UNGA '78 -- A Day in Court

 As outlined in the last post, I did get re-energized about the state of COPD, and I was encouraged to bring the story to an august meeting of the United Nations General Assembly last September in New York City.  

How did that come about, you might ask?  What did you say?  And how was it received?

Well, the story could be viewed as a long one, or a short one.

The short version is that I got stimulated about COVID-19 statistics, like the week after I myself got COVID (the first person in Tulare County, California--on March 6, 2020, the same day that President Trump triumphantly announced at CDC that America has "plenty of tests, over a million. . . " when in fact there were none that worked, and only a few that had been shipped.

And I thought back to the old CAPCC days, when the data was slow and imperfect for a disease few cared about.  I thought "THIS will be different.  There will be LOTS of data, coming fast and furious (yes, we might quibble about how 'perfect' it will be)."

So, I began a major data acquisition of COVID data--confirmed cases and deaths--and quickly discovered that, YES INDEED, this was a LOT of data.   I knew an old HP colleague, Scott Futryk, who had a small company called AnywhereAnytime LLC that specialized in multi-variate spreadsheet presentations using PowerBI from Microsoft (Business Intelligence is the meaning of BI--Microsoft dubs it 'Data Analytics Report Software).    I asked him if he could help me construct a PowerBI view that was roughly akin to the old COPD geospatial maps (see blog posts herein for May 1, 2013 and May 11, 2013)

He did, and here is a snapshot of what he built (showing not only Confirmed and Deaths but per capita occurrences alongside those absolute numbers).  

I reported much of this work in another blog, InnovaScapes Institute, something like 49 posts in 54 weeks.    https://innovascapes.blogspot.com/2021/

I also posted one paper in ResearchGate   https://www.researchgate.net/publication/344751028_Four_'waves'_of_Covid_Confirmed_Cases_per_capita#fullTextFileContent

Well, the upshot of three years of work, was that Professor Martin Curley, the chief information officer for the Irish Health Service, was co-chair of the UNGA event.  Curley and I knew each other from our time at Intel Corporation a decade earlier, and he knew of this COVID study.   Hence the invitation.

The net was a chance to present an updated COPD story on the first day, and the COVID story on the second day.  Wow!   So that is 'how it happened'--I'll share what we said in the next post.