Sphera Spark: Issue 4 // Spring-Summer 2020

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SPARK: A Sphera Publication

wo weeks prior to this writing, the Spark team got together to discuss the next issue. It feels like an eternity ago with the everchanging developments. At that time, we collectively decided that we needed to cover the COVID-19 pandemic. It is an operational risk, it is a health risk, it is a risk like no one under the age of 101 has ever seen—at least not on such a global scale.

The first thing we realized was that technology and innovation are and will be at the forefront of combating this crisis, so we looked and researched and learned about many of the advancements in play to keep people safe.

There are many, and with a story that is breaking as quickly as this one, it’s impossible to cover everything and stay truly up to date. The second you take your eyes off the screen, another innovation or development emerges.

Of course, regardless of the speed that has gone into battling this virus head on, we must acknowledge that there are people who could not be saved and there will continue to be other lives lost until a vaccine or anti-viral medication is available.

Until that time comes, we urge you to take social distancing practices seriously. There are many people who likely have COVID-19 and don’t even realize it because they are asymptomatic, which means any unnecessary contact could continue the chain of passing on the virus unbeknownst via a contagion.

In a CNN COVID-19 town hall from March 26, Bill Gates said about the United States: “We’re entering in a tough period here that if we do it right, we’ll only have to do it once for six to 10 weeks. But it has to be the whole country. We have to raise the level of testing, and the prioritization of that testing quite dramatically in order to go through one shutdown.” Of course, the same applies to other countries as well.

To help tackle the problem, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has formed a partnership with Wellcome and MasterCard. The three organizations have funded the COVID-19 Therapeutics Accelerator to the tune of $125 million.

“Epidemics introduce a paradox to the world,” the foundation said. “Viruses like COVID-19 spread rapidly but developing vaccines and treatments to stop them moves slowly. If we want to make people, particularly the most vulnerable, safer from outbreaks, then we need to find a way to unwind this paradox: to speed up R&D and slow down the spread.”

No doubt there’s a lot of work to do, but there’s no question scientists, governments, companies, not-for-profits, innovators and more are moving as quickly as possible to end this global crisis. It will take time, but there will be a return to normalcy, hopefully sooner rather than later.

Keep in mind, the non–COVID-19 articles in this issue were written well before the pandemic occurred.

Stay safe everyone.

We hope you enjoy, “The Virus and the Vision.” Let us know what you think by emailing spark@sphera.com.

— James Tehrani, Editor-in-Chief | Spark

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Publisher Paul Marushka Associate Publisher Megan Geldman mgeldman@sphera.com Editor-in-Chief James Tehrani jtehrani@sphera.com Senior Editors Lyndsay Deckert – Silke Delpeuch ldeckert@sphera.com | sdelpeuch@sphera.com Senior Writer Niles Maxwell nmaxwell@sphera.com Creative Director Eric Anderson eanderson@sphera.com Graphic Designers Jasmine Ng – Michael Oleshko Social Media Manager Ellen Bremseth Circulation Manager Erica Serna Advertising Manager Michele Lavoie Contributors Dr. Martin Baitz – Neal Rosen – Mary Rudolph Stephen Rylander Accolades Content Marketing Awards/2019 Best New Print Publication – 2019 Ragan’s PR Daily Awards/Best Digital Publication Spark is published semiannually by Sphera Solutions Inc., 130 E. Randolph, Suite 2900, Chicago, IL 60601 Sphera and Sphera.com are the trademarks of Sphera Solutions Inc. Copyright © 2020, Sphera Solutions Inc. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Reproduction of material published in Spark is forbidden without permission.

If you have any questions or comments, please email us at spark@sphera.com. Visit us online at sphera.com/spark.

ISSN 2640-0006

A Message from the CEO

COVID-19: Facing This Challenge Together AS YOU KNOW, THINGS ARE CHANGING rapidly with the spread of COVID-19, and Sphera is closely monitoring the evolving situation with the utmost sensitivity and importance.

That’s why we thought it was so important to get this Spark Special Report out as quickly as possible. Things are fluid, but technology is the differentiator. As you’ll read in our cover story, innovation is coming at an unprecedented pace to help the world tackle this enormous problem and mitigate risk.

It’s impossible to cover every area of technological advancement we are seeing to address COVID-19, but the Special Report offers a fascinating look at many of the technologies and innovators who are working tirelessly to keep people safe.

Technology has also allowed Spherions to continue working remotely without missing a beat. The health and safety of colleagues, families and communities is of the utmost importance. There is no executable business plan that does not involve the health of employees, and that’s why people will always come first. At Sphera, we have enhanced our Pandemic Business Continuity Plan to support the recommendations of the World Health Organization, and we will continue to monitor the situation and make necessary adjustments along the way.

We also released a new COVID-19 Coronavirus Workforce Assessment feature to our SpheraCloud customers so they can leverage their existing capabilities to mitigate the risks associated with the COVID-19 outbreak while protecting the health and safety of employees.

The capabilities include: • Incident Management allows customers to capture information on COVID-19related events as they occur in real time, including when an employee has been exposed to or diagnosed with COVID-19.

By doing so, they can help mitigate the risk of others in the organization from being exposed.

• Risk Assessment gives customers the option to create custom assessments to understand the health and safety of their workforce and develop mitigation strategies to keep people safe and operations productive.

• Audits empowers customers to create new checklists to understand employee- and facility-readiness leveraging guidance from the World Health Organization, the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control and the U.S. Centers for Diseases Control and Prevention.

We will get through this unprecedented situation together.

We wish you, your teams and your loved ones all the very best. Please let us know what you think of this issue. You can email us at spark@sphera.com.

Sincerely,

Paul Marushka Publisher, President & CEO

Paul Marushka

We will get through this unprecedented situation together. We wish you, your teams and your loved ones all the very best.”

As Sphera’s founding president and CEO, Paul Marushka is responsible for providing overall strategic leadership for the company in developing, directing and implementing goto-market, service, product and operational plans.

Spark Volume 3, Issue 4

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IN THIS ISSUE SAFER WORKPLACES

●

SAFER WORLD

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SPRING/SUMMER 2020

CONTENTS FEATURES Special Report

12 COVID-19 — THE VIRUS AND THE VISION How technology and innovation are being used to help mitigate risk from the COVID-19 pandemic.

26 A ‘CONCURRENT’ CURVEBALL

Spark talks with former Major League pitcher Bobby Jenks about how he used to close out baseball games until a bad outcome from an overlapping surgery closed out his career.

38 FILM REVIEW: ‘1917’

‘1917’ captures an ugly event with breathtaking beauty.

COLUMNS

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Product Stewardship and Expertise

Mary Rudolph explains how even when expertise exits, regulatory compliance doesn’t need to be elusive.

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Seven Steps to Securing a Sustainable Future

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COVID-19 and the Climate Crisis

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Musing on Master Data Management, the New York City Water Supply ... and Madonna?!

Dr. Martin Baitz explains what global warming could mean for our civilization. If left unchecked, it will threaten the future of humanity’s ability to survive and prosper. So what can be done?

Niles Maxwell talks about how the pandemic has impacted our environment in a surprisingly positive way.

Neal Rosen talks parallels between what New York City does to provide clean water and MDM solutions to “clean” master data.

VOLUME 3, ISSUE 4

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Tech Talk: Technology-driven Innovation

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Whatever Works

Stephen Rylander discusses how software needs to take a bigger bite of the EHS&S pie.

James Tehrani says we need to take social distancing seriously for the asthmatics and other people vulnerable to the virus.

GUEST COLUMN SPARKING CONVERSATION

PRODUCT STEWARDSHIP

Product Stewardship and Expertise

EVEN WHEN EXPERTISE EXITS, REGULATORY COMPLIANCE DOESN’T NEED TO BE ELUSIVE

By Mary Rudolph

IT WASN’T THAT LONG AGO that most chemical companies had a handful of people who appeared to be blessed with an infinite knowledge about substances.

