Category: pandemic

A good article on Covid-19 testing, a way forward, and where we screwed up

October 2, 2020 • 1:45 pm

I commend to your attention this article in The Atlantic on Covid-19.  The authors, Robinson Meyer and Alexis Madrigal (staff writers on science and technology), discuss the best ways to stem the pandemic, the advantages and disadvantages of various tests for infection, and how the U.S. screwed up in its response. Click on the screenshot to read:

It’s very good and clear on the science, though I can’t judge the efficacy of their plan, which involves continual “spit testing”, a very quick but not completely accurate way of diagnosing the virus through its antigens, like the spike protein. PCR tests are much more accurate, but are expensive and take time, yet if we do continual antigen testing, the errors tend to go away, and we could get results in 15 minutes on a strip of paper. You could do this before flights, before entering restaurants, and so on.

The problems with PCR tests are numerous, the most serious being that it can’t distinguish between a new infection, which is contagious, and one that’s a month old, which isn’t contagious. And they’re much more expensive to distribute and more time-consuming to diagnose. The authors discuss “pooling”, a cute way to cut down on money and time by bundling together swab results (or spit) from a bunch of people. If there’s no positive in the mix, you needn’t go further. If there is, you subdivide, and so on.

The main reason we screwed up is, of course, Trump. In this case the authors indict him for failing to invoke the Defense Production Act, a wartime regulation, still on the books, that allows the government to force companies to mass-produce things in case of a national crisis, like this one. One excerpt:

. . . the Trump administration has addressed the lack of testing as if it is a nuisance, not a national-security threat. In March and April, the White House encouraged as many different PCR companies to sell COVID-19 tests as possible, declining to endorse any one option. While this idea allowed for competition in theory, it was a nightmare in practice. It effectively forced major labs to invest in several different types of PCR machines at the same time, and to be ready to switch among them as needed, lest a reagent run short. Today, the government cannot use the Defense Production Act to remedy the shortage of PCR machines or reagents—because the private labs running the tests are too invested in too many different machines.

Because of its trust in PCR, and its assumption that the pandemic would quickly abate, the administration also failed to encourage companies with alternative testing technologies to develop their products. Many companies that could have started work in April waited on the sidelines, because it wasn’t clear whether investing in COVID-19 testing would make sense, Sri Kosaraju, a member of the Testing for America governing council and a former director at JP Morgan, told us.

The Trump administration hoped that the free market would right this imbalance. But firms had no incentive to invest in testing, or assurance that their investments would pay off. Consider the high costs of building an automated testing factory, as Ginkgo is doing, said Stuelpnagel, the Illumina co-founder. A company would typically amortize the costs of that investment over three to five years. But that calculation breaks down in the pandemic. “There’s no way that we’re doing high-throughput COVID testing five years from now. And I hope there’s not COVID testing being done three years from now that would require this scale of lab,” he said. Companies aren’t built to deal with that level of uncertainty, or to serve a market that would dramatically shrink, or disappear altogether, if their product did its job. Even if the experimentation would benefit the public, it doesn’t make sense for individual businesses to take on those risks.

So nothing happened—for months. Only in the past few weeks has the federal government begun to address these concerns.

Even if you don’t see the use of mass antigen testing as a big step forward until (and if) we get an effective vaccine, this article will teach you a lot.

Reminder: first MIT coronavirus lecture today at 11:30 Eastern time

September 1, 2020 • 8:15 am

Just a reminder: I announced yesterday a one-hour-a-week “all star” course at MIT on the pandemic and the virus—the first lecture in a course that goes through December 8.  There are of guest lecturers, some well known. It starts soon this morning, and note that the starting time (11:30 a.m.) is Eastern US time.

More information:

The class will run from September 1, 2020 through December 8, 2020 and begin each Tuesday at 11:30 a.m. ET. See the syllabus for lecture details.

How to watch it. The place where you go to watch the livestream is here, but you have to type in a password:

The class is open to allMIT students, as well as any eligible cross-registered students. The live stream will be available to the public, but only registered students may ask questions during the Q&A. To view the live stream, click on this link and type in the password: mit-covid. Miss a class? You’ll be able to view a video of the lecture on this page.

