulnerable group you may wish to continue wearing a mask. And always practice good hand hygiene because it will help protect you from a whole host of other things besides COVID-19.

An editorial today cautioned people that COVID-19 still active. As we saw earlier in the year, when new cases were in the single digits and we even had some days with no new cases statewide, if we let our guard down it can become dangerous for nā kūpuna and people with underlying conditions that make them more vulnerable. Until there is a safe and properly vetted vaccine widely available, and used, we need to (repeat after me) wear a mask, keep minimum 6 feet apart, outdoors is better than indoors, good hand hygiene, don't go to work (or anywhere else) when you are not feeling well.

Hawaiʻi Island Mayor Harry Kim opted out of the pre-travel testing program. This means trans-pacific travelers coming in to Kona or Hilo will still have to do the 14-day quarantine. It is understandable that the outer islands are more leery of the program since there is still a small chance of infected people slipping through; their medical facilities are much more limited and can easily be overwhelmed. When I traveled there in late March, as things were just beginning to heat up in the state, I was strongly advised by a friend that works in the emergency room to return to Honolulu at the first sign of a cough or fever because of the limited facilities regardless of what I thought it might be. Mayor Kim was also deeply affected by nā kūpuna who died at the veterans home; he took it as a personal failure to keep them safe.

Many people are wondering whether there will be a flood or a trickle of tourists when things open up in next week. Obviously, most businesses that depend on tourists would like to see a flood. But concerned citizens hope for a trickle. Previous statistics show that last year an average of 29,000 visitors would arrive each day; the LG estimates things will start in the 5,000 to 8,000 a day range. It's anybody's guess whether it will ever return to pre-COVID levels.

There are also concerns that the tourism restart will delay moving to Tier 2 because of positive people slipping in and creating clusters of new cases that will push the 7-day average of new cases over 100. What is more likely is that we will move to Tier 2 but then return to Tier 1. Here's why, the pre-travel testing program begins on October 15th. The earliest people coming in on that day can be tested is October 12th and that test must be negative. If that person is infected immediately after they leave the test facility and they run the average course of the disease, they will start showing symptoms on October 17th and have been shedding virus particles from about October 15th (or the day they arrived). Assuming the resident "new cases" remain the same as they are today at 73, those 8 people that came in on the 15th have now increased the October 17th new case number to 81, on October 18th the new case number will go up to 89 for the people who came in on October 16th, and so on until October 21st, when the 7-day average for new cases will be 90. Yay! We move to Tier 2! But wait; on the 23rd the 7-day average has now increased to 104! Do we immediately move back to Tier 1? Or do we have to stay above the target new case number for a certain number of days before we move back to the previous Tier? That is not clear to me. [Note: My calculations are based on these assumptions: 1) number of incoming people is 8,000/day, 2) the person is infected immediately after they get tested, 3) all infected people coming in are asymptomatic when they step off the plane & are screened, 4) rate of asymptomatic people is 1/1000, 5) they all begin to show symptoms on Day 5 after their exposure, 6) they are all tested on Day 5 and added to the new cases on that day. It is also unclear to me how the 28 days per tier is counted; Tier 1 started on September 24th, 28 days later is October 21st. But I am hearing some people say the 22nd is the last day, so I don't really know. Though on the 22nd the 7-day average new cases would still be below the threshold at 97.]

There were 110 new cases of COVID-19 today, bringing the total up to 13,045. Three more deaths were reported today bringing the death toll up to 163. The 7-day average new case rate for Oʻahu is 73 on this last day of the 2nd week of Tier 1. The 7-day average new case rate will have to remain at 100 or lower for the next 14 days in order for us to move to the less restrictive Tier 2. I think if we have one day over 100 during this period, we go back to square one and start counting towards the 14 days again; but I'm not sure.