Liz Specht @LizSpecht Twitter profile

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

5 years

I think most people aren’t aware of the risk of systemic healthcare failure due to #COVID19 because they simply haven’t run the numbers yet. Let’s talk math. 1/n

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

5 years

Undeserved panic does no one any good. But neither does ill-informed complacency. It’s wrong to assuage the public by saying “only 2% will die.” People aren’t adequately grasping the national and global systemic burden wrought by this swift-moving of a disease. 23/n

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

5 years

But I have no reason to think they’ll be orders-of-magnitude wrong. Even if your personal risk of death is very, very low, don’t mock decisions like canceling events or closing workplaces as undue “panic”. 26/n

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

5 years

I’m an engineer. This is what my mind does all day: I run back-of-the-envelope calculations to try to estimate order-of-magnitude impacts. I’ve been on high alarm about this disease since ~Jan 19 after reading clinical indicators in the first papers emerging from Wuhan. 24/n

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

5 years

We’re looking at about 1M US cases by the end of April, 2M by ~May 5, 4M by ~May 11, and so on. Exponentials are hard to grasp, but this is how they go. 4/n

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

5 years

Worst case, I’m massively wrong and you now have a huge bag of rice and black beans to burn through over the next few months and enough Robitussin to trip out. 29/n

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

5 years

Let’s conservatively assume that there are 2,000 current cases in the US today, March 6th. This is about 8x the number of confirmed (lab-diagnosed) cases. We know there is substantial under-Dx due to lack of test kits; I’ll address implications later of under-/over-estimate. 2/n

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

5 years

These measures are the bare minimum we should be doing to try to shift the peak – to slow the rise in cases so that healthcare systems are less overwhelmed. Each day that we can delay an extra case is a big win for the HC system. 27/n

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

5 years

We can expect that we’ll continue to see a doubling of cases every 6 days (this is a typical doubling time across several epidemiological studies). Here I mean *actual* cases. Confirmed cases may appear to rise faster in the short term due to new test kit rollouts. 3/n

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

5 years

Importantly, I cannot stress this enough: even if I’m wrong – even VERY wrong – about core assumptions like % of severe cases or current case #, it only changes the timeline by days or weeks. This is how exponential growth in an immunologically naïve population works. 22/n

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

5 years

Nothing in the last 6 weeks has dampened my alarm in the slightest. To the contrary, we’re seeing abject refusal of many countries to adequately respond or prepare. Of course some of these estimates will be wrong, even substantially wrong. 25/n

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

5 years

By this estimate, by about May 8th, all open hospital beds in the US will be filled. (This says nothing, of course, about whether these beds are suitable for isolation of patients with a highly infectious virus.) 9/n

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

5 years

The US has about 2.8 hospital beds per 1000 people. With a population of 330M, this is ~1M beds. At any given time, 65% of those beds are already occupied. That leaves about 330k beds available nationwide (perhaps a bit fewer this time of year with regular flu season, etc). 7/n

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

5 years

As the healthcare system begins to saturate under this case load, it will become increasingly hard to detect, track, and contain new transmission chains. In absence of extreme interventions, this likely won’t slow significantly until hitting >>1% of susceptible population. 5/n

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

5 years

Let’s trust Italy’s numbers and assume that about 10% of cases are serious enough to require hospitalization. (Keep in mind that for many patients, hospitalization lasts for *weeks* — in other words, turnover will be *very* slow as beds fill with COVID19 patients). 8/n

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

5 years

And yes, you really should prepare to buckle down for a bit. All services and supply chains will be impacted. Why risk the stress of being ill-prepared? 28/n

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

5 years

That’s all for now. Standard disclaimers apply: I’m a PhD biologist but *not* an epidemiologist. Thoughts my own. Yadda yadda. Stay safe out there. /end

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

5 years

One more thought: you’ve probably seen multiple respected epidemiologists have estimated that 20-70% of world will be infected within the next year. If you use 6-day doubling rate I mentioned above, we land at ~2-6 billion infected by sometime in July of this year. 30/n

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

5 years

How quickly could we ramp up production of new masks? Not very fast at all. The vast majority are manufactured overseas, almost all in China. Even when manufactured here in US, the raw materials are predominantly from overseas... again, predominantly from China. 17/n