New MIT all-stars course on coronavirus and the pandemic starts TOMORROW (one hour per week)

August 31, 2020 • 9:00 am

Reader Andrea sent me a note about a new online course at MIT, one that you can watch for free. It starts tomorrow morning, and note that class times given are Eastern US times. It’s just one hour per week, and is likely worth your while.

Here’s the announcement, and notice all the Big Guns who are lecturing (click on screenshot to go to the page):

 

More information:

The class will run from September 1, 2020 through December 8, 2020 and begin each Tuesday at 11:30 a.m. ET. See the syllabus for lecture details.

How to watch it. The place where you go to watch the livestream is here, but you have to type in a password:

The class is open to allMIT students, as well as any eligible cross-registered students. The live stream will be available to the public, but only registered students may ask questions during the Q&A. To view the live stream, click on this link and type in the password: mit-covid. Miss a class? You’ll be able to view a video of the lecture on this page.

David Baltimore, Eric Lander, Anthony Fauci as guest speakers—how can you go wrong?

Dr. Alex’s latest advice on Covid 19, and a chance to ask questions

August 25, 2020 • 9:00 am

From time to time, my primary care physician Dr. Alex Lickerman posts articles on his website from about what’s going on with the pandemic, concentrating on the scientific research and what it means. The latest post on the website, below, “lays out the evidence for wearing masks, talks about the development of a vaccine, and answers questions about the validity of the rapid nasal swab test.” You can read it as a whole, or skip to the “bottom line” in each section. I’ll simply list the sections (Q&A’s) and the bottom lines.

Alex has kindly volunteered to answer readers’ questions about the pandemic, about vaccinations, about masks, and anything to do with the virus and how we should deal with it as individuals and as a society. So feel free to put your questions in the comments, and Alex will answer them as he has time.

Click on the screenshot to read the post:

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The sections and “bottom lines” (quotes are indented). Any take I have will be flush left, and of course each section below is followed in Alex’s post by an extensive discussion of the medical/scientific data.

Question: Will the wearing of masks in appropriate circumstances slow the pandemic?

Answer:  Probably.

BOTTOM LINE: The only way we’ll ever know for certain if mask-wearing by asymptomatic people, in the right circumstances, will reduce the spread of SARS-CoV-2 would be to prospectively assign a region (e.g., a city) to wear masks and compare its rates of infection over the same time to another region where people were assigned not to wear masks (and measure the compliance of each). The impossibility of conducting such a study at this point is obvious. Therefore, we’ll likely never be able to conclude with 100 percent certainty that mask-wearing in the right circumstances will slow the progression of the pandemic. But when we consider the sum of the evidence above, we conclude that mask-wearing by asymptomatic people, in the right circumstances, is likely to slow the progression of the pandemic.

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Question: Who should wear masks, then?

Answer: Everybody.

. . . .When you consider this data together, you have what seems on the surface to be a good argument for not wearing masks to reduce the spread of COVID-19 if you’re asymptomatic.

BOTTOM LINE: But it’s not. Here’s why: a 21 percent prevalence of asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection represents 57.9M people infected. If each of those 57.9M infected people has a 0.33 percent chance of spreading the infection without wearing a mask and does so, it would amount to roughly 191,070 transmitted infections! (Even if our estimate of the number of asymptomatic infections is off by a factor of 10, this would still amount to 19,107 infections.) We don’t know to what degree wearing a mask will decrease the risk down from 0.33 percent, but even a small amount would translate into a large number of people. Thus, while the impact of one asymptomatically infected person not wearing a mask is small, the impact of all asymptomatically infected people not wearing masks may be large. The logic of collective action requires that individuals act as if their contribution is greater than it is because only that way do enough individuals act in such a way that yields the protection society needs. We all need to tolerate inconvenience to contribute to the greater good.

Alex also discusses which masks are best. So far there are data only for which masks keep you from spreading viruses through respiratory droplets. For this N95s are the gold standard, but plebes like us can’t easily get them. He recommends using surgical masks to prevent infecting others, though most other masks seem to be about as good. And the best masks to protect YOU are probably the best masks for protecting others against you, though this isn’t 100% certain. Avoid knitted masks and single-layer cloth masks. I covered some research on this in a post a few weeks ago.

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To me, this is the most depressing part, but I can’t quarrel with the argument:

Question: Will we have a safe, effective vaccine for COVID-19, and if so, when?

