When will this be over?
We wish we knew. Sara Cody, ’85, the chief health officer of Santa Clara County, led the rollout of the nation’s first shelter-in-place order. She spoke with the New York Times on Friday about California’s progression from a containment phase, in which each new case was isolated, to a mitigation phase, which we’ve experienced as increasing restrictions on contact with other people. “The idea is that we slow the train down for a couple reasons. The top level reason is to preserve the capacity of the health care system to care for people who get sick. But the other is if we bend the curve and are able to reduce the case count then we can go back to more refined containment strategies and marry those with the mitigation.” In other words, if we succeed in slowing the spread enough, eventually we can go back to containing individual outbreaks. For now, hang in there. “We all have to just take a very deep breath and understand that this is our new normal for a while.” In the meantime, you can stay up-to-date on the latest information about prevention, testing and treatment by visiting the Stanford Medicine COVID-19 website.
Economists and epidemiologists agree we need to stay on lockdown for now, but without coordination among U.S. states and across countries and continents, we might as well be playing a game of whack-a-mole. Or, as economics professor Matthew Jackson puts it, trying to rid a house of termites by fumigating one room at a time. Jackson, whose research focuses on networks, including how diseases and financial crises spread, says that without a coordinated effort, “we will end up endlessly reacting to resurgences of the virus,” with devastating consequences for public health and the global economy.
The search is on.
Volunteers lined up in their cars at three sites last week to donate a blood sample for a project that will give Stanford scientists and the Santa Clara County Department of Health a snapshot of how widespread the COVID-19 virus is in the community. Because the virus may cause mild or no symptoms, many people don’t know they’ve been infected; the test detects potentially protective antibodies that indicate a person was exposed. While the “serological test” used in this project is a research tool and not yet widely available in the United States, Stanford scientists are working on another antibody test that will be deployed for more widespread use.
This is why we need diversity in AI.
The automated speech recognition systems used by Amazon, IBM, Google, Microsoft and Apple make twice as many errors when interpreting black speech as they do when interpreting the same words spoken by whites, finds a new study by researchers at Stanford Engineering. The disparities likely stem from the fact that speech recognition systems largely use databases of English as spoken by white Americans. Researchers say similar problems could affect people who speak English with regional or other accents. “One should expect that U.S.-based companies would build products that serve all Americans,” lead author Allison Koenecke, a doctoral candidate in computational and mathematics engineering, told Stanford News Service. “Right now, it seems that they’re not doing that for a whole segment of the population.”
At least somebody’s socializing.
Human-sized Humboldt squid use light-producing organs to make subtly glowing patterns appear between their eyes and on the edges of their fins. These patterns may be a way of communicating with other squid, say researchers at Stanford’s Hopkins Marine Station. “We sometimes think of squid as crazy life-forms living in this alien world, but we have a lot in common—they live in groups, they’re social, they talk to one another,” says Benjamin Burford, a biology doctoral student and the lead author of a newly published paper. Next steps for researchers? Maybe creating a cyber squid to try and talk to a real squid. “Right now, as we speak, there are probably squid signaling each other in the deep ocean,” Burford told Stanford News Service. “Who knows what kind of information they’re saying and what kind of decisions they’re making based on that information?”
As long as you’re decluttering.
Not everyone has extra RNA-extraction kits and single-stranded DNA primers lying around. But when the Stanford Clinical Virology Laboratory started running low on the compounds and kits they use to test patient samples for COVID-19, the Stanford research community came together, donating supplies from campus labs, pharmaceutical companies and biotech start-ups. Meanwhile, students from Stanford Medicine and the School of Engineering hosted a personal protective equipment drive (while taking care to maintain a safe social distance, of course). They collected more than 4,000 N95 respirators and 10,000 surgical masks for donation to local hospitals and clinics.
Photo credit: Kate Selig, ’23/Stanford Daily
How can we be of service?
When schools shut down across the Bay Area, Stanford students who are enrolled in the Data Challenge Lab course saw a way to help families whose kids depend on free school breakfasts and lunches. The students partnered with local school districts, nonprofits and newsrooms to create a digital map with detailed information on 441 sites across 10 counties where families can pick up meals. The students continue to explore whether there are digital tools better suited to getting this resource to the people who need it, says Charlie Hoffs, ’22. Since so many people access the internet using their phones, she told Stanford News Service, “a text about meal district sites might be more effective to folks than a map.”
Dispatches from the Stanford diaspora.
How are members of the Stanford family coping with the changes the COVID-19 pandemic has brought to our communities? From the senior who didn’t get a real goodbye to an alum who pivoted her business to serve new needs, STANFORD magazine spoke with members of the community about how their lives have changed. And hospitalist Kate Knepper, ’93, checked in with the first of a series of briefings about what things are like in Fort Collins, Colo., as cases surge.
Here’s more help for how you’re living and working now:
Here are some ways alums can help, connect and even have a little Stanford fun during this time.
SIEPR senior fellow Nicholas Bloom’s research extols the productivity benefits of working from home. But WFH during COVID-19 he says, is a productivity disaster. “My 4-year-old regularly bursts into the room hoping to find me in a playful mood, shouting 'doodoo!'—her nickname for me—in the middle of conference calls.”
What should you do if your housemate has symptoms of COVID-19? Have them wear a mask, School of Medicine professor Aruna Subramanian told PopSugar. And you should wear one too. (Read her other advice here.)
Feeling stressed? Alia Crum, head of the Stanford Mind & Body Lab, and graduate fellow Kari Leibowitz, MA ’18, explain how you can harness your stress to improve your well-being.
“Sorry, I was on mute.” Here’s expert advice for less annoying Zoom meetings.
There’s no stopping it—love, that is. Doctoral candidates Negin Heravi and Jimmy Rojas managed to get married on campus on March 30.
Pardon our L’Oops. The March 24 Loop was missing the link to a March 18 video in which Darrell Duffie, senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, discussed the volatility of the financial market.
Summer Moore Batte, ’99, is the editor of Stanfordmag.org. Email her at summerm@stanford.edu.
Note: The Loop sometimes links to articles outside of Stanford that may require a subscription to view.