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

5 years

If we’re wrong by a factor of two regarding the fraction of severe cases, that only changes the timeline of bed saturation by 6 days in either direction. If 20% of cases require hospitalization, we run out of beds by ~May 2nd. 10/n

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

5 years

What does a case load of this size mean for healthcare system? We’ll examine just two factors — hospital beds and masks — among many, many other things that will be impacted. 6/n

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

5 years

As healthcare system becomes increasingly burdened, Rx shortages, etc, people w/ chronic conditions that are normally well-managed may find themselves slipping into severe states of medical distress requiring intensive care & hospitalization. But let’s ignore that for now. 12/n

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

5 years

One per day would be neither sanitary nor pragmatic, though this is indeed what we saw in Wuhan, with HCWs collapsing on their shift from dehydration because they were trying to avoid changing their PPE suits as they cannot be reused. 16/n

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

5 years

As COVID19 cases saturate virtually every state and county, which seems likely to happen any day now, it will soon be irresponsible for all HCWs to not wear a mask. These HCWs would burn through N95 stockpile in 2 days if each HCW only got ONE mask per day. 15/n

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

5 years

Obviously I think the doubling time will start to slow once a sizeable fraction of the population has been infected, simply because of herd immunity and a smaller susceptible population. 31/n

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

5 years

Keep in mind that all countries globally will be going through the exact same crises and shortages simultaneously. We can’t force trade in our favor. 18/n

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

5 years

If only 5% of cases require it, we can make it until ~May 14th. 2.5% gets us to May 20th. This, of course, assumes that there is no uptick in demand for beds from *other* (non-COVID19) causes, which seems like a dubious assumption. 11/n

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

5 years

Now consider how these 2 factors – bed and mask shortages – compound each other’s severity. Full hospitals + few masks + HCWs running around between beds without proper PPE = very bad mix. 19/n

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

5 years

HCWs are already getting infected even w/ access to full PPE. In the face of PPE limitations this severe, it’s only a matter of time. HCWs will start dropping from the workforce for weeks at a time, leading to a shortage of HCWs that then further compounds both issues above. 20/n

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

5 years

Alright, so that’s beds. Now masks. Feds say we have a national stockpile of 12M N95 masks and 30M surgical masks (which are not ideal, but better than nothing). 13/n

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

5 years

This is not some hypothetical, fear-mongering, worst-case scenario. This is reality, as far as anyone can tell with the current available data. 34/n

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

5 years

There are about 18M healthcare workers in the US. Let’s assume only 6M HCW are working on any given day. (This is likely an underestimate as most people work most days of the week, but again, I’m playing conservative at every turn.) 14/n

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

5 years

Addendum: to anyone who found this useful or interesting, highly recommend you follow @trvrb who actually does modeling and forecasting for a living. This thread is a great place to start:

Trevor Bedford

@trvrb

5 years

If growth continues unabated, this cluster alone may be responsible for 1100 (210, 2800) active infections by March 10 and 2000 (370, 5000) by March 15. 5/7

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

5 years

We could go on and on about thousands of factors – # of ventilators, or even simple things like saline drip bags. You see where this is going. 21/n

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

5 years

That timeline roughly fits with consensus end-game numbers from these highly esteemed epidemiologists. Again, we’re talking about discrepancies of mere days or weeks one direction or another, but not disagreements in the overall magnitude of the challenge. 33/n

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

5 years

But take the scenarios above (full beds, no PPE, etc, at just 1% of the US population infected) and stretch them out over just a couple extra months. 32/n

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

5 years

A lot of folks have been requesting a compilation of this thread that they can share with friends and family who don't use Twitter. You can find that here, courtesy of @threadreaderapp :

Thread by @LizSpecht: I think most people aren’t aware of the risk of systemic healthcare failure...

Thread by @LizSpecht: I think most people aren’t aware of the risk of systemic healthcare failure due to #COVID19 because they simply haven’t numbers yet. Let’s talk math. 1/n Let’s conservatively...

threadreaderapp.com

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

4 years

This is unprecedented. This is a shining example of one creative strategy — among thousands yet to come — we will employ to collectively cope with the challenge facing us. We must adopt the mindset of doing whatever needs doing, regardless of whether it's in our job description.