Answer: Probably. But likely not until the Summer of 2021 at the very earliest.

BOTTOM LINE: Currently, there are over 140 COVID-19 vaccines in development. Given the statistics we quoted above, that means we should end up with 14 viable vaccines. There’s one RNA vaccine being tested in a Phase III trial right now with 30,000 volunteers being given the vaccine. But we predict it will take us at least until mid- or late-2021 to determine if it’s a winner because it will take at least that long to make sure the vaccine is safe and effective. Remember, the risk of adverse reactions to vaccines needs to be substantially lower than the risk of adverse reactions to medications. This is because: 1) the number of people vaccinated will be much greater than the number of people given a medication (medications for diseases are given to at most millions of people; a vaccine for COVID-19 will be given to billions of people), so even small risks of harm can mean harm is done to millions of people, and 2) the vaccines are given to healthy people, not people already suffering from a disease. Thus, the risk of adverse events from the vaccine must be compared to the risk of not just contracting the disease but of experiencing a severe adverse outcome (i.e., severe, chronic morbidity or death). So, in the case of COVID-19, if we’re considering immunizing a 12-year-old child, for example, whose risk of dying from COVID-19 is literally only 0.022 percent, the risk of a severe adverse reaction to the vaccine needs to be far below that.

Unfortunately, the history of vaccine development is replete with stories of harm. One vaccine developed against respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) in the 1960s actually caused a form of immune enhancement where the disease was worse in vaccinated children, even killing two who’d been vaccinated. In 1955, Cutter Laboratories, a small pharmaceutical company that manufactured a polio vaccine, released vaccines contaminated with fully live virus due to manufacturing errors and poor government oversight, resulting in an estimated 40,000 children being infected with polio. Two hundred victims were permanently paralyzed, and ten of them died.

We mention these cautionary tales not to add fuel the anti-vaccine movement fire, but to highlight the importance of doing the science correctly, of not rushing inadequately tested vaccines to market. The reason vaccines are among the safest of medical interventions available is because they undergo such long and rigorous safety testing. As candidates come off the pipeline, we’ll review their efficacy and safety data and make recommendations about them.

This section has a good precis on how vaccines are both developed and tested. There’s also a nice graph in this section showing the reduction of nine childhood diseases after vaccination was introduced—good ammunition against antivaxers. Alex concludes: “Immunization is one of the most effective—and safest—public health measures that exist. The prevalence of infections from diseases for which we now vaccinate children has declined by ninety percent (see chart below of effectiveness of routine childhood vaccinations). There are literally no other interventions in medicine that are as effective as vaccination.”

***********

Question: Are rapid tests worth doing, especially because the results are returned so much more rapidly

Answer: Only if the rapid test comes back positive can you believe it.

BOTTOM LINE: We don’t recommend people get a rapid test. Even though results take longer with the PCR test, a negative PCR test is more likely to be accurate. We know only one rapid test with a zero false-positive rate. Other rapid tests may not perform nearly as well.

***********

This is the tenth in Alex’s series of posts on coronavirus and the pandemic; you can see all the links at the bottom of this post. There’s a lot more to read if you’re interested.

So, if you have questions—my latest one, which I asked Alex yesterday, was “is it safe to get a haircut, and how should ensure that the experience is the safest possible?”—put them in the comments below and then check back in a while to see if they’ve been answered.

Thanks to Alex for offering his analyses and advice to the readers.

Yale reopens, but at what cost?

August 19, 2020 • 12:37 pm

Matthew called my attention to a tweet quoting this article from Yale University’s student paper, the Yale Daily News. (Click on the screenshot).

Unlike most colleges, which are closing as fast as a revolving door, Yale plans to reopen this fall with stringent health protocols in place. Only three cohorts (first- third- and fourth year students) will be able to live on campus, and while classes will mostly be conducted remotely, some, involving lab or studio work, will be live.

According to the article below, Yale’s school of public health has set out conditions for a safe reopening, which includes Covid-19 testing of all students twice a week, at a cost of $25 to $30 per test.  (The article doesn’t mention testing staff, faculty, or other employees.)

