It’s OK to Just Stay Home

Covid-19 Transmission graphic

Just stay home, that’s all you need to do to help. There’s no need to give yourself anxiety about what else you could be doing to help. Take this at home time to relax, and forget about the all the bizarre social pressure to be always performing. It’s ok to just be yourself. You can do it!

I’ve seen this happen to a lot of people. The best thing that 99% of us can do is to stay home. Yet, that can feel like doing nothing, because we see other people out there actively doing something. Yet, passively doing nothing, in this case, is actively doing something: You are taking the best action for our collective safety and health. My student also pointed out that the best thing to do — stay at home — is oddly uncomfortable. I think many of us can relate to this. The discomfort of feeling stuck or trapped inside can heighten the desire to be active in general, creating an even bigger contrast between staying put and helping outside of the home.

What’s going on here and how do we work with these feelings?

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How We can Track COVID-19 and NOT Invade Your Privacy

To figure out the spread of COIV-19, or other diseases, the technique of contact tracing gets used by researchers to decipher who is likely to have been exposed. When too many people are infected then contact tracing takes too much labour and subsequently becomes less useful, which has led tech companies and government to propose the ability to track you everywhere you go. You might think “what’s the big deal?”, the big deal is that this tracking will continue past the pandemic and it doesn’t need to happen in the first place. There are ways to build technical contact tracing without the government or an undemocratic mega-corporation spying or profiteering off of your personal location.

The wonderful Nicky Case put together a comic explaining how we can have technologically-driven contact tracing without spying on your everyday actions.

nick case covid tracking privacy

Read the comic.

Technical documents:
Decentralized Privacy-Preserving Proximity Tracing
Temporary Contact Numbers, a decentralized, privacy-first contact tracing protocol
Quantifying SARS-CoV-2 transmission suggests epidemic control with digital contact tracing

Mental Health Tips to Help You Get Through Social Distancing

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Weeks of practicing social distancing can get tiring since we don’t feel as physically connected to our social groups as normal. That’s ok, we all feel that way. So what do we do about it? We can practice good mental health hygiene too.

Over at Discover they have seven tips from a clinical psychologist to help you find ways to mirage any anxiety or stress you’re currently feeling due to the pandemic. You don’t have to take all their advice, but some might be worth considering for you and maybe your entire household.

Routine is your friend
It helps to manage anxiety, and will help you to adapt more quickly to this current reality. Create clear distinctions between work and non-work time, ideally in both your physical workspace and your head space. Find something to do that is not work and is not virus-related that brings you joy. Working in short bursts with clear breaks will help to maintain your clarity of thought.

Be compassionate with yourself and with others
There is much that we cannot control right now, but how we talk to ourselves during these challenging times can either provide a powerful buffer to these difficult circumstances or amplify our distress. Moments of feeling overwhelmed often come with big thoughts, such as “I cannot do this,” or “This is too hard.” This pandemic will cause a lot of stress for many of us, and we cannot be our best selves all the time. But we can ask for help or reach out when help is asked of us.

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Are you Creative? The UN Wants Your Help Fighting COVID-19

If you are a creative individual or work at a company that produces creative content then the United Nations wants your help. The UN has put out a call for creatives to produce engaging content to educate people about how to be safe during this pandemic. They are looking for anything from posters, marketing campaigns, songs, films, anything! This might be your opportunity to pick up painting again or whatever artistic hobby you’ve been neglecting. Submissions are open now and now’s your chance to help the UN help all of us.

Check out my Twitter bot Jam This Game if you’re in need of some creative inspiration.

The United Nations (UN) needs your help in translating critical public health messages, into work that will engage and inform people across different cultures, languages, communities and platforms. The shortlisted work will reach everyone, everywhere.

We need your submissions from day 1. The UN will continually review the submissions, and shortlist the most suitable work to become visible on a microsite, and accessible to everyone – supporting media, brands, influencers etc – around the world, who can download and use the work across their platforms in support of this cause.

It is not too late. No one can do everything, but everyone can do something. Together, we can save lives, protect resources and care for each other.

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Folding@Home now Faster Than Fastest Supercomputer

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Scientists can use your help folding. In particular they could use your computer to help understand how proteins fold. In order to understand viruses and ways to fight them it helps to run simulations to see how proteins interact with each other. You can get your computer to devote a percentage of it’s computational power to helping that research, and thanks to enough people doing that the Folding@Home network is now more powerful than the fastest supercomputer!

If you have access to multiple computers you can spin them up and get them computing towards helping researchers create more efficient and safer drugs.

The outbreak of COVID-19 has been taxing for a number of computational biology and chemistry projects. IBM recently formed its COVID-19 High Performance Computing Consortium that pools together major supercomputers run by various research institutions and technology companies in the USA to run research simulations in epidemiology, bioinformatics, and molecular modeling. Cumulative performance of supercomputers participating in IBM’s COVID-19 HPC Consortium is 330 PetaFLOPS.

Folding@home distributed computing project uses compute capabilities to run simulations of protein dynamics in a bid to better understand them and find cures for various diseases. Recently F@H started to run projects simulating theoretically druggable protein targets from SARS-CoV-2, which attracted a lot of attention as SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19 are clearly the hottest topics these days.

Read more.

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