Ian Haydon

@ichaydon

4 years

Wow — dean of University of Washington medical school is asking qualified graduate students to pause their research and instead help run COVID-19 lab tests. Voluntary until compensation structure can be determined

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

5 months

This is why H5N1 in livestock is such a notable development in the H5N1 saga: - H5N1 in wild birds: no/few mammalian adaptations + low human handling = low risk (but ecologically devastating) - H5N1 in poultry: no/few mammalian adaptations + high human handling = some risk (the

BNO News

@BNOFeed

5 months

Texas issues health alert after state's first human case of H5N1 bird flu

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

2 years

It's finally happening, but still not fast enough. Major inflection point coming in the alt protein space as plant-based products start outcompeting animal products on price. 2 examples of this starting to happen, in different product categories, and why it matters:

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

5 months

Reminder that while this one patient's symptoms are mild, worldwide thru February there have been 887 confirmed human cases of H5N1. Of those, 462 have died (52% mortality).

Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

5 months

This is why H5N1 in livestock is such a notable development in the H5N1 saga: - H5N1 in wild birds: no/few mammalian adaptations + low human handling = low risk (but ecologically devastating) - H5N1 in poultry: no/few mammalian adaptations + high human handling = some risk (the

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

1 year

I just fell prey to a scam that I now know is making the rounds (apparently someone shared ~exact same experience on TikTok). Got a call from my sister’s legit phone #, heard muffled crying in the background and a guy threatening to kill her if I didn’t send him $$$ immediately.

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

4 years

I'm honored that @statnews invited me to publish my thread as a slightly more nuanced opinion piece (including new details such as the striking differences in hospital beds per capita btwn US and S Korea). "Simple math offers alarming answers" on #covid19 :

What does the coronavirus mean for the U.S. health care system? Some simple math offers alarming...

At a 10% hospitalization rate, all hospital beds in the U.S. will be filled by about May 10. As #Covid19 cases saturate nearly every state and county, health care workers would burn through the...

www.statnews.com

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

5 years

Thank you to everyone who has engaged with me! Please understand that I cannot reply to every comment/DM (I am getting thousands & hundreds, respectively). And please ask a medical professional for advice on your specific condition/situation/risk level — sorry I can't help there!

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

3 years

I've heard this stat a thousand times but it never ceases to blow my mind. 96% of all mammal biomass on the planet is comprised of us and our livestock and pets. Every wild mammal you can think of... the remaining 4%. That gives you a sense of the scale of animal agriculture.

Jennifer Molidor

@JenniferMolidor

3 years

Only 4% of mammals are wild. Researchers of food & climate issues continue to overlook or downplay the direct impact of livestock on wildlife. Yet the biodiversity crisis is as important to a just & resilient food system as climate change. Data: @_HannahRitchie @OurWorldInData

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

2 years

We should never tolerate 97% food waste—but that's what beef entails just to produce it. That's not even accounting for further waste at the retailer or consumer end of the chain. Each human eats 2,000 lbs of food a year. We burn almost all of it off. That's what all animals do.

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

4 years

Most of my new followers know me for my admiration of math—esp. simple, back-of-the-envelope math to illustrate a point. This thread, I want to talk about something equally pragmatic. I'm an engineer and biologist, but I’m also a human. Let’s talk about grief and compassion. 1/n

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

4 years

A must-read. We can't hang our hopes on a vaccine in the next 18 mo (or even the next 36). We need to be talking about other interim solutions (test/trace/isolate, therapies, long-term adaptation of social norms, etc.) as indefinite, not merely stopgap.

Opinion | How Long Will a Vaccine Really Take? (Published 2020)

Experts say at least 18 months. Here’s how to shorten the timeline.

www.nytimes.com

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

2 years

Last month, the average cost of plant-based meat (including beef and chicken products) in the Netherlands was reported to have finally dropped *below* (not just parity!) the average cost of their animal-derived equivalents per kg.

Plant-based now cheaper than meat in the Netherlands: ‘Vegan burgers are on average 78 cents...