 

But this is the part that got me. (Remember that the residence heads of Silliman college used to be Nicholas and Erika Christakis, both hounded out of their Silliman jobs because of a Halloween-costume email from Erika telling students to use their own discretion.)  Here’s another, and much scarier, email (my emphasis):

From the paper:

In a July 1 email to Silliman College residents when Yale first announced its plan to reopen on-campus housing, Head of College and psychology professor Laurie Santos warned Yale’s “community compact” was not to be taken lightly, treated like some course readings and skimmed for main ideas. She explained that some staff members are from sectors of society that are particularly vulnerable to COVID-19, and that they do not have the choice of whether to come to campus. At the time, Yale was planning to test returning students once per week — a plan that the University modified several weeks later, when it announced that it would instead test students twice weekly.

“We all should be emotionally prepared for widespread infections — and possibly deaths — in our community,” Santos’s email reads. “You should emotionally prepare for the fact that your residential college life will look more like a hospital unit than a residential college.”

What the heck? Deaths and hospital units? If Dr. Santos is serious, and I assume she is, the students shouldn’t be coming back at all. In fact, I think it’s unwise for nearly any college to start live teaching with residential students this fall, and college after college is changing its plans to reopen (cf. Notre Dame, Michigan State, University of North Carolina); more will come.

Covid-19 isn’t under control, students will be converging at colleges from all over the country as well as from overseas, and many students have proven themselves unwilling to abide by quarantine restrictions. (Horrific scenes of crowded parties, without mask-wearing, have appeared often.)  And really, can you expect students to come back to school and socialize only with single other students wearing masks and staying six feet apart? What kind of college experience is that? Moreover, they’ll be living in college and learning remotely. (Living away from college and learning remotely may be safer, but it’s just as dreadful for one’s education. Were I a Yalie or a Harvard student, I’d simply take a year’s absence.

Is there any college out there that can open “safely,” that is, the risk of a viral infection is outweighed by the advantages of being together with a lot of isolated students and learning mostly from a computer screen? I can’t imagine one.

The efficacy of different face masks in reducing droplet emission

August 11, 2020 • 8:45 am

What kind of mask should you wear during the pandemic? (Yes, you should always wear one if you’re around people.) A new paper in Science Advances (click on screenshot below, free pdf here, reference at bottom) gives a tentative answer to that question, assuming that you’re wearing the mask to avoid infecting other people. And that presumes that you’re carrying the virus, symptomatic or asymptomatic. (If you’re symptomatic, you shouldn’t be going out anyway.)

Note that the question here is probably not the one many people have, which is “Which kind of mask should I wear if I don’t want to get infected by others?” This is not the same question, as some of the features of the masks that decrease their efficacy (i.e., breaking up expelled droplets into smaller droplets), might not work in reverse. In general, though, those masks that reduce the number of droplets expelled when you’re speaking should also reduce the number of droplets coming in when someone’s speaking to you. The short answer is that fitted N95 masks (which most of us can’t get) are the best at keeping your droplets in,, followed by surgical masks and then two-layer masks of polyproplylene and cotton (multiple layers, as you might guess, are important). N95 masks with valves to allow you to exhale aren’t that great, as you might also expect, and knitted or fleece masks, particularly with one layer, are pretty useless. Bandanas are dreadful—barely better than controls, yet I’ve seen many people wear them.

If you can see through your mask, it’s a clue that it’s not a good one.

Click to see the article, which I’ve summarized below:

The authors used an inexpensive setup (roughly $200) to measure expelled droplets when individuals spoke through a mask for 40 seconds, repeating the phrase, “Stay healthy, people” five times, with the protocol repeated ten times for each mask and the control (no mask) trial. Droplet size and number were measured in a dark chamber using a laser and a cellphone camera.

I’m not sure why the authors are so keen on the inexpensiveness of the apparatus, as individuals aren’t going to do this at home, and a more professional setup in a lab would surely reveal general results that wouldn’t need to be replicated on this inexpensive apparatus. At any rate, the apparatus is diagrammed below, with the diagram and caption from the paper:

(From paper): Fig. 1 Schematic of the experimental setup. A laser beam is expanded vertically by a cylindrical lens and shined through slits in the enclosure. The camera is located at the back of the box, a hole for the speaker in the front. The inset shows scattering for water particles from a spray bottle with the front of the box removed. Photo Credit: Martin Fischer, Duke University.

They used a single speaker for most of the tests to reduce variation, but also used four other speakers on 3 masks and the no-mask control (also ten replicates each) to test the replicability of the results. And they tested fourteen masks, shown below. I’ll describe them as they do in the paper, for the table they give is hard to read.

