Guaranteed growth of your money every year. This will be interest-rate-driven based on the economy, but your account will move forward every year regardless of what the market does. This is compound tax-free growth and not the “average rate of return” you get with mutual funds. To be fair, in our current low-interest-rate environment, the growth rates are only in the 2 percent to 4 percent.
We all need some good news and I will give that to you.
The weather is going to improve by next weekend here in the Northwest. Much warmer and even some sun.
But there is also some bad news....we will have to get through a cool/cloudy period first.
Let's face it. It has been cool and murky this week, a situation that heightened the stress of all the virus news. Below are the temperatures at SeaTac during the past two weeks, with the normal highs and lows plotted. Our daily maximum temperatures have been well below normal the last six days. Like 5-10F below normal. Plus lots of clouds and light rain.
Tomorrow will be similar and then a much stronger system, with real rain, will hit Monday, associated an unusually energetic upper level trough (see upper level map for 5 PM Monday). If this was January, we would be worried about lowland snow with such a pattern.
Fortunately, as the week progresses an upper level ridge of high pressure will build along the West Coast and temperatures will rise. To warm you up, here is the latest forecast for high and low temperatures at SeaTac based on the European Center ensemble forecasting system (running their model many times and taking the average). High temperatures climb roughly 10 degrees between this weekend/Monday/Tuesday and later in the week. You will notice that.
The National Weather Service GEFS ensemble of many forecasts shows a cooling trend for a few days, following by warming (see below). Each forecast is plotted with a line and the black line is the average of all of them. Warming towards 60F by April 4/5.
Southern California will warm into the upper 60s to low 70s....perhaps high enough to slow down the coronavirus there. Also clearing skies and progression into spring will produce higher ultraviolet
radiation values along the southern tier of the U.S.: not good news for the virus, which can be degraded or killed by UV. Below are the forecast UV index for Sunday and Wednesday. Big improvement over the western U.S.
This is a good time to plant your spring/cool season veggies if you have a garden. That is my plan this afternoon!
Washington State has immense resources to apply to the coronavirus crisis.
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One of the leading university medical centers in the world.
Major biotech firms and a huge foundation dedicated to health science (Gates Foundation)
The world's leading logistics and delivery firm (Amazon).
One of leading brick and mortar food and supply firms (Costco)
World-leading software and machine learning firms and expertise (e.g., Microsoft, Amazon)
One of the leading tech centers in the world.
Our state has intellectual, scientific, technological, and financial resources equivalent to those of many nations.
Might we take a leadership role in tackling this crisis, not only for ourselves, but for the rest of the world as well?
Could Washington State lead the nation in heavily investing in a complementary approach to social distancing, online learning, and sending people home from work? Might Washington State fill the void left by an ineffective Federal response?
Importantly, could the current environment of despair and fear, be replaced with a more empowered one?
Imagine the following path in the future.
One in which local businesses and academic, put state capabilities on an immediate "war footing" to address the threat.
On March 18th, The University of Washington and major regional biotech firms, with the financial support of the Gates and Bezos foundations, announce that they will rapidly build the capacity to provide 100,000 tests a day for the coronavirus in Washington State, with results available within hours. This includes the purchase of several Roche cobas 6800 systems that will have the capacity of processing over a million tests per month. Such testing capacity is expect to be in place by April 10.
Governor Inslee announced on the same day that the test will be immediately available to all doctors and hospitals and that 50,000 test per day will be dedicated to random sampling of state residents. Testing at this level began on April 3rd.
Governor Inslee noted that anyone with a positive test will be experience mandatory quarantine. He further noted that a new state fund will cover the salary of any quarantined individual.
"South Korea showed that potential of coupling massive testing with quarantine, and we will take this approach to a new level", announced the Governor.
The Governor also noted that all skilled nursing and other retirement communities will require all patient and caregivers to be tested, as will all visitors. " We must take all steps required to prevent our most vulnerable citizens from being exposed to this threat".
Jeff Bezos, leader of Amazon, announced on March 17th that Amazon would deliver food and other necessary supplies without delivery charge during the next 30 days. "We will extend this offer, if the situation does not resolve itself," said Bezos. "And considering that many people are home-bound, we will make all content on Amazon Prime freely available to the general public. Amazon runs the biggest supply chain system in the world, and we will use it to assure food and other supplies will reach all home-bound" patients", said Bezos.
Costco also joined the effort, with a temporary program of no-cost delivery and the new ability to pre-order and pick up orders outside of any warehouse. "No Costco shopper need to enter a store to purchase any of our products", noted Costco CEO W. Craig Jelinek.
A major issue had been the relatively simple modeling used to predict coronavirus spread and deaths, and their relative poor performance. On March 16th, a joint effort between the University of Washington, the Gates Foundation, and the data analytics groups of Microsoft and Amazon was initiated to produce state-of-science predictive modeling for coronavirus by early April. "
Microsoft has huge capacity in predictive analytics and machine learning, with particular expertise in the medical area. Coupled with the expertise of the University of Washington and others, we will build the capability to more skillfully predict the trajectory of COVID-19 using the increasing volume of data assets" explained Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.
By June the effects of massive testing and quarantine, coupled with the isolating of the most vulnerable elderly and infirm as well as social distancing, resulted in a significant decline of new cases, with regional loss of life in Washington State far more limited than initially expected. The beneficial role of warmer weather and contribution of the large pool of now-immune young people who had mild or little symptoms may also have been important in lessening the impact of COVID-19.
