This page includes links and bullets that cover the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic (aka coronavirus pandemic) on my life and projects I work on, as well as some of my related writings. It is not an introduction to COVID-19. The first iteration of the page was written on May 16, 2020, and I do not plan to update the page regularly, so information in it may become stale over time.

My LessWrong posts on COVID-19

• Near-term planning for secondary impacts of coronavirus (March 20, 2020)
• Coronavirus: the four levels of social distancing, and when and why we might transition between them (March 26, 2020): I included my key predictions in a table in this post.
• Coronavirus: California case growth (March 29, 2020); I have continued updating the associated Google Sheet here.

I also posted a question on the Effective Altruism Forum titled How has biosecurity/pandemic preparedness philanthropy helped with coronavirus, and how might it help with similar future situations? (March 13, 2020).

My personal response to, and personal impact on me, of COVID-19

• I “missed the boat” on COVID-19. It was only around late February that I started paying close attention to it, and only in the first week of March that I started increasing my work-from-home frequency because of it. March 6 was the last day I went to the office, and decided to work from home after that. Given that I had access to LessWrong, that had sounded the alarm on COVID-19 by mid-February, I was quite slow to recognize it.
• In the second half of March, I spent considerable time reading about COVID-19 to understand its impact. The three LessWrong posts linked above were during that time. By early April, having made my predictions and decisions based on those predictions, I had decided to stop focusing on COVID-19.
• COVID-19 resulted in some changes to my work situation, but the net effect on me is unclear. See here for more.

Impact of COVID-19 on other things that I monitor and track (not a list of the most important things affected, just the ones I keep track of)

• My impression is that LessWrong did a pretty good job getting ahead of COVID-19, and also a reasonable job moving away from it once the rest of the world had picked up the ball (though they’re still focusing quite a bit on it). You can look at the LessWrong coronavirus tag to see how LessWrong has responded to COVID-19.
• BART ridership is down a lot. I track BART ridership at https://bart.vipulnaik.com/ where you can plot charts and tables to see the sharp drop in ridership through March and into April. BART has a page with more granular daily data as well.
• English Wikipedia pageviews are up about 15% relative to normal, and most of this increase isn’t due to COVID-19 content. I wrote a Facebook post about this.