Mapping the price differences between animal products and plant-based substitutes in retail suggests the cheapest animal products are now more expensive than their cheapest plant-based counterparts.

www.foodnavigator.com

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

1 year

If you get a call from a family member’s phone number and the guy on the line says he’s got your family member held hostage, immediately hang up and call that number back. They can spoof the number for an outbound call but it seems they can’t intercept an inbound call.

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

4 years

I see lots of risk-downplaying along these lines: "We've dealt with natural disasters & high casualties many times before. Our health system can adapt." But in most of these cases, we adapt by bringing in resources & personnel from unaffected cities, states, even countries. 1/3

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

4 years

Today's eye-opening read is so full of revelations that it's hard to know which quote to pull first. I'll post a few in the thread below. Hard-hitting reporting from @USATODAY & @IMidwest finds that the slaughterhouse situation is worse than we thought.

Coronavirus at meatpacking plants worse than first thought, USA TODAY investigation finds

Coronavirus closed Smithfield and JBS meatpacking plants. Many more are at risk. Operators may have to choose between worker health or meat in stores.

www.usatoday.com

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

5 months

This is why we likely haven't seen H5N1 human cases transmitting human-to-human thus far, because they have virtually all come from poultry (non-mammalian adapted) strains. But if we're getting mammalian-adapted strains, and *especially* if those strains are already spreading

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

5 years

Scott Gottlieb has been sounding the alarm on this for weeks - not just regarding the rise in cases but also the wide-ranging supply chain implications. The aggressive measures he recommends need to be implemented immediately.

Scott Gottlieb, MD

@ScottGottliebMD

5 years

THREAD: On #Coronavirus , we may be entering a period of accelerating cases. The country could look very different over next two weeks. We’ll get through this, but need to take steps now to limit the scope and impact of virus. There are things we can do now to help ourselves. 1/n

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

5 months

These stats will never stop blowing my mind. - Cattle-feed crops consume 46% of the water that is diverted from the river, accounting for 2/3rds of ag water use - In CO, WY, UT, and NM, cattle-feed crops consumed 90% of all water used by irrigated ag

Hay grown for cattle consumes nearly half the water drawn from Colorado River, study finds

Much of the Colorado River's water is used for agriculture. A new study shows 46% of the water that is diverted is used to grow hay to feed cattle.

www.latimes.com

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

5 years

There's something big missing in the conversation re: how fast we could potentially develop and deploy a vaccine at large scale. This article does a great job stating realistic timeframes (12-18mo) while also discussing how novel approaches may alter that:

How Long Will It Take to Develop a Coronavirus Vaccine?

Researchers face political pressure to develop a vaccine that can fight COVID-19. But the virus is likely to spread for months, if not more than a year, before anything can be widely available to the...

www.newyorker.com

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

5 months

If the difference between category 4 (livestock) and the previous 3 (wild birds, poultry, wild mammals) isn't clear enough at face value, consider the data point that the first confirmed human case from livestock came within days of the announcement of confirmed livestock cases.

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

4 years

#Covid19 is among the most serious challenges humanity has ever faced, and enormous work lies ahead of us to get this outbreak under control. But in parallel, we need to innovate ourselves out of the systems that create entirely foreseeable & unacceptable public health risks. 1/n

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

4 years

@bbculp I'm here for it.

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

2 years

Consumers deserve access to more stable, resilient, affordable protein sources that aren't so vulnerable to these severe price shocks. The govt should incentivize R&D and larger-scale production of alt proteins to ensure broader access, now. Food security = national security.

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

2 years

Next time you hear about food insecurity caused by disruptions in global grain markets, think about this. Cycling grain through animals, which metabolize >90% of it rather than convert to meat, is the most inefficient conceivable use of grain for ultimately creating human food.

The Economist

@TheEconomist

2 years

From 2010 to 2019 the amount of grain used for animal feed rose from 770m tonnes per year to 987m

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

4 years

I'm honored that @statnews invited me to publish my thread as a slightly more nuanced opinion piece (including new details such as the striking differences in hospital beds per capita btwn US and S Korea). "Simple math offers alarming answers" on #covid19 :

What does the coronavirus mean for the U.S. health care system? Some simple math offers alarming...

