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Showing posts from May, 2021

A Mask Protocol

The SARS-COV-2 [1] virus pandemic that started in late 2019 and took over the planet in 2020 has been the big news of late. I don't think there is anyone on the planet who does not know about the virus and its impact on the world. XPrize [2] held a competition in 2020 called the XPrize Pandemic Response Challenge [3]. I competed in this challenge and made it to the final. The competition concerned itself with creating two kinds of models, one to predict mortality and morbidity, and another to predict intervention policy. The first round was the prediction portion where my model performed quite well. The model I wrote used some anecdotal knowledge about prevention and risk as well as some research topics that were emerging in 2020.  Out of this competition there were some interesting anecdotal observations about virus transmission. Masks could be ineffective . When you respirate through a mask in an area that has elevated concentrations of the Covid-19 virus, the particles hosting t