Masks marked with an asterisks were tested by four different speakers saying the same thing (one different speaker for each of three masks and the control), while the rest of the masks were tested with a single speaker. Numbers below correspond to the diagram above except for the control (no mask) and “swath” mask, which I assume is like a turtleneck pulled up.

  1. “Surgical” mask*.  3 layer
  2. Valved N95
  3. Knitted
  4. “Polyprop”: 2 layer polypropylene apron mask
  5. “Poly/cotton: 3 later cottong/polypropylene/cotton mask
  6. MaxAT mask: 1 layer Maxima AT mask
  7. “Cotton2” 2-layer cotton pleated mask
  8. “Cotton4”: 2-layer cotton, Olson-style mask
  9. “Cotton3”: 2-layer cotton pleated style mask
  10. “Cotton1” 1-layer cotton, pleated style mask
  11. Fleece: Gaiter type neck fleece
  12. “Bandana”*: Double layer bandana
  13. Cotton5*: 2-layer cotton, pleated-style mask
  14. Fitted n95 mask: no exhalation valve and fitted
  15. “Swath” mask: swath of polypropylene mask material (not shown)
  16. “None”: control 

And the results in short are below, showing the number of droplet counts, relative to the control (green dot to the right). 1 means as many droplets expelled as with no mask, while close to zero means almost no droplets expelled relative to no mask. All black dots represent the means of ten replicates with a single (and the same0 speaker (lines are standard deviations), while the four colored dots represent the means for four other speakers. These are close to the single speaker using all three tested, giving confidence that the results may be general. Have a look:

(From paper): Droplet transmission through face masks. (A) Relative droplet transmission through the corresponding mask. Each solid data point represents the mean and standard deviation over 10 trials for the same mask, normalized to the control trial (no mask), and tested by one speaker. The hollow data points are the mean and standard deviations of the relative counts over four speakers. A plot with a logarithmic scale is shown in Supplementary Fig. S1.

 

Swath masks, which did well (fifth best) but aren’t shown, involve wearing swaths of polypropylene mask material, as shown below (source of photo is here, which gives a simpler summary of the recommendations):
Even cotton masks are okay, with 1 layer being better than pleated, but when you get to the knitted masks, bandanas, and fleece masks (which produced more droplets, probably by breaking up the big ones into smaller ones), you’d best avoid them.

So what does this mean for you? Assuming that you can’t get a fitted N95 mask, your best bets are surgical masks, which are available (remember, these are designed to keep medical professionals from exhaling microbes into patients’ wounds and bodies), multilayered poly/cotton and poly/propylene (masks 4 and 5 above), or a “swath” of mask material (polypropylene), shown above. If you have a choice, get a surgical mask, or wear masks 4 or 5. But, except for fleece, some mask is better than no mask.

Caveats: Remember first that these masks are tested for EXHALED DROPLETS, not droplets inhaled, which would be harder to test. So sites that imply that these are the “best masks for you to wear” are leaving out that crucial information. I suspect there will be a correlation, but perhaps not a perfect one.

The authors offer other caveats, like the inability to measure total droplets in the chamber, and their use of a cellphone camera, which reduces sensitivity to detecting laser-reflecting particles. Even so, the droplets that could be detected in this method are half a micron: 0.001 mm or 0.00004 inches, which are small. They also emphasize the small number of speakers (five, with most masks tested using a single—and the same—speaker), and that would warrant replication, since some people speak more or less forcefully than the speaker they tested.

These are the necessary reservations, but these are valuable data nonetheless. But again, remember that these data tell you how to protect other people from your exhaled droplets. Even so, I’d suggest getting yourself some 3-layer surgical masks if you can. I believe you can re-use them if you let them disinfect for a week or so before you wear them again, but I’m not an expert here, so take that with a grain of salt and do your own checking.

h/t: SImon

_____________

Fischer, E. P., M. C. Fischer, D. Grass, I. Henrion, W. S. Warren, and E. Westman. 2020. Low-cost measurement of facemask efficacy for filtering expelled droplets during speech. Science Advances:eabd3083.

