This is an article on the controversy over continuing construction in residential and mixed-residential neighborhoods in Palo Alto during the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic:
Clearly many people in the region share my concern for the baffling continuation of clearly non-essential construction projects in densely populated residential and mixed residential neighborhoods. The apartment complex across the street from me is clearly a luxury apartment complex aimed at prosperous Apple, Google, and other high tech employees. There are several going up in the neighborhood, in a number of cases having knocked down less expensive apartments to make room. The builders and their allies in the city/county/state may well claim they are “mixed use,” but … seriously?
Given the severity of the claims about COVID-19 one should question the wisdom of continuing even genuine affordable housing projects in highly populated areas.
It is becoming increasingly clear that many people will not be symptomatic during an active infection. Huge numbers are being revealed by the testing. Thus, measures such as body temperature checks, asking workers with coughs to stay home etc., — touted by the construction companies in the article — will not be effective in halting the spread of the disease.
Having said that, the actual mortality rate and ease of transmission of the disease, as well as other key factors, are not known. People should calm down and press hard to get these and other critical numbers evaluated quickly, accurately in an open “transparent” manner.
(C) 2020 by John F. McGowan, Ph.D.
About Me
John F. McGowan, Ph.D. solves problems using mathematics and mathematical software, including developing gesture recognition for touch devices, video compression and speech recognition technologies. He has extensive experience developing software in C, C++, MATLAB, Python, Visual Basic and many other programming languages. He has been a Visiting Scholar at HP Labs developing computer vision algorithms and software for mobile devices. He has worked as a contractor at NASA Ames Research Center involved in the research and development of image and video processing algorithms and technology. He has published articles on the origin and evolution of life, the exploration of Mars (anticipating the discovery of methane on Mars), and cheap access to space. He has a Ph.D. in physics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a B.S. in physics from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).