Does it make sense to do this at an event that lasts 3 days? Is it worth the costs of such an intervention, relative to doing this in a space that’s occupied long-term (e.g. Trajan House)?
In other words, are there candidate interventions that only require mobile equipment and not (semi-)permanent changes to buildings?
Yeah there are considerations on both sides. On the one hand, you can’t install permanent changes and it’s a short period of time. On the other, events where large numbers of people mix from a wide number of locations probably have a unique role in spreading infectious disease + conferences have a unique need to prove COVID safety and venues might compete on those grounds, so establishing a model in that context could be particularly useful.
It’s not that I think “get all EA offices to implement optimal indoor air safety” is a bad idea (or necessarily a worse idea than EA Global doing it), and I’ll probably send some emails today in that vein. But the EA Global version appeals to me for two reasons: 1. It is a shared space for the EA community (unlike particular offices owned by particular organizations), which makes it a chance for us to express our values; and 2. the fact that it’s an event on a specific date creates a deadline, which i think has a lot of value in improving productivity and forcing decisions.
At EAGx Berlin just now, I and a few others discussed 80⁄20 interventions.
My first suggestion was mandatory FFP2 or better masks indoors and many outdoors activities, ideally with some sort of protection from rain – a roof or tent.
Another participant anticipated the objection that people would probably object to that that it’s harder to read facial expressions with masks, which could make communication harder for those people who are good at using and reading facial expressions. A counter-suggestion was hence to mandate masks only for the listeners during talks since that is a time when they might fill a room with Covid spray but don’t need to talk.
Improving the air quality is another good option that I do a lot at home but haven’t modeled. It feels like one that is particularly suitable to EA offices and group houses.
The Less Wrong Community Weekend in Berlin was successful with very rigorous testing every day with the most sensitive test that is available.
All in all I would just like to call for a lot more risk modeling to get a better idea of the magnitude of the risks to EA and EAs, and then proportionate solutions (technical or social) to mitigate the various sources of risk. Some solution may be better suited for short events, some for offices and group houses.
This seems all easily important enough that someone should quantitatively model it.
Without mask, the event cost 6 years of EA time (continuous, so 24 hours in a day, not 8 h). Maybe it was worth it, maybe not, hard to tell. But if everyone had worn N95 or better masks, that would’ve been down to about 17 days. They could’ve kept about 100% of the value of EAG while reducing the risk to < 1%.
If the event really had more like 900 attendees, then that’s almost 20 years of EA time that is lost in expectation through these events. I’m not trying to model this conservatively; I don’t know in which direction I’m erring.
One objection that I can see is that maybe this increases the time lost from EAGs by some low single digit factor, and since the event is only 3 days long, that doesn’t seem so bad on an individual level. (Some people spend over a week on a single funding application, so if it’s rejected, maybe that comes with a similar time cost.)
Another somewhat cynical objection could be that maybe there’s the risk that someone doesn’t contribute to the effective altruism enterprise throughout two decades of their life because they were put off by having to wear a mask and so never talked to someone who could answer their objections to EA. Maybe losing a person like that is as bad as a few EAs losing a total of 20 years of their lives. This seems overly cynical to me, but I can’t easily argue against it either.
I don’t think the OP was talking about interventions that require action from participants, like masks and testing, but rather about ones that the organisers deploy independently.
Testing everyone might be good for COVID prevention, but again I think the point of the OP is about preventing airborne infections in general and not just COVID.
I wasn’t in the last EAG London but I think there were ~1500 people. I did go to the previous one, which had ~1000 people.
That EAG London that I attended published details about every COVID case discovered in some time period after the conference (10 days or so?). I think there were <20 infections out of those 1000 people. Does that match your model?
Another note on 4: A friend of mine contracted Covid at EAGx and says that she knows of many people how have. That’s just one pick from almost a thousand people. Her bubble may be unusually Covidious due to being a bubble with Covid though. So I don’t think Microcovid overestimates the risk of infection.
I’ve so far used the individual’s risk of infection and multiplied it with the number of individuals. But of course these people infect each other, so they are very much not independent. I would imagine that an EAG has either very few or very many infections. So that would require tracking the number over the course of several events to be able to average over them.
But a relatively Covid-conscious event like the Less Wrong Community Weekend may also cause or be correlated with more people afterwards reporting their Covid infections. A more Covid-oblivious EAG probably suffers underreporting afterwards. Maybe 10x from the same source that causes people not to fill in feedback surveys unless they are strongly coerced to and maybe another 10x from bad tests and bad sample-taking.