The MS Roald Amundsen becomes a Petri dish

August 4, 2020 • 1:45 pm

Several readers informed me about the coronavirus outbreak on the MS Roald Amundsen, the ship I was on last fall as a lecturer for five weeks in Antarctica, Patagonia, and the Falkland Islands. The article below is from Ars Technica (click on screenshot), and there’s another from the BBC.  It’s a sad tale of something unspecified gone wrong, but I was informed of it by the ship’s parent company, Hurtigruten, several days ago. I was hoping against hope that I’d be invited back to the Antarctic to lecture again this year, but in light of this, there’s no way that’s going to happen. (I was hoping against hope that they’d have a vaccine by then, and, if not, even musing about whether I’d take a chance and go unvaccinated, which is how much I love the Antarctic.)

The kicker is that in the picture below, taken on November 19 of last year, I was on that ship! 

It’s not clear what went wrong (the company says it didn’t follow its procedures properly), but on a trip to Svalbard (Spitzbergen), 41 passengers (the BBC says 41, Ars Technica says 34) and crew tested positive for Covid-19, and hundreds on board are being quarantined back in Norway. Four have been hospitalized. Hurtigruten was the the first cruise line in the world to resume trips while the pandemic was still going on, and the results weren’t pretty.

Ars Technica reports:

MS Roald Amundsen is run by the Norwegian firm Hurtigruten, which in mid-June became the first cruise ship operator in the world to resume voyages amid the coronavirus pandemic. Hurtigruten assured travelers that it followed national public health guidelines and touted safety precautions for passengers on board, including social distancing, increased hygiene and sanitation protocols, and a vow to sail at no more than 50 percent capacity.

And indeed, the ship was loaded with hand sanitizing machines and we were repeatedly instructed last fall, before the pandemic hit, to keep our hands sanitized and clean. The company is, after all, well known for the scientific nature of its trips: there are no casinos, bells, or whistles: just landings ashore and science lectures, three of which were given by me. I loved it. One would think that of all cruise ships, this one would be the safest. But apparently, with the crew from East Asia and passengers from all over Europe, there would be no way to keep an infection off the ship. And so it happened.

In the wake of the outbreak, the company has suspended all cruises. Norway’s government has also banned cruise ships carrying more than 100 people from disembarking passengers at its ports for 14 days.

The conclusion may seem foregone. The pandemic kicked off with multiple outbreaks on cruise ships, leaving some vessels desperately seeking ports that would accept them while isolating vacationing passengers in their tiny cabins. The most notable was the Diamond Princess, which docked in Yokohama, Japan on February 3 and held passengers and crew in quarantines for weeks. Of the 3,711 passengers and crew originally on board, 712 became infected with the coronavirus and 13 died.

Mistakes

The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notes that cruise ships are uniquely prone to infectious disease outbreaks because of the social nature of the ships and the fact that they bring travelers from many places together. The CDC has issued a “No Sail Order” for cruise ships that is set to last until September 30, unless it is rescinded or extended.

Still, Hurtigruten CEO Daniel Skjeldamsaid seemed to pin the outbreak onboard its ship to rule-breaking. “A preliminary evaluation shows a breakdown in several of our internal procedures,” Skjeldamsaid said in a statement to the BBC.

“This is a serious situation for everyone involved,” he went on. “We have not been good enough and we have made mistakes.”

Coronavirus cases onboard MS Roald Amundsen span two voyages, one that departed July 17 and another that departed July 24. There were 387 passengers total on the two legs, of which five have tested positive so far. Local authorities scrambled to track down passengers who had already disembarked, making sure that they went into quarantine and received testing.

Of the 158-person crew, 36 have tested positive. Thirty-two of the infected crew are from the Philippines and the rest are from Norway, France, and Germany. Crew were tested prior to leaving their countries, but were not required to quarantine before coming aboard.

And so it goes. They’ve canceled all cruises until at least late fall, and I suspect winter is off, too. The hope for a return to Antarctica was keeping me going, so for me this is a major downer. But not as much of a downer as for the passengers and crew who have the virus, four of whom are hospitalized. I wish them a speedy recovery. And since my experience with Hurtigruten was totally positive, so much so that I’d lecture on any of their adventure trips, I wish the company well, too, and hope it finds out what happens, ensures that it won’t happen again, and resumes cruises only when it’s (nearly) absolutely safe to do so.

Better days to come, I hope. One of my photos showing the ship: