The following message is part of a campaign to raise public awareness and resources in light of the global threat posed by COVID-19 on World Health Day. If you have the resources, please consider contributing in any of the ways listed at the end of this post. Remember to adhere to current local health guidelines wherever you are, which may differ from those referenced in this post.
Now that the world has woken up to the danger that we face in the Covid-19 pandemic, and world leaders have begun to grapple with the problem in policy terms, many individuals have justifiably wondered how long this crisis will last. The answer is, we don’t know. I’m going to repeat this several times, because it’s important to come to terms with this. For all meaningful purposes, we are living through an event that has never happened before. Yes, there have been pandemics this bad in the long ago, and yes, there have been various outbreaks in recent memory, but there has not been a pandemic which is as deadly, and as contagious, which we have failed to contain so spectacularly, recently enough to use it is a clear point of reference. This means that every prediction is not just speculation, but speculation born of an imperfect mosaic.
Nevertheless, it seems clear that unless we are willing to accept tens of millions of deaths in every country, humanity will need to settle in for a long war. With the language of the US President and Queen Elizabeth, the metaphor is apt. Whether “long” may mean a few months, or into next year will depend on several factors, among them whether a culture which has for many decades been inculcated with the notion of personal whimsy and convenience is able to adapt to collective sacrifice. The longer we take to accept the gravity of the threat, the weaker our response will be, and the longer it will take us to recover. Right now all of humanity face a collective choice. Either we will stubbornly ignore reality, and pay the price with human tragedy of hitherto-fore unimaginable proportions, and repercussions for decades to come, or we will listen to experts and hunker down, give support to those who need it, and help each other through the storm.
For those who look upon empty streets and bare shelves and proclaim the apocalypse, I have this to say: it is only the apocalypse if we make it such. Granted, it is conceivable that if we lose sight of our goals and our capabilities, either by blind panic or stubborn ignorance, we may find the structures of our society overwhelmed, and the world we know may collapse. This is indeed a possibility, but a possibility which it is entirely within our collective capacity to avoid. The data clearly shows that by taking care of ourselves at home, and avoiding contact with other people or surfaces, we can slow the spread of the virus. With the full mobilization of communities, we can starve the infection of new victims entirely. But even a partial slowing of cases buys us time. With that most valuable of currencies, we can expand hospital capacity, retool our production, and focus our tremendous scientific effort towards forging new weapons in this fight.
Under wartime pressure, the global scientific community is making terrific strides. Every day, we are learning more about our enemy, and discovering new ways to give ourselves the advantage. Drugs which prove useful are being deployed as fast as they can be produced. With proper coordination from world leaders, production of these drugs can be expanded to give every person the best fighting chance should they become sick. The great challenges now are staying the course, winning the battle for production, and developing humanity’s super weapon.
Staying the course is fairly simple. For the average individual not working essential jobs, it means staying home, avoiding contact as much as possible, and taking care to stay healthy. For communities and organizations, it means encouraging people to stay at home by making this as easy as possible. Those working essential jobs should be given whatever resources they need to carry on safely. Those staying at home need to have the means to do so, both logistically and psychologically. Logistically, many governments are already instituting emergency financial aid to ensure the many people out of work are able to afford staying home, and many communities have used volunteers or emergency workers such as national guard troops to support deliveries of essentials, in order to keep as many people as possible at home. Psychologically, many groups are offering online activities, and many public figures have taken to providing various forms of entertainment and diversion.
Winning the battle for production is harder, but still within reach. Hospitals are very resource intensive at the best of times. Safety in a healthcare setting means the use of large amounts of single-use disposable materials, in terms of drugs and delivery mechanisms, but also personal protective equipment such as masks, gowns, and gloves. If COVID-19 is a war, ventilators are akin to tanks, but PPE are akin to ammunition. Just as it is counterproductive and harmful to ration how many bullets or grenades a soldier may need to use to win a battle, so too is it counterproductive and harmful to insist that our frontline healthcare workers make do with a limited amount of PPE.
The size and scope of the present crisis, taken with the amount of time we have to act, demands a global industrial mobilization unprecedented during peacetime, and unseen in living memory. It demands either that individuals exhibit self discipline and a regard for the common good, or central authorities control the distribution of scarce necessities. It demands that we examine new ways of meeting production needs while minimizing the number of people who must be kept out at essential jobs. For the individual, this mobilization may require further sacrifice; during the mobilization of WWII, certain commodities such as automobiles, toys, and textiles were unavailable or out of reach. This is the price we paid to beat back the enemy at the gates, and today we find ourselves in a similar boat. All of these measures are more effective if taken calmly in advance by central government, but if they are not they will undoubtedly be taken desperately by local authorities.
Lastly, there is the challenge of developing a tool which will put an end to the threat of millions of deaths. In terms of research, there are several avenues which may yield fruit. Many hopes are pinned on a vaccine, which would grant immunity to uninfected, and allow us to contain the spread without mass quarantine. Other researchers are looking for a drug, perhaps an antiviral or immunomodulator which might make COVID-19 treatable at home with a pill, much like Tamiflu blunted the worst of H1N1. Still others are searching for antibodies which could be synthesized en masse, to be infused to the blood of vulnerable patients. Each of these leads requires a different approach. However, they all face the common challenge of not only proving safety and effectiveness against COVID-19, but giving us an understandable mechanism of action.
Identifying the “how and why” is not merely of great academic interest, but a pressing medical concern. Coronaviruses are notoriously unstable and prone to mutation; indeed there are those who speculate that COVID-19 may be more than one strain. Finding a treatment or vaccine without understanding our enemy exposes us to the risk of other strains emerging, undoing our hard work and invalidating our collective sacrifices. Cracking the COVID-19 code is a task of great complexity, requiring a combination of human insight and brilliance, bold experimentation, luck, and enormous computational resources. And like the allied efforts against the German enigma, today’s computer scientists have given us a groundwork to build off.
Unraveling the secrets of COVID-19 requires modeling how viral proteins fold and interact with other molecules and proteins. Although protein folding follows fairly simple rules, the computational power required to actually simulate them is enormous. For this, scientists have developed the Folding@Home distributed computing project. Rather than constructing a new supercomputer which would exceed all past attempts, this project aims to harness the power of unused personal computers in a decentralized network. Since the beginning of March, Folding@Home has focused its priorities on COVID-19 related modeling, and has been inundated with people donating computing power, to the point that they had to get help from other web services companies because simulations being completed faster than their web servers could assign them.
At the beginning of March, the computing power of the entire project clocked in at around 700 petaflops, FLOPS being a unit of computing power, meaning Floating Point Operations Per Second. During the Apollo moonshot, a NASA supercomputer would average somewhere around 100,000 FLOPS. Two weeks ago, they announced a new record in the history of computing: more than an exaflop of constant distributed computing power, or 10^18 FLOPS. With the help of Oracle and Microsoft, by the end of March, Folding@Home exceeded 1.5 Exaflops. These historic and unprecedented feats are a testament to the ability of humanity to respond to a challenge. Every day this capacity is maintained or exceeded brings us closer to breaking the viral code and ending the scourge.
Humanity’s great strength has always lay in our ability to learn, and to take collective action based on reason. Beating back COVID-19 will entail a global effort, in which every person has an important role to play. Not all of us can work in a hospital or a ventilator factory, but there’s still a way each of us can help. If you can afford to donate money, the World Health Organization’s Solidarity Fund is coordinating humanity’s response to the pandemic. Folding@Home is using the power of your personal computers to crack the COVID-19 code. And if nothing else, every person who stays healthy by staying home, washing hands, wearing homemade masks and keeping social distance is one less person to treat in the ICU.