Addendum: Why Massive Testing of the Population is How We Get Out of This
Social distancing may be a useful, short-term stop gap, but in the end something more effective is needed. Social distance can buy time, but it is essentially kicking the can down the road, and society can not keep it in place for long without undermining its ability to function, Economic activity will collapse.
The key aspect of social distancing is to prevent large portions of the population from getting in contact with an infected individual. It does this by shutting down all avenues of interaction and gathering. It is a blunt tool with significant negative impacts (e.g., cancellation of schools or degradation of teaching).
Far better to use a more precise tool: massive testing. Find the infected individuals and take them out of circulation. Much more effective and less damaging. This allows society to function, but it requires the ability to give tens of thousands of tests per day or more, something that is technologically well within our reach.
Another issue with social distancing is that you can never cut off interactions completely--leaving a continuous base of cases and as soon as you pull back the restraints, the virus can explode again.
Weather prediction is an essential technology that both protects the economy and saves lives.
National Weather Service personnel are considered critical personnel and are still working, but they are dependent on numerical weather prediction models, which in turn are dependent on the quality and quantity of weather data going into them.
And it appears that one important data source is declining rapidly in volume, aircraft observations.
And such observations are particularly important for the West Coast of the U.S., which has a vast ocean to our west.
To produce a numerical weather prediction, a three-dimensional description of the atmosphere needs to be created, something called the initialization. Over land there are lots of surface observations and balloon-launched weather observations (radiosondes), but obviously there are far fewer of these over the ocean. In the old days of numerical weather prediction, forecast skill was less downstream of oceans because of the large oceanic data voids.
But this situation changed profoundly with the advent of weather satellites and the use of weather observations from commercial aircraft. The oceans now had substantial numbers of observations, driving a rapid increase of weather prediction skill. Weather satellites are now the dominant source of oceanic weather information, but aircraft observations (known as ACARS observations or AMDAR) are quite important.
The distribution of aircraft observations in January 2020 is shown below (courtesy of the the European Center --ECMWF). The number of observations is shown by the colors (red and orange are the most). Importantly, the are a large number of observations between the West Coast and Hawaii, most of which are at important jet stream elevations (30,000 to 40,000 ft). There are also considerable number of observations from flight going between North America and Asia.
As noted by this graphic from ECMWF, the number of aircraft observations has grown rapidly due to more flights and increased numbers of aircraft with the appropriate weather sensors.
A number of studies have examined the importance of aircraft observations for weather prediction. As illustrated below, automated aircraft observations (AIREP) are about fourth in importance overall (more important than surface observations!), and data denial experiments at ECMWF, in which they reran forecasts without using the aircraft observations) indicated a decline of forecast skill in the upper troposphere (again roughly 30,000 to 40,000 ft) by about 10% and some degradation near the surface (by roughly 3%).
Not the end of the world, but significant. But what about regions downstream of oceans? Could the impact be larger? That is an analysis I have not seen.
But there is a problem, particularly for us on the West Coast for short-term forecasts and for the entire nation in the longer term. There is a huge decline of air travel going on now. And the decline in air travel is about to plummet.
Hawaiian Airlines will soon cancel most of its flights to the mainland, and Alaska is planning on pausing on about 70% of its flights (some to Hawaii). Flights to Asia are down profoundly already. The latest statistics from the FlightAware website indicates nearly 16,000 flight cancellation today, with nearly half cancelled out of San Francisco and about a quarter at SeaTac and LA (red colors below). This is only the beginning.
So how much degradation in forecasts will occur as aircraft observations profoundly decline? To what degree will the impacts be greater for land areas downstream of oceans?
Considering the key role of satellite observations, one might expect the degradation to be modest, but perceptible.
The latest forecast skill statistics over the Pacific/North American area (called the PNA region) available from the National Weather Service for the five-day forecast of near jet stream level (see below) does not suggest anything significant at this point (particularly since there is a lot of natural variation in forecast skill). In this plot, 1 (top) is a perfect forecast and several forecast models are shown (black--US GFS, red-European Center, green-Canadian), orange-UKMET).
Numerical experiments to determine the impact could be done, but will probably be relatively low priority.
Aircraft in flight at 9:30 AM this morning (from the wonderful FightAware site). This is already well down from normal, but a lot more than will be flying in a week
In the longer term, the impacts on weather prediction will be substantial for other reasons. Weather research and communication is being profoundly degraded. Major meetings and conferences have been canceled (including the NW Weather Workshop) and research is made difficult and far less effective. We are all trying to work at home and use online communication, but the degradation is real and will increase with time.
The COVID-19 coronavirus has caused many local governments in our area to enact measures such as curfews, call for state of emergencies and limit services such as dining at restaurants.
Below you can find how each county across the Big Bend has responded to the coronavirus pandemic. This story will be updated with new information daily.
If you see any information that is missing, send an email to web@wctv.tv.
Curfews
Several Big Bend counties or cities have enacted curfews during the COVID-19 pandemic. Click on the county or city name to learn more about the curfew.
Midway
Leon County Stay-At-Home Orders
In an effort to halt the rapid spread of COVID-19, some counties have enacted stay-at-home orders in an effort to have people go out only for essential travel/business.
Leon County COVID-19 Cases
Below is the number of cases reported by the Florida Department of Health in our local counties. The numbers were last updated at 6 p.m.
Calhoun - 0
Franklin - 0
Gadsden - 1
Hamilton - 0
Jackson - 1
Jefferson - 0
Lafayette - 0
Leon - 8
Liberty - 0
Madison - 0
Suwannee - 0
Taylor - 0
Wakulla - 0
For more on the Florida Department of Health's COVID-19 statistics, click here.
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