Some people don’t have the routine figured out of rubbing the swap first against the tonsils and then sticking it through the nose all the way down into the throat. Plus there are order-of-magnitude differences in the sensitivity of the self-tests. Bad tests and bad sample-taking can easily make a difference of 10x among the people who think they just had a random cold. So maybe a follow-up survey should ask about symptoms rather than confirmed positive tests, be embedded in various other feedback questions (so that it’s not just filled in by people with Covid), and then be used as a sample to extrapolate to the whole attendee population.
I’ve been trying to find studies on medical conferences but the only one I could find had various safety mechanisms in place, very much unlike EAGx, so it’s unsurprising that very few people got Covid. (I’m assuming that the vaccination statuses of the attendees are similar between a medical conference and an EAG.)
Yeah, but I can see Guy’s point that there’s some threshold where an event is short enough that a social intervention is cheaper than a technical one, so that different solutions are best for different contexts. But I don’t really have an opinion on that.
Hmm, true. Testing for fever maybe?
Thanks!
My model (based on Microcovid) would’ve predicted about 9 cases (3–26) for a 1,000-person event around nowish in Berlin. I don’t have easy access to the data of London back then, but the case count must’ve been higher. With these numbers we “only” lose about a year of EA time in expectation and have less than one case of long-covid.
Thanks for spending the time thinking about this! My focus had not been masks because, insofar as they would make EAG safer in a cost-beneficial way, I don’t think increasing mask adoption at EAG would have strong follow-on effects on other actors/the personal protective equipment (PPE) field in general. On the other hand, interventions to clean the air directly (ventilation, filtration, and UV light) seem to require better piloting on the critical path to wide adoption. Since a world with clean indoor air has both near-term health and long-term existential safety benefits my hypothesis is that piloting them in EA spaces is uniquely attractive compared to masks.
I know a lot of EAG biosecurity groups are excited about next-gen PPE and insofar as prototypes become available where EAG could serve as a useful testing ground, I’d become much more excited about implementing PPE there.
That said, I acknowledge your arguments that the direct benefits to EA health may justify masking. I personally do tend towards the “I dislike wearing masks; I think they impose real burdens that likely outweigh the health benefits for EAs” side of things, but I don’t feel like my view on that is particularly well-justified.
Does it make sense to do this at an event that lasts 3 days? Is it worth the costs of such an intervention, relative to doing this in a space that’s occupied long-term (e.g. Trajan House)?
In other words, are there candidate interventions that only require mobile equipment and not (semi-)permanent changes to buildings?
Fortunately, yes. Within-room UVC (upper-room 254nm and lower-room 222nm) can be provided by mobile lights on tripod stands.
This is what the JHU Center for Health Security did for their IAQ conference last month. (Pictures at https://twitter.com/DrNikkiTeran/status/1567864920087138304 )
Yeah there are considerations on both sides. On the one hand, you can’t install permanent changes and it’s a short period of time. On the other, events where large numbers of people mix from a wide number of locations probably have a unique role in spreading infectious disease + conferences have a unique need to prove COVID safety and venues might compete on those grounds, so establishing a model in that context could be particularly useful.
It’s not that I think “get all EA offices to implement optimal indoor air safety” is a bad idea (or necessarily a worse idea than EA Global doing it), and I’ll probably send some emails today in that vein. But the EA Global version appeals to me for two reasons: 1. It is a shared space for the EA community (unlike particular offices owned by particular organizations), which makes it a chance for us to express our values; and 2. the fact that it’s an event on a specific date creates a deadline, which i think has a lot of value in improving productivity and forcing decisions.
At EAGx Berlin just now, I and a few others discussed 80⁄20 interventions.
My first suggestion was mandatory FFP2 or better masks indoors and many outdoors activities, ideally with some sort of protection from rain – a roof or tent.
Another participant anticipated the objection that people would probably object to that that it’s harder to read facial expressions with masks, which could make communication harder for those people who are good at using and reading facial expressions. A counter-suggestion was hence to mandate masks only for the listeners during talks since that is a time when they might fill a room with Covid spray but don’t need to talk.
Improving the air quality is another good option that I do a lot at home but haven’t modeled. It feels like one that is particularly suitable to EA offices and group houses.
The Less Wrong Community Weekend in Berlin was successful with very rigorous testing every day with the most sensitive test that is available.
All in all I would just like to call for a lot more risk modeling to get a better idea of the magnitude of the risks to EA and EAs, and then proportionate solutions (technical or social) to mitigate the various sources of risk. Some solution may be better suited for short events, some for offices and group houses.
This seems all easily important enough that someone should quantitatively model it.
I did the math for the last EAG London, though I underestimated the attendee count by 3–4x. (Does someone know the number?)
Without mask, the event cost 6 years of EA time (continuous, so 24 hours in a day, not 8 h). Maybe it was worth it, maybe not, hard to tell. But if everyone had worn N95 or better masks, that would’ve been down to about 17 days. They could’ve kept about 100% of the value of EAG while reducing the risk to < 1%.
