The Mythical Bay Area Mask Mandate

I had to buy a pair of shoes today, and so decided to use the mall visit to test the effect of the "mask mandate" that theoretically grips San Jose in its iron fist.

My selected target was an anonymous, generic, medium-quality indoor mall. I approached it in regular clothing, with no mask or other face covering in sight - I had a mask in my back pocket should things prove sticky at any point. Spoiler: they didn't.

Within the body of the mall, I passed by security guards at least four times in close proximity. No-one said anything. I was careful not to lock eyes in challenge, just looked ahead at a destination store and occasionally consult my phone.

Of the other stores:

• I avoided CVS (Pharmacy), and the pharmacy area of Target - didn't want to unnecessarily disturb sick people
• Within Target there was no reaction, even though I walked past several staff members.
• Discount clothing store #1 - nada
• Footwear store #1 - very relaxed, even when I asked them questions
• Discount clothing store #2 - no challenge, but a staff member was wearing trousers well below his underwear waistline so I'm not surprised he didn't say anything. Let he who is without sin, et cetera...
• Discount clothing store #3 - v helpful, no comment on lack of mask.
• Footwear store #2 - no problem at all, friendly even through the purchase of shoes.

Summary: no-one gives a shit on enforcement of the mask mandate. It's way too much hassle. Don't feel constrained to wear a mask. That said, everyone else in the mall I saw was wearing one, even though some were way below the nose and only being worn for the form of things.

Also note: as a highly white person with clear diction, if there were anyone expected by shop staff to be a nark, and therefore demand mask-compliant behavior, it would be me.

I'm rather disappointed that I didn't have to pull out my explanation:

"I'm feeling the spirit" -SF Mayor London Breed, explaining why she was dancing without a mask in one of her city's nightclubs , contrary to her own order

COVID protection insanity - Sarah Cody

Santa Clara County, which is mostly the megapolis of San Jose, is making its COVID policy through its County Health Officer Dr Sarah Cody, and if there ever was an example of the Peter Principle - Petra Principle? - then she is it.

Witness Friday's announcement about loosening restrictions in Santa Clara:

Santa Clara County loosened some guidelines Friday while keeping others tightly in place. It now says if you're six feet apart, and outdoors, masks are no longer required.

According to Twitter, up until now, many residents of Santa Clara had no idea that they had to wear masks while outdoors and 6+ feet away from anyone else. This is not surprising because it is completely insane. Technically, if you were jogging on a public trail last Thursday with no-one within 100 yards, you were violating these restrictions. There is no evidence that COVID spreads outdoors between people 6ft+ apart - none! Yet Cody found it necessary to impose the restrictions nevertheless.

I've played the ball (the restrictions) so now I feel justified in playing the man (Cody).

Cody was appointed in 2013, succeeding her boss - she had spent the past 15 years working as a Deputy Health Officer at the Santa Clara County Public Health Department. If I saw that promotion profile on a resumé I'd have absolutely no confidence that the promotion was earned. It was either for convenience - the leadership didn't really bother advertising and interviewing - or diversity, where she was the only female candidate. The latter seems a bit unlikely because public health officials tend to be female, so I'm leaning towards "convenience". Definitely not "competence".

Cody has comprehensively screwed up Santa Clara's response to COVID, mounting increasing strict restrictions which have had no differential impact on the spread and effect of the virus compared to elsewhere. She invents random priorities for vaccination just to show that she's involved and hip to minorities - rather than taking hard-won experience from other countries and implementing as-is. She is astonishingly out of her depth. I'm sure she's a competent middle-of-the-road medic, but she apparently has no idea how to consider the business and other aspects of her random pronouncements.

I would like to see every restaurant in San Jose, having suffered 3 months of shut-down indoor dining and 2 months of any dining at all despite their investments in outside facilities, post a picture of Sarah Cody - and her minions - in their front windows. Text underneath: "BANNED: not to be served at this establishment". Hope she likes McDonald's and KFC.

That said, Cody doesn't get the full blame; when the local population is full of neurotics, pandering to them is very tempting.

"It feels good, but at the same time it's nerve-wracking not wearing it, see, that's why I still have it on, you never know, boom, here we go,” said Monica Hernandez of Cupertino.

Monica Hernandez should shut herself in a closet in her apartment if she's that afraid. Let the rest of us try to restart the economy that Dr Sarah Cody has throttled to death.

Pandejos and the law of unintended consequences

Most of the readership will be familiar with the fact that California has a large population of "indocumentados" - immigrants of less-than-legal status, mostly from Central America, who supply a lot of the farming, factory and other close-or-below minimum wage labour. This has, historically, been encouraged by virtually every Californian politician in high office.

So you've brought in a large population of people who aren't that fluent with the language, actively avoid authority - police, INS, DMV etc. - and you've specifically told them that the rules, such as immigration law, don't apply to them. And now, there's a pandemic, and you want them to follow government-mandated rules on their business and personal lives.

How, dear reader, would you expect this to turn out?

Gustavo Arellano of the Los Angeles Times is in despair at the behaviour of the pandejos - a portmanteau of "pandemic" and the Hispanic pejorative "pendejo":

The earnestness and importance of the [COVID] messages don't matter: Everywhere I turn, my neighbors ignore the suggestions with gusto. Down the street are tents on front yards packed with people attending a birthday party. Over there is a taco truck where people chow down shoulder to shoulder, despite signs stating that all orders are to-go. Off in all directions, I hear music: live mariachi, conjunto norteño outfits, brass bands, and DJs, echoing from blocks away. Sometimes I can even catch the sermon of a Pentecostal minister who never bothered closing his storefront church to indoor service.

The combination of Gustavo's Puritan indignity at this behaviour, and his previous cheering-on of Latino extra-legal immigration (e.g. his relentless opposition to Proposition 187, is enough to make one wish for stronger bladder muscles. Gustavo has inadvertently cheered on a wipe-out of his favoured community's abuelos and abuelas:

In Los Angeles County, the Department of Health estimates that daily COVID-19 deaths among Latinos went from about 3.5 per 100,000 people in early November to 28 per 100,000 in January—an increase of almost 800 percent. In Ventura County, two zip codes in the city of Oxnard account for around 30 percent of all COVID-19 cases—and these spots just so happen to correspond with where farmworkers live and pick. In Orange County, Latinos make up 34 percent of the population but 44 percent of all cases and about 39 percent of deaths.

Why does California continue to have a high COVID infection and death rate? Because it imported a large underclass who never had to pay mind to government diktats, who live in crowded conditions that happily spread the virus, and who (though generally young and healthy) have brought in grandparents with diet-related comorbidities who are prime targets for COVID.

NHS Track+Trace - what went wrong

By now, you've presumably seen how Public Health England screwed up spectacularly in their testing-to-identification pipeline, such that they dropped thousands of cases - because they hit an internal row limit in Excel.

Oops.

Still, how could anyone have predicted that Public Health England - who were founded in 2013 with responsibility for public health in England - could have screwed up so badly? Well, anyone with any experience of government IT in the past... 40 years, let's say. Or anyone who observed that the single most important job of a public health agency is to prepare for pandemics, which roll around every 10 years or so - remember SaRS 2003? H1N1? And that duty, as illustrated in their 2020 performance, is one that PHE could not have failed at any more badly if they'd put their best minds to it.

Simply, there's no incentive for them to be any good at what they do.

It's tempting to simply roll out the PHE leadership and have them hung from the nearest lamp post - or at least, claw back all they payments they received as a result of being associated with Public Health England. For reference, the latest page shows this list as:

• Duncan Selbie
• Prof Dr Julia Goodfellow
• Sir Derek Myers
• George Griffin
• Sian Griffiths
• Paul Cosford
• Yvonne Doyle
• Richard Gleave
• Donald Shepherd
• Rashmi Shukla

However, this misses the point; there's plenty more where they came from. Many of these people are actually smart, or at least cunning. None of them actively wanted tens of thousands of people in the UK to die, or the UK's coronavirus response to become an absolute laughing-stock. Yet, here we are.

When you set up a data processing pipeline like this, your working assumptions should be that:

1. The data you ingest is often crap in accuracy, completeness and even syntax;
2. At every stage of processing, you're going to lose some of it;
3. Your computations are probably incorrect in several infrequent but crucial circumstances; and
4. When you spit out your end result, the system you send it to will be frequently partially down, so drop or reject some or all of the (hopefully) valid data you're sending to it.

Given all these risks, one is tempted to give up managing data pipelines for a living and change to an easier mode of life such as a career civil servant in the Department for Education where nothing you do will have the slightest effect, yet you'll still get pay and pension. Still, there's a way forward for intrepid souls.

The insight you need is that you accept that your pipeline is going to be decrepit, leaky and contaminate your data. That's OK as long as you know when it's happening, and approximately how bad it is.

Let's look at the original problem. From the BBC article:

The issue was caused by the way the agency brought together logs produced by commercial firms paid to analyse swab tests of the public, to discover who has the virus. They filed their results in the form of text-based lists - known as CSV files - without issue.

We want to have a good estimate, for each agency, whether all the records have been received. Therefore we supplement the list of records with some of our own - which have characteristics which we expect to survive through processing. Assuming each record is a list of numerical values (say, number of virus particles per mL - IDK, I'm not a biologist) a simple way to do this is to make one or more fields in our artificial records have values that are 100x higher or lower than practically feasible. Then for a list of N records, you add one artifical record to the start, one at the end and one in the middle, so you ship N+3 records to central processing. For extra style, change the invalidity characteristic of each of these records - so e.g. you know that an excessively high viral load signals the start of a records list, and excessively low load signals the end.

The next stage:

PHE had set up an automatic process to pull this data together into Excel templates so that it could then be uploaded to a central system and made available to the NHS Test and Trace team, as well as other government computer dashboards.

First check: this is not a lot of data. Really, it isn't. Every record represents the test of a human, there's a very finite testing capacity (humans per day), and the amount of core data produced should easily fit in 1KB - 100 or more double-precision floating point numbers. It's not like they're uploading e.g. digital images of mammograms.

So the first step, if you're competent, is for Firm A to read-back the data from PHE:

• Firm A has records R1 ... R10. It computes a checksum for each record - a number which is a "summary" of the record, rather like feeding the record through a sausage machine and taking a picture of the sausage it produces.
• Firm A stores checksums C1, C2, ..., C10 corresponding to each record.
• Firm A sends records R1, R2, ..., R10 to PHE, tagged with origin 'Firm A' and date '2020-10-06'
• Firm A asks PHE to send it checksums of all records tagged 'Firm A', '2020-10-06'
• PHE reads its internal records, identifies 10 records, sends checksums D1, D2, ... D10
• Firm A checks that the number of checksums match, and each checksum is the same: if there's a discrepancy, it loudly flags this to a human.

This at least assures Firm A that its data has been received, is complete, and is safely stored.

If PHE wants to be really cunning then one time in 50 it will deliberately omit a checksum in its response, or change one bit of a checksum, and expect the firm to flag an error. If no error is raised, we know that Firm A isn't doing read-backs properly.

Now, PHE wants to aggregate its records. It has (say) 40 firms supplying data to it. So it does processing over all the records and for each record produces a result: one of "Y" (positive test), "N" (negative test), "E" (record invalid), "I" (record implausible). Because of our fake record injection, if 40 firms send 1000 records in total, we should expect zero "E" results, 120 "I" results, and the total of "Y" and "N" results should equal 880. If we calculate anything different, the system should complain loudly, and we send a human to figure out what went wrong.

The system isn't perfect - the aggregation function might accidentally skip 1 in 100 results, for instance, and through bad luck it might not skip an erroneous record. But it's still a good start.

I just pulled this process out of my posterior, and I guarantee it's more robust than what PHE had in place. So why are we paying the Test+Trace system £12 billion or more to implement a system that isn't even as good as a compsci grad would put in place in return for free home gigabit Ethernet, with an incentive scheme based around Xena tapes and Hot Pockets?

Nobody really cared if the system worked well. They just wanted to get it out of the door. No-one - at least, at the higher levels of project management - was going to be held accountable for even a failure such as this. "Lessons will be learned" platitudes will be trotted out, the company will find one or two individuals at the lower level and fire them for negligence, but any project manager not actually asleep on the job would have known this was coming. And they know it will happen again, and again, as long as the organisation implementing systems like this has no direct incentive for it to work. Indeed, the client (UK Government) probably didn't even define what "work" actually meant in terms of effective processing - and how they would measure it.