At a 10% hospitalization rate, all hospital beds in the U.S. will be filled by about May 10. As #Covid19 cases saturate nearly every state and county, health care workers would burn through the...

www.statnews.com

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

8 months

There are few things I see people get more consistently wrong than the bizarre assumption that if everyone switched to plant-based diet, we would require more cropland. NO. In every scenario, a shift toward plant-based requires not just less pasture land, but less cropland too.

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

2 years

Just this week, the price of @justegg was reported to drop below that of premium chicken eggs. Egg prices have soared 50% in the last year (not just inflation—also a massive outbreak of avian flu sweeping the country) while JUST's price dropped 41%.

JUST Egg reaches price parity with premium chicken eggs: 'It's an opportunity for trial by consum...

As the average retail price of chicken eggs has surged 51% in the past year, JUST Egg has reduced pricing for its 12-ounce plant-based liquid egg product by 41%, reaching cost parity with premium...

www.foodnavigator-usa.com

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

4 years

Two things on which discussion died w/ very little fanfare: 1) Those drive-thru testing sites in Walmart parking lots that were supposed to be operational by the Monday after they were announced (~6-7 weeks ago?). 2) The Google+Apple contact tracing app. Did I miss something?

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

4 years

Fun altruistic behavior reminder: every time you sanitize a surface (e.g., airplane armrest, door handle), it's not just for your own benefit — it helps people for *days* afterwards. We clean the slate of viral accumulation from many, many people prior.

Persistence of coronaviruses on inanimate surfaces and their inactivation with biocidal agents -...

Currently, the emergence of a novel human coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, has become a global health concern causing severe respiratory tract infections in humans. Human-to-human transmissions have been...

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

2 years

When global ag supply chains are disrupted & climate catastrophes cut into yields for animal feed crops, the cost of resource-intensive animal products rises disproportionately to the cost of more efficient plant-based products. (Remember, huge grain inputs for meat/egg/dairy!)

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

5 years

Precisely. Both of these concepts (network effects and exponential growth) are very difficult to intuit, but this geographic area is certainly enriched for folks whose careers are built around a deep understanding of one or both.

Steve Schlafman 🐌

@schlaf

5 years

Yesterday a founder in SF told me she felt people in Silicon Valley were taking #COVID19 more seriously than other parts of the US including NYC. I began to wonder why that might be. Here’s my conclusion: SV understands the power of network effects and exponential growth.

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

9 months

Why are plant-based products (milk, meat, etc.) still usually more expensive than their animal-based counterparts if their production is so much more efficient (lower resource use across the board, hence << carbon footprint compared to animal ag products)? Many reasons beyond

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

1 year

🚨 Fascinating new sensory study! In both blinded & informed taste tests, participants ranked a plant-based burger #1 , followed by the beef burger. Even when blinded participants could correctly identify the beef burger, they still preferred the PB one.

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

3 years

This is salmon sushi grown directly from salmon cells — no fishing or fish farming required. Can you tell the difference? It's truly astounding how quickly this field is progressing.

Wildtype

@wildtypefoods

3 years

Who knows a sushi chef who would want to taste the future of sushi? Comment, DM or email us at hello @wildtypefoods .com! 🙏 #salmon #sushi #nigiri #salmonsushi #salmonnigiri #cellcultivatedseafood #saveouroceans

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

2 years

I've written about the market volatility Achilles' heel of industrial animal ag before, & how alt proteins mitigate on multiple dimensions. It's worth a revisit. Now, while meat prices are soaring, it's time to say "good riddance" sooner rather than later.

Alt-Meat Trounces Animal Meat's Massive Inefficiencies

Opinion: Animal meat production is slow, rigid, and wasteful. Plant- and cell-based meat production is swift, nimble, and sustainable.

www.wired.com

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

4 years

"You can only play viral Russian roulette for so long, which is why public health experts concerned about zoonotic diseases have for years been ringing the alarm about the industrial farming of animals." We can't afford to keep playing this game.

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

4 years

@yarbsalocin @IanKarmel Most underrated tweet I've ever seen.

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

4 years

What's massively unhelpful is dismissing uncomfortable reality as "scaremongering." There will be a lot of uncomfortable, even unimaginable, truths in months to come. We need to take this seriously, even if it seems at first to be totally outlandish. This is uncharted territory.