If the event really had more like 900 attendees, then that’s almost 20 years of EA time that is lost in expectation through these events. I’m not trying to model this conservatively; I don’t know in which direction I’m erring.
One objection that I can see is that maybe this increases the time lost from EAGs by some low single digit factor, and since the event is only 3 days long, that doesn’t seem so bad on an individual level. (Some people spend over a week on a single funding application, so if it’s rejected, maybe that comes with a similar time cost.)
Another somewhat cynical objection could be that maybe there’s the risk that someone doesn’t contribute to the effective altruism enterprise throughout two decades of their life because they were put off by having to wear a mask and so never talked to someone who could answer their objections to EA. Maybe losing a person like that is as bad as a few EAs losing a total of 20 years of their lives. This seems overly cynical to me, but I can’t easily argue against it either.
My Guesstimate model is here.
Sorry that I only have time for a short reply:
I don’t think the OP was talking about interventions that require action from participants, like masks and testing, but rather about ones that the organisers deploy independently.
Testing everyone might be good for COVID prevention, but again I think the point of the OP is about preventing airborne infections in general and not just COVID.
I wasn’t in the last EAG London but I think there were ~1500 people. I did go to the previous one, which had ~1000 people.
That EAG London that I attended published details about every COVID case discovered in some time period after the conference (10 days or so?). I think there were <20 infections out of those 1000 people. Does that match your model?
Another note on 4: A friend of mine contracted Covid at EAGx and says that she knows of many people how have. That’s just one pick from almost a thousand people. Her bubble may be unusually Covidious due to being a bubble with Covid though. So I don’t think Microcovid overestimates the risk of infection.
I’ve so far used the individual’s risk of infection and multiplied it with the number of individuals. But of course these people infect each other, so they are very much not independent. I would imagine that an EAG has either very few or very many infections. So that would require tracking the number over the course of several events to be able to average over them.
But a relatively Covid-conscious event like the Less Wrong Community Weekend may also cause or be correlated with more people afterwards reporting their Covid infections. A more Covid-oblivious EAG probably suffers underreporting afterwards. Maybe 10x from the same source that causes people not to fill in feedback surveys unless they are strongly coerced to and maybe another 10x from bad tests and bad sample-taking.
Some people don’t have the routine figured out of rubbing the swap first against the tonsils and then sticking it through the nose all the way down into the throat. Plus there are order-of-magnitude differences in the sensitivity of the self-tests. Bad tests and bad sample-taking can easily make a difference of 10x among the people who think they just had a random cold. So maybe a follow-up survey should ask about symptoms rather than confirmed positive tests, be embedded in various other feedback questions (so that it’s not just filled in by people with Covid), and then be used as a sample to extrapolate to the whole attendee population.
I’ve been trying to find studies on medical conferences but the only one I could find had various safety mechanisms in place, very much unlike EAGx, so it’s unsurprising that very few people got Covid. (I’m assuming that the vaccination statuses of the attendees are similar between a medical conference and an EAG.)
Yeah, but I can see Guy’s point that there’s some threshold where an event is short enough that a social intervention is cheaper than a technical one, so that different solutions are best for different contexts. But I don’t really have an opinion on that.
Hmm, true. Testing for fever maybe?
Thanks!
My model (based on Microcovid) would’ve predicted about 9 cases (3–26) for a 1,000-person event around nowish in Berlin. I don’t have easy access to the data of London back then, but the case count must’ve been higher. With these numbers we “only” lose about a year of EA time in expectation and have less than one case of long-covid.
Thanks for spending the time thinking about this! My focus had not been masks because, insofar as they would make EAG safer in a cost-beneficial way, I don’t think increasing mask adoption at EAG would have strong follow-on effects on other actors/the personal protective equipment (PPE) field in general. On the other hand, interventions to clean the air directly (ventilation, filtration, and UV light) seem to require better piloting on the critical path to wide adoption. Since a world with clean indoor air has both near-term health and long-term existential safety benefits my hypothesis is that piloting them in EA spaces is uniquely attractive compared to masks.
I know a lot of EAG biosecurity groups are excited about next-gen PPE and insofar as prototypes become available where EAG could serve as a useful testing ground, I’d become much more excited about implementing PPE there.
That said, I acknowledge your arguments that the direct benefits to EA health may justify masking. I personally do tend towards the “I dislike wearing masks; I think they impose real burdens that likely outweigh the health benefits for EAs” side of things, but I don’t feel like my view on that is particularly well-justified.
I see! Yeah, I don’t have an overview of the bottlenecks in the biosecurity ecosystem, so that’s good to consider.
Having to wear masks would reduce the value of EAG by >20% for me, mostly due to making 1-1s worse.