Adam

@reelyadam

5 years

@LizSpecht This type of “math”/scaremongering (whatever you choose to cal it) is massively unhelpful. We all have a duty to exercise caution and an equal responsibility not to stoke the fire and cause panic. I’d stake $100k that the US won’t get to 100,000 infected.

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

1 year

If you only read one thing this week, read this. Animal ag is responsible for btw 15 and 19.6% of global GHG, but < 0.5% of stories about climate change by leading news outlets in the US, UK, & Europe mentioned meat or livestock.

Why the media too often ignores the connection between climate change and meat

The burger-sized hole in climate change coverage, explained.

www.vox.com

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

4 years

If you're looking for deep expertise in disease modeling, THIS is the group you want to reach out to. My numbers were back-of-the-envelope to get a very rough sense of what we're looking at here. This group adds many, many layers of sophistication. Thank you, @IDMOD_ORG !

Institute for Disease Modeling

@IDMOD_ORG

4 years

Grateful to support science-driven decision-making by Washington officials during this critical phase of the #COVID19 outbreak. Read about what generated today's graphic: @GovInslee @KCPubHealth @WADeptHealth @MayorJenny @trvrb @famulare_mike @hagedornb

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

2 years

"...[F]or each dollar, investment in improving & scaling up production of meat & dairy alternatives resulted in 3x more GHG reductions compared w/ investment in green cement technology, 7x more than green buildings & 11x more than zero-emission cars."

Plant-based meat by far the best climate investment, report finds

Exclusive: Non-animal proteins can play critical role tackling climate crisis, says Boston Consulting Group

www.theguardian.com

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

4 years

We will have to rewrite the script for how our society operates; there is no instruction manual for this. But it needs to rest upon a foundation of empathy and compassion. Wishing all of you safety, benevolence, health, and clarity in the days and weeks ahead. /end

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

4 years

It becomes much, much harder to compensate for a sudden increase in caseload when this is happening simultaneously not only in every major city and state in *one* country, but also across virtually every country globally now. 3/3

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

4 years

@elonmusk Developing lower-carbon versions of meat, eggs, & dairy products from plant-based, microbial, or animal cell cultured sources is one of the most tractable, highest-impact technology investments one can make. Nonprofit @GoodFoodInst is a superb shepherd of philanthropic $ here.

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

7 months

@hubermanlab I disagree. You have no idea what condition(s) someone might have that could cause them to subjectively look unwell; it might have nothing to do with the advice they're giving. You don't know the counterfactual of how they'd look/feel if they *weren't* behaving in that way.

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

4 years

How does one even produce such a thing? What software allows this? Was it just made manually in PowerPoint? 🤯

Hugh Harvey

@DrHughHarvey

4 years

That Y axis tho....

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

2 years

This graph’s salience is evergreen. If you dislike soy, monocultures, etc., the animal feed industry should be the target of your ire. 37% of global soy goes toward chicken feed.

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

1 year

We tracked down the individual associated with the account we were told to send money to. We have filed a report with FBI internet crimes, with the bank to hopefully get the money back, and with the local county PD in Georgia where their home appears to be.

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

11 months

Next time someone says “but almonds use so much water!” show them this and ask “compared to what?” Compared to oat or soy, sure, about 2x the water use… but NOT compared to dairy. Dairy is more resource-intensive on every metric.

The Good Food Institute Europe

@GoodFoodEurope

11 months

🥛Plant-based milk has a significantly lower environmental impact than conventional milk. It's already a staple for many Europeans, accounting for around 10% of the milk market, but important work still remains to reduce prices and level the playing field for plant-based options.

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

5 years

@doctordendrite @OurWorldInData Bingo - this is absolutely the key variable here. I'll defer to @trvrb 's excellent work on modeling this. I chose 6 days in large part because that's where much of his analysis is roughly centered. See, for example:

Trevor Bedford

@trvrb

5 years

Running these simulations forward with a mean doubling time of 6.1 days, we estimate the number of current infections in this transmission chain on March 1 to be 570 with an 90% uncertainty interval of between 80 and 1500. 6/11

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

4 years

This is utterly horrifying. In the span of about a week, we've gone from "slaughterhouse workers are getting sick" to "there might be meat shortages" to "farmers, all options are fair game to kill off your animals, including baking them alive in your barns."

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

4 years

Jonathan Safran Foer is one of my favorite writers, and every time I read something penned by him I am reminded why. This is a powerful must-read. I'll pull some favorite quotes in the thread below. 1/7

We have to wake up: factory farms are breeding grounds for pandemics | Jonathan Safran Foer and...

After Covid-19, to ignore the links between animal and human health would be to invite unimaginable disaster, say Jonathan Safran Foer and Aaron S Gross

www.theguardian.com

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

4 years

While #globalhealth and infectious diseases have been a passion of mine for ~15 years, 4 years ago I made the leap into #foodtechnology bc I feel this is actually the most impactful area for addressing global health. My latest op-ed in @WIRED explains why.

Modernizing Meat Production Will Help Us Avoid Pandemics

The coronavirus outbreak stresses the need to change how we make our meat.

www.wired.com

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

5 years

A very worthwhile thread too - including the brilliance of a visual distillation of the main points I verbosely tried to get across in my last thread. Kudos to the people who *get it* this crystal-clear.

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

4 years

The number of daily new cases may be plateauing bc *the number of daily tests has also plateaued.* The % positive has not changed in recent days. Need to be very cautious with these curves - we don't have enough info to know if they reflect anything beyond testing inadequacies.

The COVID Tracking Project

@COVID19Tracking

4 years

Our daily update is published. We’ve now tracked ~4.16 million tests, up 152k from yesterday, a bit over the April average. The testing plateau continues. Note that we can only track tests that a state reports. For details, see:

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

2 years

Breaking new study in @Nature indicates that substituting 20% of beef with microbial proteins from fermentation could cut deforestation in half by 2050. I spoke with @partlowj at @washingtonpost about the broader context of fermentation & alt proteins.

Meat grown from fungus? It could save the world’s forests.

A study in Nature suggests that eating meat made from microbes could stave off half the world’s deforestation — but at a certain point, land-saving effect is diminished.

www.washingtonpost.com

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

4 years

We're seeing one of the ugliest inefficiencies of animal agriculture rearing its head: it's tragically inept at responding in real time to volatility in demand, prices, or production capacity. Slaughterhouse closures have ghastly implications. 1/4

America could be 'perilously close' to meat shortages as slaughterhouses shut down and hundreds of...

A Smithfield Food plant that supplies up to 5% of the pork in the US closed indefinitely after 293 workers were diagnosed with COVID-19.

www.businessinsider.com

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

4 years

If you're interested in a thorough, superbly commented walk-through of my recent thread on healthcare overload from #covid19 , give this a watch (starts at 13:36). Thanks, @chrismartenson !

Coronavirus: Why The US Is In Deep Trouble

For those asking how best to SUPPORT Chris & Peak Prosperity in their efforts to provide continuing coverage of news that matters: https://www.peakprosperity...

www.youtube.com

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

4 years

Can we all just collectively agree to cancel April Fools' Day this year? Normally I'm all for comic relief, but...

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

4 years

Think of any major event requiring hospital care (mass shooting, bombing, etc.): patients are often spread across dozens of nearby hospitals. For larger disasters like earthquakes or fires, we will send entire disaster response teams to/from other states or countries to help. 2/3

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

1 year

I’m guessing these scammers are now at least screwed financially (accounts closed/reported). It’s absurd that it’s possible to make a call routed through another phone #. This guy did NOT seem that sophisticated, so this must be pretty easy to accomplish. Stay safe y’all ✌🏼

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

4 years

When I’m not tracking #covid19 developments, I work at @goodfoodinst to transform the global food system via technological advances in the alternative protein sector. My latest op-ed in @wired explains why. 1/5

Modernizing Meat Production Will Help Us Avoid Pandemics

The coronavirus outbreak stresses the need to change how we make our meat.

www.wired.com

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Liz Specht

@LizSpecht

4 years

This bot is one of my favorites, and its mindless, tone-deaf interjections on my timeline all day today are equal parts comical and horrifying.