If you wanted to manage hazardous materials along the full life cycle—from raw material acquisition to production to distribution of products around the world—they were the go-to folks who knew how to ensure companies stayed in compliance. If you needed to know about the regulations for using Acetone in South Korea, for example, you could turn to an in-house expert and get the information you needed. If you had concerns about a product that was designed to specification for China, running foul of interpretations by authorities in another part of the country, then there was an obvious door to knock on.

Like walking rulebooks, these individuals just seemed to have all the answers. If they were particularly experienced, they could even guide their teams through the extensive cultural differences that lie behind detailed regulatory requirements and interpret them correctly.

But times change. Age creeps up on us all—as does technological development and macroeconomic pressures.

Many businesses in the chemical-producing and manufacturing value chain—including the downstream and chemicals sectors—are at the point where their valued experts, namely the baby boomers with years of experience, are retiring and leaving younger cohorts without the same degree of sagacity and experience.

A MORE SYSTEMATIC APPROACH The experience retiring workers take with them is not to be dismissed. Global regulations have exploded in both volume and complexity over the past few decades—a trend that began around the time many of these imminent retirees were just starting out. They had the luxury of learning each regulation as it came up, adding to their knowledge incrementally.

Now, a newcomer faces what seems like an impenetrable thicket of tangled rules and regulations. By necessity, expertise becomes more spread out, and the company loses that totemic resource: the person who knows the regulations and business inside out.

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But that level of expertise is not to be overestimated either. Knowledge doesn’t get old, but the application of that heritage knowledge changes. Some Japanese regulations have been in force since the 1990s but may now be affected by overarching chemical control laws. What’s more, as any number of businesses will point out, overdependence on one individual or a small team of specialists, and their collective knowledge, is a risky proposition. Supporting systems, documentation and processes are all required.

This is what many firms have been implementing for the past 10 years or so. The looming loss of specialists need not, therefore, be as terrifying as it first appears.

PRODUCT STEWARDSHIP SOLUTIONS As dependence on individual knowledge has declined, reliance on technology has increased. As careers have progressed, so have ways of accessing vital data and making it available to those who need it—a transformation that continues to evolve through continuing advances in technology.

Even the past five years have seen a dramatic change in the way we gather, collate, assess and report vital data.

In addition, what junior colleagues lack in worldly experience, they often more than make up for in technological savvy. They have the opportunity to catch up fast by finding the answers to specific questions as they arise. Automated, instantly accessible Product Stewardship systems are an effective solution to the departing of human expertise.

Particularly as the industry comes to terms with the idea that Product Stewardship covers significantly more than just hazard communication, and links together disparate functions including manufacturing, marketing and legal.

It is a little more complicated than that.

Product Stewardship is complex. If you don’t ask the right question, you won’t get the information you need. So, you still have to understand what countries you’re doing business with and what regulations apply to your products.

That in turn has implications for the systems themselves, which must be designed to support less-experienced colleagues and prompt them to search for the necessary information. The systems must integrate seamlessly with key enterprise systems like Enterprise Resource Planning and Product Life cycle Management so that no one’s time is spent simply shuffling data from one spot to another. Additionally, they must apply information in the way that a new user cohort needs and expects, for example, taking a single substance and discovering in a single search how it is regulated around the world.

What’s more, people become more educated by virtue of more information being available to them. Keeping up with the growing sophistication of users is an essential component of any system. Consider that net native millennials and Generation Zers who will comprise 75% of the workforce by 2025, and that need for smart, intuitive systems becomes more critical.

TRANSLATING ENVIRONMENT, HEALTH, SAFETY & SUSTAINABILITY But this is more than just a case study on the changing relationship between people and tech. This is all taking place against a backdrop in which global trade and transport of industrial products is becoming more closely monitored while new trading patterns are emerging but ill-defined. What’s more, EHS legislation is becoming simultaneously stricter and more complex—but not necessarily more clearly defined.

Take the requirements for the Safety Data Sheets and Label as an example. A country will translate verbatim the UN GHS Purple Book leaving phrases like “Some competent authorities may require ‘this’ for the SDS

and/or ‘that’ for the label,” but there is no clear requirement in the regulation.

Another example is occupational exposure limits (OELs). Say a country sets its OEL for selenium compounds, but do they include selenium, the element, in that? Or is it exclusively related to its compounds? Sometimes, the country will refer you to the competent authority to decide without pointing out who that competent authority is or how to contact them. To make it more challenging, the competent authority for one issue may not be the same competent authority for another one.

These challenges that sound relatively minor on paper become significant headaches when translated into vessel freight that cannot be unloaded until all the labels and product safety documentation is examined and confirmed.

Any mistakes and port fees soon rack up as ships are stuck in dock unable to unload while potentially lowering the value of the trade in progress. More than that, it will almost certainly lead to future delays as port authorities take note of, and apply watch notices to, importers with a history of poor paperwork.

TAKING BACK CONTROL There is a direct connection between effective Product Stewardship and just-in-time manufacturing, frictionless trade and seamless supply chains, which are all demands of the modern global economy. As geopolitics continue to upend previous assumptions about global trade and introduce major notes of uncertainty over which businesses have limited control, it is critical to minimize disruptions by aligning regulatory expertise and software systems to streamline business processes.

Mary Rudolph is Sphera’s senior manager for global content.

She has more than 25 years of international Environmental Health, Safety & Sustainability experience, including technical and business implementations of authoring services.

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GUEST COLUMN SPARKING CONVERSATION

SUSTAINABILITY

7 STEPS TO SECURING

A SUSTAINABLE

FUTURE

By Dr. Martin Baitz

MANY PEOPLE ARE UNAWARE of what global warming will mean for human civilization. Too often it seems we underestimate the serious risks involved in failing to act. If we don’t take decisive and rapid steps toward securing a more sustainable future, both as individuals and as organizations, it will threaten the future of humanity’s ability to survive and prosper.

In a new hotter climate, most of our infrastructure will be rendered completely useless. Let’s just think about bridges and buildings for a moment.

Concrete needs to maintain a certain water content otherwise it becomes brittle. So too with metal structures. If we keep losing rainforest in the Amazon because of climate-related fires, and the Gulf Stream patterns shift, it could get much colder in Europe and the Middle East. If it gets too cold on the Arabian Peninsula, for example, a lot of steel structures might no longer comply with safety specifications and need to be carefully inspected and maybe refurbished or reinforced. We will have to invest billions or perhaps trillions of dollars in completely new or refurbished infrastructure. Without new infrastructure, the global economic system is likely to collapse in a transformed climate.

Let’s look at another example: farming. Changing water and harvest conditions in a hotter climate will displace hundreds of millions of people. The political pressure and military conflicts would be immense. For a large portion of humanity, life would no longer be about generating wealth, but about pure survival. None of us wants such a situation to come to fruition.

We don’t know for sure if it will take five years or 50 years, but there is a tipping point in terms of the emissions we release into the Earth’s atmosphere.

That is the point when the entire climate system will change into a fundamentally different equilibrium. The dynamics of the climate system hang in a delicate balance. Although global warming means that average temperatures are rising all over the planet as the result of human activity, the effects on different regions will vary.

Each of us needs to make a few changes to avoid the catastrophic tipping point to buy ourselves the time necessary to implement sustainability technology, develop sustainable economies and construct a sustainable society. Here are seven ways to accomplish that.

Niles Maxwell contributed to this article.

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Implement New Business Models & Work Toward Transformation: A classic example for a new business model is found within the automotive industry. It used to be that greater sustainability in car manufacturing was mostly about improving efficiency during the use phase of vehicles—the period of time when consumers actually drive their cars. Manufacturers analyzed vehicles at the engine-production level so as to reduce emissions to their lowest possible point during the use phase of the vehicles. Now auto manufacturers have pretty much perfected their own systems and production. They now seek to provide mobility rather than physical automobiles—they are moving beyond material manufacturing in their outlook.

Define Sustainability Holistically: Sustainability acts as the foundational building block of life on our planet. It is, in a sense, the way of nature. Without environmental sustainability, the physical environment won’t be able to support the economic and social pillars. Sustainability, therefore, has to take into account the symbiotic relationship with nature. It is a kind of circularity in which no energy or material is lost in the system and no emissions are produced.

Take Personal Responsibility: We have to ask ourselves why, despite having known for decades that we have a serious environmental crisis on our hands, so many of us have failed to act on a personal level.

And we’ve got to take responsibility to do everything in our personal power to become more sustainable.

Encourage a Chain Reaction: Solving one thing, such as the long-term problem of renewable energy, opens up opportunities for other improvements. The sustainability I’m advocating is a kind of self-sustaining system—always improving, always moving to a greater level of sustainability.

Use Your Organization’s Influence to Pressure for Regulatory Change: Along with personal and business transformation, we absolutely need supportive legislation that helps the transformation. Without legislative encouragement, the technology and infrastructure will struggle to adapt for a more sustainable future.

Use your business as a vehicle for regulatory transformation.

Use Facts and Systems Thinking to Analyze: Now that we’ve given ourselves a definition of sustainability to work from, how do we proceed?

What is relevant for me? What is relevant for my company? What is relevant for my city? The process of identifying relevancy is more simple for individuals, more complex for organizations and very complex for governments. Analyze all facets.

Recognize Cultural Differences: There are also culturally specific things we can do, cultural tendencies that we have that we can change to avoid creating unnecessary harm to the environment. That means examining how other countries and people handle sustainability, examining your own subculture.

To read a longer version of this list, go to Dr. Baitz’s LinkedIn article.

Dr. Martin Baitz holds a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering from the University of Stuttgart, was a founding member of PE International, works as an associate lecturer for Life Cycle Assessment at the University of Applied Sciences in Esslingen and is content director at Sphera. As an expert in Life Cycle Assessment, he is responsible for Quality Assurance, Innovation and thought leadership of the GaBi Databases and Content and life cycle information supply and exchange at Sphera. He is a subject editor for data availability and quality for the International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment.

Dr. Baitz has worked extensively in chemical and automotive industries and works regularly as an expert sustainability consultant for governmental bodies and industry associations.

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FEATURE | SPECIAL REPORT

COVID-19

VIRUS VISION

BY JAMES TEHRANI

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How Technology and innovation are being used to help mitigate risk from the COVID-19 pandemic.

I’M SITTING ON my bed in sweatpants and a T-shirt—feet up, legs crossed—reaching out to a potential source via Twitter DMs. He wants to talk through Google Hangouts, but Skype is a better option for me for recording since I’m already set up for it. What is also going through my mind is whether my dog, Oreo, will start barking during said interview, but then I realize there are just some variables that are out of our control.

At that very moment, I think to myself: What a wonderful, technologically advanced world.

Like millions of people around the globe, I’ve been working from home the past few weeks because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and I don’t know when I’ll be able to return to the office. But this isn’t about me or them.

This is about us tackling a problem together.

During a crisis, technology and innovation become the focal points for not only benefiting society now but also creating a better future in the process.

While there are many unanswered questions at this point, scientists, innovators, governments and companies around the world are on it as I type these words. The speed at which change is coming to tackle this enormous problem is nothing short of amazing and fascinating to watch.

With all that’s at stake, a barking dog is the least of our concerns.

Coronaviruses are named for the crownlike spikes on their surface, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

There are seven known coronaviruses that can infect people, four of which are considered common. The other three are MERS-CoV, SARS CoV, and SARS CoV-2, which is better known as COVID-19.

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I had a little bird, its name was Enza. I opened the window, and in-flu-enza.

T

— Reportedly a jump-rope rhyme from 1918

he speed at which COVID-19 is being researched and analyzed is astounding and should offer a great deal of hope, especially when one looks back at one of the worst viral outbreaks in recorded history: the 1918 influenza pandemic.

When that virus hit and hit again and hit again, it’s fair to say no one knew what hit them. As the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention details on its website, the first wave reached the United States in March 1918 followed by a second wave in September 1918 and a third one in spring 1919. Overall, the death toll was an unfathomable 50 million people worldwide. Of course, there were no vaccines at the time. People wore masks (albeit primitive ones, which were nothing like today’s N95 masks that are designed to filter out 95% of airborne particles, including viruses) and businesses and schools were closed. It might sound familiar, but technology has obviously improved phenomenally since then.

At this writing, the total confirmed deaths from COVID-19 was 45,500.

For perspective, when we started this article the number was 11,252.

While the number of deaths is obviously scary and will sadly will

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undoubtedly get worse before it gets better, there is a worldwide effort going on right now to “flatten the curve” and limit the number of people who are affected by this disease through social distancing. Without taking measured steps, the “curve” of cases will continue to rise before slowly coming down, but by staying home and limiting the spread of the virus, the “curve” is flattened considerably.

Technology plays a huge role in that. At the most basic level, many workers can work from home in a way that was not possible even, say, 10 years ago.

Besides remote work, and you’ve heard this over and over, proper handwashing, not touching your face and social distancing are all important tools to help stop the spread.

“Social distancing will work,” said Stefan Green, the associate director of the Research Resources Center and director of the Genome Research Core at the University of Illinois at Chicago. “The critical thing is to decrease the rate of transmission to gain time to develop a vaccine.”

Unlike previous pandemics including the 1918 flu: “Nobody knew about DNA or RNA, and there was no chance that you had a sequence of the entire organism,” Green said. “And here, within two weeks, we were able to identify what we’ve got. So our ammunition in terms of scientific and technical capabilities are much higher than they were 100 years ago, and I think that should all give us great hope that we can properly deploy our societal resources to address this pandemic.”

In other words: Technology is the differentiator.

The mystery of the 1918 flu transmission took decades and separate trips to Brevig Mission, Alaska, to solve. There are 72 Iñupiat Eskimos interned there near Port Clarence on the far western side of the Last Frontier. There were only 80 people living in the village at the time.

The corpses were mostly preserved from the permafrost, so the theory was that the frozen bodies of those unfortunate souls could help solve the mystery of what exactly caused the 1918 outbreak. Yet, it would take two trips separated by 46 years for microbiologist Johan Hultin to find the lung tissue sample he needed to solve the mystery. Twice he ventured to Brevig Mission— in 1951 and 1997—to collect samples from the deceased Eskimos there, and twice he asked for and received permission from village elders to dig into the grave to remove tissue to research the disease.

During the first trip, Hultin built a fire to warm the ground, and he then shoveled through the melted soil and exposed the surface to air just to get to the mass grave below—a painstaking operation that took “two days to reach the first body,” Hultin told the Anchorage Daily Tribune in 2014. Even with the preserved tissues, Hultin and his research team were not successful in reviving the virus for research.

The second trip, which Hultin again volunteered to take, but this time at the age of 72, led to a sample that could be reconstructed and researched.

The virus, it was discovered, originated in birds.

That 1918 jump-rope song was more on-point than people at the time could have ever imagined.

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hile there’s still so much that isn’t known about COVID-19, scientists and innovators are working feverishly to try to stop the spread of the virus, which likely came from bats via a “spillover,” meaning it jumped from animals to humans. Although,

“WE DIDN’T KNOW AT THAT MOMENT THAT THIS WAS GOING TO BECOME SOMETHING OF THIS MAGNITUDE

— Kamran Khan, founder and CEO of BlueDot, told CNBC

There are many myths about COVID-19. To learn more, visit the World Health Organization’s “Myth Buster” webpage.

one article suggests the virus could be a “chimera” of two different viruses, possibly originating in bats, pangolins or even another species.

Either way, it’s clear the virus is zoonotic. So let’s start there.

Researchers like Shi Zhengli, a principal investigator at the Wuhan Institute of Virology who is known as “Bat Woman” in China, go into caves to collect samples of blood, saliva and guano from a colony of bats to learn more about the many diseases those nocturnal creatures carry, including coronaviruses. As Scientific American explains, Shi first got a call about a novel coronavirus on Dec. 30, 2019. Shortly after, she told the publication, “Using a technique called polymerase chain reaction, which can detect a virus by amplifying its genetic material, the first round of tests showed that samples from five of seven patients contained genetic sequences known to be present in all coronaviruses.”

Meanwhile, halfway around the world a Canadian artificial intelligence company named BlueDot was tracking a cluster of “unusual pneumonia” cases in Wuhan. But, Kamran Khan, founder and CEO of BlueDot, told CNBC, “We didn’t know at that moment that this was going to become something of this magnitude.” The original idea for BlueDot, he explained in the article, was to “spread knowledge faster than the diseases spread themselves” and to ensure people don’t get caught “flatfooted” during a new outbreak. The fast-moving pace of this virus fit the bill perfectly.

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Although there is some debate about whether people should wear masks in public, the World Health Organization is not recommending people do so unless they are sick or caring for someone who is. Keep in mind there is a shortage of N95 masks that health care providers need to help ensure their safety while continuing to treat patients.

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On Jan. 7, 2020, just over a week after Shi got her call and BlueDot started tracking the cluster, Shi and her team—based on results from the polymerase chain reaction (PCR), genome sequencing and antibody testing— learned that the virus, officially called SARS-CoV-2, “was 96% identical to that of a coronavirus the researchers had identified in horseshoe bats in Yunnan.”

Two days later, the WHO made its first statement about the cluster in Wuhan, China, noting: “Preliminary identification of a novel virus in a short period of time is a notable achievement and demonstrates China’s increased capacity to manage new outbreaks.” The statement went on to say: “WHO does not recommend any specific measures for travelers. WHO advises against the application of any travel or trade restrictions on China based on the information currently available.”

On Jan. 30, a little over three weeks after that statement, a WHO Emergency Committee determined that COVID-19 met the criteria for a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC), and the WHO director-general made it official. The same day, the U.S. State Department raised its travel advisory to Level 4, meaning “Do not travel” to China.

A dramatic development in a short period of time— and the world was just beginning to understand the sheer magnitude of this situation.

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hile the human brain is an amazing organism that can store a petabyte worth of memories, as we explained in our fall/winter 2019 cover story, there are still issues with being able to access the information and analyze it. Artificial intelligence and machine learning on the other hand can provide useful analytics much quicker, perhaps in seconds, so when Chinese researchers posted the sequence for COVID-19 in a public database on Jan. 10, 2020, the race began to find a vaccine—a race that could take a year or longer.

In July 2019, a team of researchers from Flinders University in South Australia released the first flu vaccine created solely

by artificial intelligence via a program called SAM, which is short for Search Algorithm for Ligands.

“SAM is based on a deep machine learning algorithm,” Nikolai Petrovsky told Spark in an email. Petrovsky, who led the research into the AI vaccine, is a professor at Flinders University in the College of Medicine and Public Health. “We essentially train SAM on known compounds with particular features such as anti-COVID-19 antiviral activity, and then SAM can use the information learned to look at large chemical libraries containing millions of compounds and identify compounds SAM thinks might have antiviral activity. We can then make these compounds and test them against COVID-19. So in this case SAM can be used not just to help design vaccines, as we did previously, but also to help find new antiviral drugs.”

Petrovsky said that screening those millions of compounds takes mega-computational power, which SAM gets from the cloud. It “is not something we could have easily done even a few years ago,” he told Spark, adding: “The speed with which information can be gleaned in this way is unprecedented, and speed is what is needed when dealing with a potential pandemic virus as we have found with COVID-19.”

About 10,000 miles away, researchers at Oak Ridge (Tennessee) National Laboratory have tapped into Summit, a supercomputer that can make 200 trillion calculations per second. For perspective, while there’s no exact answer, it would probably take at least a month for a human just to count to a million, but likely longer than that.

When Summit ran thousands of simulations, it identified 77 drug compounds that might be effective in stopping the virus from infecting host cells. Of course, clinical tests need to be performed, which takes time. How much time is unclear. In the United States, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told reporters it could take 12 to 18 months to develop a vaccine for public use.

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“You have to go out and test it and ensure that it works,” said Dr. Chuck Gerba, a professor of environmental science at the University of Arizona, referring to a vaccine. He is an expert on the spread of germs (See “Dr. ‘Germ’s Tip on Ridding Your House of COVID-19 and Other Germs,” on the right). “That takes time, even if you have one developed fairly rapidly within a few months, to really get the data back on its efficacy would probably take a year, even with maybe a benefit of using artificial intelligence.”

Still, the race is on, as biotech companies like Johnson & Johnson, Moderna Therapeutics and others work on a vaccine. While there’s still much testing to be done, Moderna said an emergency vaccine for health care workers could be available as early as this fall. “Any emergency use would be subject to authorization by the appropriate regulatory agencies, based on the emergence of clinical data for mRNA-1273 that would support use of the vaccine prior to licensure,” the company said in a written statement on its website.

SpheraNOW PODCAST Companies face many potential legal issues with COVID-19, including related to company travel policies and sick employees, among other things.

James Tehrani talks with employment law expert Jon Hyman on the SpheraNOW podcast. To listen and learn more, visit: sphera.com/podcast

“GIVEN THE SCALE OF THIS PANDEMIC, INNOVATION IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN EVER, AND WE BELIEVE THAT HEALTH CARE NEEDS TO EXPLORE ALL DIAGNOSTIC AND THERAPEUTIC OPTIONS

— Moshe Becker, founder and CEO of RADLogics

Cases per 1M people 1-9 10-99 100-999 1,000-9,999 10,000+

About this data: This data changes rapidly, so whatʼs shown may be out of date. Totals may not always represent an accurate sum. Information about reported cases is also available on the World Health Organization site.

Source: World Health Organization

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CORONAVIRUS STATISTICS

896,450 Worldwide Confirmed Cases *Data accurate as of April 2, 2020.

45,525

Worldwide Confirmed Deaths

By James Tehrani

Another interesting AI application is in the area of CT scans. With a shortage of PCR tests available, countries are scrambling to figure out what to do. British researchers have even developed a “rapid smart testing device for coronavirus.”

According to the Lancaster University website, “Incorporating artificial intelligence, image processing, molecular virology and vast experience in the applied technologies, researchers at Brunel University London, Lancaster University and University of Surrey have developed an innovative device to detect COVID-19 in 30 minutes using an intelligent smartphone application.”

The test, the article says, has already been used for another purpose: checking chickens from the Philippines for viral infections.

For COVID-19, a nasal or throat swab is taken and then put into the device, which costs about $120 each. Within 30 minutes, the researchers say, the device will tell if the sample if positive or negative for COVID-19.

Separately, Abbott Laboratories recently announced a portable testing device called the ID Now Platform that it says can detect the virus in “as little as five minutes.” In a news release, the company said it plans to produce 50,000 tests per day. “With rapid testing on ID Now,” the company said in a written statement, “health care providers can perform molecular point-of-care testing outside the traditional four walls of a hospital in outbreak hotspots.”

Beyond PCR testing, a company called RADLogics, which is based in Boston and Tel Aviv, Israel, is using artificial intelligence through CT scans to help determine if someone has COVID-19.

CT scans are “much faster in detecting COVID-19 symptoms,” wrote Moshe Becker, RADLogics’ CEO and co-founder, in an email. “The average time it takes to do a chest CT is one to two minutes, and our software can analyze the data in less than a second to produce a full analysis including positive/negative determination and quantification of the symptoms if positive.”

The scan, he said, is designed as an automatic detection tool that will help caregivers assess the severity of the spread of COVID-19 in the patient. The software then creates a “Corona Score” based on what percentage of a patient’s lungs are infected with COVID-19. This allows doctors to better assess the severity of the illness, Becker said.

The technology has been used in China, Russia and Italy, he said, and, a study published on the Cornell University website found that, in 157 patients from China and the United States, the test was able to identify COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 patients with an Area Under the Curve (AUC) of 0.996. The best possible AUC is 1.0 in terms of accuracy.

“Given the scale of this pandemic, innovation is more important than ever, and we believe that health care needs to explore all diagnostic and therapeutic options,” Becker added.

TIPS ON RIDDING YOUR HOUSE OF COVID-19 AND OTHER GERMS emote working situations are nothing new, but the sheer number of people working remotely because of the COVID-19 virus is undoubtedly unprecedented.

To learn more about how people can slow the spread of the virus in their homes and in the office, Spark caught up with Dr. Chuck Gerba, who is a professor of environmental science at the University of Arizona as well as a professor of microbiology and immunology. “Dr. Germ,” as he is known, has spent his career tracking and learning about the spread of viruses and bacteria among other germ types.

If you’re a germaphobe, you’ll be happy to know there are people out there like Gerba germinating on how best to keep people safe and healthy from viruses. But if you’re a germaphobe, some of his observations might cause copious consternation. He told CNN last year, for instance, that “There’s more fecal bacteria in your kitchen sink than there is in a toilet after you flush it. That’s why your dog drinks out of the toilet. He’s smarter than you think.”

Doggone, right.

Timely Tips From Dr. Gerba

Wash or sanitize your hands as soon as you come home to avoid spreading the virus.

Regularly disinfect high-touch areas such as tabletops, countertops and surfaces.

Don’t share towels, and wash cloth towels every few days. Dry hands with paper towels if possible.

Make sure to follow the instructions on the bottle for spray and wipe disinfectants.

If sanitizing wipes are not available, bleach works or even nonbleach disinfectants.

Consider using liquid hand soap instead of bars of soap.

Want more tips? Listen to the full podcast at sphera.com/podcast

B

eyond testing, the need to be able to assess and process information is vital. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention now has a “self-checker” guide it calls “Clara” on its website to help people “make decisions about seeking medical care” for COVID-19.

AI is also playing a role with scientific papers as well. The website Semantic Scholars offers an easy way to track research on COVID-19.

By using natural language processing technology, the COVID-19 Open Research Dataset can help researchers find information from, at this writing, from thousands of scholarly articles written about the virus.

There’s also an “AI-powered Research Feed” that helps scientists “find papers relevant to your interests based on your ratings.”

Additionally, there’s the Delphi research group from Carnegie Mellon University’s Machine Learning department that Roni Rosenfeld, an adjunct professor in the department, runs. The research group uses machine learning data to make predictions about the spread of the flu virus. The group’s past predictions, based on machine learning, have

COVID-19 (2019 NOVEL CORONAVIRUS) SEVERE ACUTE RESPIRATORY SYNDROME CORONAVIRUS 2 (SARS-COV-2)

Coronaviruses are a large family of viruses that are known to cause illness ranging from the common cold to more severe diseases such as Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) and Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS).

SYMPTOMS The most common symptoms are fever, cough, shortness of breath and breathing difficulties. In severe cases infection can cause pneumonia, severe acute respiratory syndrome and even death.

Symptoms generally appear within two to 14 days.

EMERGENCY SIGNS Difficulty breathing or shortness of breath. Persistent pain or pressure in the chest. New confusion or inability to arouse. Bluish lips or face. This list is not all inclusive. Please consult your physician for any other symptoms that are severe or concerning.

WHEN CONTRACTED People with COVID-19 generally develop signs and symptoms, including mild respiratory symptoms and fever, on an average of five to six days after infection (mean incubation period five to six days, range one to 14 days). Most people infected with the COVID-19 virus have mild disease and recover.

Sources: World Health Organization, CDC.gov

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been so accurate that, in October 2019, the U.S. CDC awarded it $3 million in research funding and a five-year designation as an Influenza Forecasting Center of Excellence. “The CDC now routinely includes our forecasting in their messaging to the public and to decision-makers,” Rosenfeld said in an article on the Carnegie Mellon website.

But when the CDC came back to Rosenfeld to ask about tracking the COVID-19 outbreak, he told Vox that he was “very, very reluctant.” The problem with COVID-19 forecasting, he said, is “there is no historical data to go on. So the machine-learning-based approaches are actually the worst here.”

He eventually decided there is a way to offer some predictions—through what he calls the “wisdom of the crowd” through Delphi’s Crowdcast webpage, which even includes a leader board.

Basically, volunteers offer their predictions based on common-sense reasoning from the news, from anecdotal knowledge, etc. The people who participate are not experts in making predictions on the spread of a virus, he told Vox, but “what we’ve learned from experience is that any one of them on their own is not very accurate, but their aggregate tends to be quite accurate.”

I

n terms of testing Italy and South Korea were well ahead of the rest of the world in terms of tests per million people through March 31, according to Our World Data.

Testing, of course, allows people peace of mind if they don’t have the virus but also allows people who are carrying the virus but are asymptomatic to know they should quarantine themselves so as not to spread the virus to others.

Everyone, for example, in the small Italian city of Vò, where the first COVID-19 death occurred in Italy, has been tested. Vò is a little over an hour west of Venice. I highly recommend dropping the little guy from Google

Street View into Vò and doing some exploring.

The University of Padua tested all the people who live there—3,300 in all—for COVID-19.

Twice. and learned that “at least six” people tested positive who were asymptomatic. In Vò, “there were the first two cases,” Luca Zaia, the governor of Italy’s Veneto region, told the Guardian. “We tested everyone, even if the experts told us this was a mistake: 3,000 tests. We found 66 positives, who we isolated for 14 days, and after that six of them were still positive. And that is how we ended it.’’

It has been well-documented that the United States is already behind in COVID-19 testing and now faces another challenge: a shortage of supplies to perform the tests.

It generally takes three or four days to get test results, but the U.S. Food and Drug Administration did recently approve a new test that can detect the virus in about 45 minutes to go along with the previously mentioned Abbott five-minute test. And with testing, speed is of the essence.

And that need for speed starts with our very DNA. “Whenever I’m teaching I always give an example that when I did my Ph.D., and this was 2000 to 2004,” UIC’s Green said, “I sequenced 150 genes as part of my Ph.D. thesis. Nowadays, we have sequencing runs that generate 150 million sequences, a billion sequences, 10 billion sequences. So, the magnitude of the data output are so incredible compared to what was available even 10 years ago, even five years ago.

“Advancements in DNA research include novel sequencing chemistries and methodologies, miniaturization of sequencing instrumentation allowing millions of more reactions to be conducted concurrently, and greater computational capacity to acquire, process, store and distribute sequence data,” Green said. “In fact, the output of sequence data has become so great that computational analysis is often the bottleneck, rather than data acquisition.”

In terms of developing anti-viral medications, which could be used to treat COVID-19 patients, one interesting area is virtual reality.

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Dr. Adrian Mulholland is a chemistry professor at the university of Bristol’s Center for Computational Chemistry, in England. He and his team are using VR to help create medicines. They’ve researched influenza proteins among others to learn how drug molecules bind to them. And now, “We want to apply this to COVID-19 targets,” he told Spark.

It could produce something like a Tamiflu drug that could be used prophylactically for health care workers to help prevent them from getting COVID19 or it could be used “to slow progression of the disease, to mitigate the symptoms and limit infectivity.”

When researchers put on the VR headset, Mulholland said, “you really step into the molecular world, you step inside the protein that’s the target for the drug design, and you see this in front of you.”

With the VR controller, you can manipulate the molecules and see what works to combine a drug to the virus to help prevent the functionality of the virus.

Besides trying to create new medications, the researchers are also testing how drugs that are currently available could perform in treating COVID-19.

“You can scan through maybe thousands of potential drugs at a time,” he said, referring to research into using available medications that treat other diseases. “But a quick and dirty approach like that will generate a lot of false positives. So we want to use the VR tool to help eliminate those false positives to identify the really promising candidates.”

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Mulholland also wants to provide the technology to more researchers around the world through an open-source framework, which opens up a new dimension of research possibility.

Speaking of open source, Spark caught up with Colin Keogh, a mechanical engineer who co-founded the Open Ventilator Project in Ireland. The project is using crowdsourcing and groupthink to create a prototype that health care providers could possibly use to print emergency ventilator systems in a pinch. As more people become ill with COVID-19, ventilators will play a huge role in the recovery process. The project is designed to help fill the void should a ventilator shortage continue or get even worse.

“We’re not trying to replace standard hospital ventilators,” Keogh said. “We’re not trying to develop new forms of medical ventilators.

We’re just trying to provide a solution that can be used in an emergency when it’s either a choice between this or nothing.”

The world, he added, hasn’t faced a challenge like this, probably since World War II. He believes that regulations could be relaxed during a global emergency, so he wants to be prepared with a solution if that should happen.

“We don’t want to overpromise anything,” he said. “We want to test our solutions first and make sure it is a valuable solution. So we’ve been working an awful lot with doctors and medical practitioners, getting their advice and input on the concepts as they currently stand. And then, as the program develops and as we iterate these concepts and designs, we will probably have some interactions” with governments to see the potential viability of open-source ventilators.

Swimming right along, similarly, Italian engineers recently used 3-D printing to turn scuba gear into ventilator equipment on a limited scale. Of course, patients would have to sign a waiver to use the uncertified device, according to an article on Futurism.com. Dyson, the vacuum and hand dryer company, has even gotten into the ventilator game. James Dyson, the founder, was able to design a new ventilator in just 10 days and plans to make 15,000 of them.

In the Spring/Summer 2019 issue of Spark, we talked to a company that uses virtual reality to train health care workers for dealing with fires in the operating room. Read the issue at issuu.com/sphera-solutions

The antithesis of information is misinformation.

W

hile social media is a powerful tool to get the message out, it’s also just as powerful as an instrument of misinformation. Seven of the biggest social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, issued a joint statement on March 16 that read: “We are working closely together on COVID-19 response efforts. We’re helping millions of people stay connected while also jointly combating fraud and misinformation about the virus, elevating authoritative content on our platforms and sharing critical updates in coordination with government health care agencies around the world. We invite other companies to join us as we work to keep our communities healthy and safe.”

Facebook, for one, has started a Coronavirus (COVID-19) Information Center for the latest updates, and says it will connect its users to trusted sources and work to weed out misinformation among other steps, according to a post attributed to Kang-Xing Jin, Facebook’s head of health.

And, as TechCrunch reports, the popular instant messaging platform WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook, has been testing a feature that allows users to get more context and information about the messages they receive to help people filter misinformation.

Anything that tamps down on untruths, like the list that Dr. Faheem Younus, a physician who is chief of infectious diseases at the University of Maryland Medical System, debunked on Twitter, gets a thumb’s up from Spark. No, hot water and onions cannot prevent someone from getting COVID-19. Got it?

In general, Keogh from the Open Ventilator Project believes a time of crisis is also a great time for innovations.

“So, again, to reference the Second World War,” Keogh said, “the amount of technology that was created for that or the Cold War or the space race, whenever there is this larger collective drive to either solve a problem or do something new, it does seem to stimulate people’s innovation capacity.”

Exactly right, and, if you’ll excuse me, the dog is barking. Stay safe.

James Tehrani is Spark’s editor-in-chief.

Contact him at spark@sphera.com.

Spark Volume 3, Issue 4

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The Twin Is in Even When You’re Not

By James Tehrani

OPERATIONAL RISK MANAGEMENT technology has moved beyond traditional compliance methods to an Integrated Risk Management 4.0 approach.

One of the key developments is Digital Twin technology that offers a virtual view of a plant so you can see the status without having to be there.

In the current remote-working situation that many of us are dealing with from the COVID-19 pandemic, this can be a valuable tool for assessing the operations, whether it’s a live view or a snapshot.

Say, for example, there’s “a refinery in Texas, and they’ve got another refinery in Illinois with the same scale and operating parameters,” said Abhilash Menon, a Sphera business consultant focused on Operational Excellence and Digital Transformation.

“Having that Digital Twin shows them, OK, one of them is performing at a higher risk level than the other, and they can start questioning that without having to actually go down to the asset but just looking at those Digital Twins and how they are performing.”

Remotely, the user could see the critical job safety activities, such as whether a valve sensor isn’t functioning properly or what immediate and essential corrective actions need to be taken.

Especially at a time when social distancing is not only encouraged but likely mandatory, it helps to keep as many people away from the plant as possible, including contractors, etc., via Digital Twin. While it’s not possible to keep everyone away from the plant, executives could still be able to gain 24

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much of the same information remotely that they would in the actual plant through Digital Twin, Menon added.

The other area that Digital Twin could help in the future is through emergency response capabilities that he expects will be available.

He gave the example of an asset manager on holiday. Even though the manager is away from the building, a Digital Twin could automatically send a message to the phone if there’s an emergency.

“I’m sitting in Hawaii, my asset is in Texas,” he said. “As soon as an emergency happens, I would get the intimation on my phone. I could take a look at what’s happening at my assets, see where people are at, and an emergency plan could be initiated based on all the information from the Digital Twin, and I could support my team with timely information.”

GUEST COLUMN SPARKING CONVERSATION

EHS&S

COVID-19 and the Climate Crisis

By Niles Maxwell

I’M NOT SUPERSTITIOUS when it comes to the environment, as we rely entirely on environmental science and engineering for the facts upon which Sphera’s sustainability publications and external communications are based.

But the COVID-19 outbreak has had some side effects that make me wonder whether the Earth as a whole isn’t actually alive and conscious. With COVID19, it seems as if Mother Nature has sent us humans both an incentivized message and a dire warning—if we slow the speed at which we are polluting the Earth now, nature will reward us by restoring itself, supporting us and all of life as we know it for millennia to come, but if we fail to stop contaminating our environment, nature will make our lives much more difficult by bringing the planet back into equilibrium through other, more devastating means, such as creating the conditions that encourage widespread disease, mass displacement, severe flooding and drought and a long list of other unsettling consequences.

Without a doubt, the lingering COVID-19 outbreak has produced a reduction in global emissions as a direct result of our response to it: social distancing, working from home and the sharp reduction in personal travel, tourism, public gatherings and manufacturing.

Some of these reductions might be countered with increases in emissions from home power consumption and by an effort to catch up after economic conditions bounce back. But, the point is, that we can, collectively and quickly, transform the way we behave.

Our response to the virus has saved lives, but it also is causing economic hardship, the loss of jobs and chaos. However critical we need to be about particular national responses to this outbreak, all things considered, humanity has responded decisively.

It is a reminder of how capable we can be as a species, how quickly we can change our behavior if our lives are threatened. When things shift back in the direction of normal, we need to put future threats into perspective. Despite the immediacy of the COVID-19 danger, the terrible consequences to humanity of this

WITHOUT A DOUBT, THE LINGERING COVID-19 OUTBREAK HAS PRODUCED A SHARP REDUCTION IN GLOBAL EMISSIONS AS A DIRECT RESULT OF OUR RESPONSE TO IT. virus are nothing compared to what we know is on the horizon if we fail to tackle global warming as soon as possible and in the most holistic manner we can.

Beyond the quantitative results of the outbreak found in CO2 reductions and other measurable environmental improvements, many people have experienced a qualitative transformation as well.

Our response to the outbreak has forced people to cooperate to tackle the challenge, families have been reunified, as children stay home from school and parents work from home. Although this has created tremendous economic hardship for some families, I wondered—as I saw in a yard and through a window at the beginning of the outbreak how parents were playing in the middle of the day with their children—about all the positive things that have come about as a result of this world event.

The reduction in traffic in Venice canals allowed fish to be visible in the clear water there. In most major cities, air pollution has dropped dramatically as people stay home. Is this what the world could look like if we took better care of it?

The immediacy of the COVID-19 outbreak was the main motivating factor here, but we need to take what we’ve learned from the experience and pull all our responsive skills back into play again... and soon. We need to be equally fear-driven in our response to global warming if we are going to prevent the most dangerous impacts of climate change.

As we have seen in the fight against this coronavirus, personal, organizational and governmental cooperation is critical to success.

We need an equal measure of cooperation in fighting climate change. The only difference is that with climate change, we still have a chance within this decade to get ahead of the dangerous curve. We must prevent global warming from increasing beyond 1.5° Celsius (above preindustrial levels) if we are to have any chance of preventing the future disaster that is inevitable if we fail to act in time.

Niles Maxwell is the content and communications manager for sustainability. He is also Spark’s senior writer. Working out of Sphera’s Stuttgart office since 2018, he translates complicated environmental engineering ideas into everyday language we all can understand.

Spark Volume 3, Issue 4

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FORMER MAJOR LEAGUE PITCHER

BOBBY JENKS USED TO CLOSE OUT BASEBALL GAMES UNTIL A BAD OUTCOME FROM AN OVERLAPPING SURGERY CLOSED OUT HIS CAREER.

ARTICLE BY

PORTRAIT BY

JAMES TEHRANI

ROBERT BECK

CONCURRENT SURGERY DEFINED

“Overlapping and CONCURRENT SURGERIES form a continuum of simultaneous surgical practice in which a single surgeon has two or more patients in operating rooms at the same time. Undeniably, in an acute life-or-limb-threatening presentation, it may be essential for a surgeon to care for two individual patients simultaneously. These situations are different from scheduled elective surgery. CONCURRENT SURGERY is defined as the attending surgeon not being present for ‘critical and key’ portions of a procedure.”

Source: The Journal of Bone & Joint Surgery

Photo: Keith Allison

I didn’t decide to stop playing baseball. I had the game taken away from me because of a BOTCHED

BACK SURGERY in Boston that was supposed to be no big deal—because a level of care and professional expertise that I trusted to be present … was not there.

— BOBBY JENKS WROTE IN THE PLAYERS’ TRIBUNE

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Photo: Keith Allison

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SPHERA INTERVIEW

WHILE BASEBALL IS A TEAM SPORT, it’s also a strategic, one-on-one game-within-a-game where a pitcher, who is on defense, challenges an offensive player—the hitter—pitch by pitch. Ball, strike, hit, out, etc.

Especially for pitchers who throws “gas,” meaning they can hurl a 5-ounce baseball close to 100 mph or on rare occasion faster than that, one throw can change a career. The risk of injury is omnipresent in baseball and sports in general, which are currently on hiatus because of COVID-19 social–distancing practices.

It’s a risk for a team, of course, although organizations generally take out insurance policies on their highest-paid star players in case of injury. Case in point: Outside of a one-game farewell at the end of the 2018 season, the former New York Mets’ All-Star third basemen David Wright had to stop playing in 2016 because of injuries. While the Mets still have to pay some of the remaining money owed him from a restructured eight-year contract Wright signed in 2012, they weren’t on the hook for the full remaining dollars over the last few years of the contract because of insurance. It’s complicated.

But Injuries can be a bigger risk for a player whose future earnings could be in jeopardy if they can’t continue to play at the level they did before the injury or they can’t continue to play at all.

Just ask Bobby Jenks. Jenks was a pitcher who started his Major League career with the Chicago White Sox in 2005. He was called up from the Minors in July 2005, and shortly thereafter would become the team’s closer—meaning he would be brought in to try to get the last few outs to win a baseball game—for a team that was World Series bound.

In fact, he threw the final pitch in the final game of the 2005 World Series getting the save and bringing Chicago its first baseball championship in over three generations—88 years to be exact.

It was a dream season for sure and the start of a promising career as well. He followed up his successful start by making the All-Star team the next two seasons. He even set a then-Major League record along the way by retiring 41 consecutive batters, over several games, without anyone reaching base by walk, hit or error.

… SO I GO TO A CLINIC RIGHT DOWN THE STREET JUST TO GET SOME SORT OF MEDICAL ANSWER ON WHAT WAS ACTUALLY HAPPENING, AND THAT’S WHEN I FOUND OUT IT WAS SPINAL FLUID AND WAS SENT TO THE ER. Six years later, in his first year as a member of the Boston Red Sox, his career came to a screeching halt in New York. It was a pitch in Yankee Stadium. He immediately knew something was wrong, but he didn’t know that it would be his last pitch as a professional athlete.

Jenks was forced to retire after playing just 19 games that year. What he thought was an arm injury turned out to be a back problem instead, one that required surgery. It was a simple procedure, or so he was told, that would allow him to start rehabbing the injury by the following spring and back to pitching in regular-season games around midseason. Instead, that “simple” operation almost cost him his life.

What he didn’t know at the time was his doctor was also operating on another patient as part of what is known as a concurrent surgery.

He first detailed his harrowing experience in a Players’ Tribune article titled “Scar Tissue” that was published in December 2019, seven months after he settled his lawsuit with the doctor and hospital for $5.1 million.

He recently spoke with Spark about what occurred and his hope for mandatory informed consent prior to any concurrent surgeries. ▸▸

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The following is an edited transcript of the interview with BOBBY JENKS. If you’d like to hear more, listen to the SpheraNOW podcast (sphera.com/podcast).

OK. So you wrote in the Players’ Tribune that it felt not like a knife, but there was a spoon digging into your back. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

Jenks: Yeah. Because I’ve had injuries before, they were very sharp … like tingling, radiating. This was more of like a very deep and dull [pain]. It was extremely painful. … It was almost like somebody was trying to use a spoon or like a thumb, like that kind of a pressure, like a deep heavy pressure.

So after you come out of the game, what happens then?

Jenks: I just went down into the tunnel.

I checked with more trainers. The Yankees’ doctor came over and was checking on me. I went inside into the training room. At that moment I wasn’t quite sure what was going on because we couldn’t diagnose it for a little while after that. So it was really at that point just going through what the possibilities were, what it could be and trying to narrow it down to where the problem is.

But originally you thought there was an issue with your arm rather than your back, right?

Let’s talk about your story. When did Jenks: Yeah, because when I was you know you were hurt?

Jenks: It was one of those things where getting some of the radiating pain, it was underneath my it wasn’t, I mean it was soreness but it left scapula, because at the wasn’t painful yet. Because I was still, time I didn’t know it was I went through my pregame warmups this compression being during the game, but it was just one of those things that happened in the game set on the nerves. So the nerves were shooting the that it was on that one pitch. pain elsewhere other than directly from my spine.

And so after all of the diagnostics, what did you find out that it was?

Jenks: So basically through my T5 through T8, it was kind of growing together. So the operation was supposed to be a decompression of my laminectomy. The best way I describe it is, you have tubes running through your spine that nerves can go through and they

Spark: So, as a baseball player, how do you balance risk in terms of, say you’re not feeling well one day and you think to yourself, ‘Should I go out there and do this for the team and the fans vs. what’s best for my personal interest and career?’ How do players deal with that?

Bobby Jenks: It’s a difference between knowing when you’re sore or when you’re hurt. That’s where that lines really comes in. I mean, guys can play through soreness and through some pain, but when you know you’re hurt, that’s the difference.

BOBBY JENKS POSITION:

BATS:

PITCHER

RIGHT

THROWS:

RIGHT

MLB DEBUT:

LAST MLB APPEARANCE:

JULY 6, 2005

JULY 7, 2011

for the Chicago White Sox

for the Boston Red Sox

MLB CAREER SUMMARY: W

L

ERA

SV

IP

SO

16

20

3.53

173

357.1

351

CAREER HIGHLIGHTS AND AWARDS

2X ALL-STAR (2006, 2007) WORLD SERIES CHAMPION (2005) TEAMS:

CHICAGO WHITE SOX (2005 - 2010) BOSTON RED SOX (2011) Photo: Scott Dunham

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were closing together. And the idea was to go in there and make those holes bigger again to open up room for those nerves to run through there freely.

Of the total individual operations where concurrent surgeries were performed, spinal surgeries led the way followed by total knee and hip replacements. For general surgeries, colon surgeries had the highest percentage.*

Spinal Surgery Total knee Total hip

7.1% 2.1% 2.1%

Colon Surgeries Ventral hernia repairs Cholecystectomies

1.9% 2.1% 2.1%

Only 4% of the 1,454 respondents to a 2017 survey said they had any knowledge of overlapping, i.e., concurrent surgery. About a third of the respondents (31%) supported the practice while 95% said the attending surgeon should notify them in advance before concurrent surgeries.

Additionally, 96% said the surgeon should identify the critical components of the operation and 92% said the doctor should document which portion of the surgery in which they were present. *The study evaluated 12,010 concurrent and 521,656 nonconcurrent operations in the ASC NSQIP registry between 2014 and 2015, and propensityscore matched 11,044 operations of each type to evaluate safety.

1 Source: American College of Surgeons National Surgical Quality Improvement Program, 201 2 Source: “Public Perceptions of Overlapping Surgery,” American College of Surgeons, May 2017

So let’s get into the day of the surgery. What did you think was going to happen?

Jenks: Well, at the time it was supposed to be just a very in and out [procedure], just a couple of hours, decompress two levels, and I was going to be ready by maybe end of spring training. … maybe come back around midseason. That was the game plan from Day One. I had no other thoughts than that at the time.

What went wrong?

Jenks: Well, a couple things went wrong. On the negligence side, we’ll save that for a minute, but just on the surgical side itself, what was supposed to be two levels that were decompressed, only one was done and it wasn’t done thoroughly. A sharp spike had been left in the area that penetrated my dural sac, which caused the spinal leak.

Actually, let’s back up a second. So the spinal leak, which you mentioned here, so you found out about that how long after the surgery, was that a day or two?

Jenks: No, no, this was, I was in Boston for the surgery and I flew home. Probably, I can’t remember the exact time. Maybe seven to 10 days later.

And so in the Players’ Tribune, it’s really dramatic. You have the story that you’re sitting on the couch and you basically say to yourself, ‘Who dumped water over me?’

Is that right?

Jenks: Yeah. Because that’s what it felt like. I mean that’s how much fluid had burst out of my back and just completely soaked the back of my tee shirt.

That’s so scary. All right, so let’s get back to the surgery.

And what did you find out later that took place that caused the problem?

Jenks: Well, during my surgery it’s what’s known as concurrent surgery where one doctor is overseeing two surgeries at the same time and there was no informed consent. We were left in the dark. We had no knowledge of any of this going on. When I say we, I’m saying not only others who have gone through this in the past, but also the surgeon who had another patient in the room right next to me. He had no understanding of what was done, that any of this has happened either. So during my surgery somewhere he left in a rush. We can never get a full definitive answer out of the doctor during his depositions. So we can never get a full clear answer. But what we pieced together is, he was in a rush. He never ▸▸ Spark Volume 3, Issue 4

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Photo: Avi Schwab

completed the surgery. We don’t even know if it was him who actually did the surgery in the first place.

Do you know if the doctor was ever in communication with the Red Sox doctors? Did they ever talk about it?

Jenks: No, not that I’m aware of. No. Even after my incision blew open, me and my agent, we tried to contact the doc, the surgeon, who did my surgery for, I don’t know how long, we were trying to send emails, phone calls, one after another trying to get ahold of him.

So you have this fluid dripping down your back. Did you ever think of going to the ER immediately?

Jenks: Well yeah. I mean, that’s why I went to a clinic right next door to my house. I mean it was literally maybe a three-minute drive down the road, because I didn’t know what was going on. So I didn’t know if it was, because at the time I didn’t know it was spinal fluid. I didn’t know what was leaking. That’s why I wanted to go and see what was going on. That’s what the discharge paper says, ‘If any leaking happens, call immediately.’ … So I go to a clinic right down the street just to get some sort of medical answer on what was actually happening, and that’s when I found out it was spinal fluid and was sent to the ER. So not many people know about concurrent surgeries. In a survey from 2017 on public perceptions of, they called it overlapping surgery, they said that there’s only 3.9% of respondents who even knew about it.

Jenks: Yeah, and see that’s where they like to trick us with the words because that’s what they try to use in my case as well, is overlapping. Which means that a surgeon can start a new surgery when my surgery was being closed. He can go into the other room and have somebody else close me up while he

goes into the other room and starts a new one. And that’s a completely different thing of actual concurrent surgery, which is two patients going under the anesthesia at the same time.

So if this doctor had an emergency patient and he came to you and said, ‘You know what, I have this emergency patient.

Would you mind if I did a concurrent surgery?’ What would you have said?

Jenks: At this point I had been waiting, because I got hurt [around] midseason. I had gotten a pulmonary embolism, so that’s why my surgery was pushed off until the middle of December. So at this point I had been waiting months. So I mean I could have waited another day. I would have said, I would’ve happily said, ‘No. Take care of the emergency surgery.

I can wait one more day to have you solely work on me.’

And going into a surgery, I think that’s what we all hope for is knowing that you’ve got 100% of [your doctor’s] focus and effort on you. I mean, going under any surgery is dangerous in the first place, but I mean, he was working on my spine where it was a very delicate surgery that many things could go wrong.

And you would expect and hope that you’re going to somebody who is going to dedicate that 100% to you at that time.

So what are you doing these days? Are you healthy? Do you feel OK now?

Jenks: For the most part, yeah. I can live a normal life. There’s some things that I’m limited on. I’ll never be 100%, but that just comes with everything that I’ve gone through. But minus that I’m doing very well. I can do a lot of things that still make me happy.

Can you still throw the hook [a curveball]?

Jenks: [Laughs] Unfortunately, the most I can do is maybe throw some BP to the kids.

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GUEST COLUMN SPARKING CONVERSATION

OPERATIONAL RISK MANAGEMENT

Musing on Master Data Management, the New York City Water Supply ... and Madonna?!

YOU GOTTA LOVE THE WORD ‘FLOCCULATION,’ RIGHT? BY NEAL ROSEN MY DAD WAS A CIVIL ENGINEER for the New York City water department for 35 years, and when I was a kid it was fun to go to work with him when I was off from school because I got to see publicly inaccessible areas, buildings and underground spaces where the guts of the water supply system existed.

I learned all about how massive amounts of water from many different sources were cleaned, treated and filtered every day to supply resources to the many millions of people and businesses that needed it. My dad showed and taught me how the sediment and other particulate matter in the water was removed through cleansing processes known as coagulation, flocculation and sedimentation, and how the water needed to be cleaned to a point where it met strict

government standards. I’m not going to bore you with more about these processes, but you gotta love the word “flocculation,” right?

Fast forward to today. In my role as vice president of Master Data Management (MDM) at Sphera, I see many parallels between what New York City does to provide clean water that meets strict standards and how the SpheraCloud MDM solution cleans and standardizes our customers’ master data—also to strict standards. In fact, Sphera has been providing expert master data optimization services for over 30 years, and we are known for having defined and created the standard for naming and

Every $1 invested in water and sanitation provides a $4 economic return. Universal access to basic water and sanitation would result in $18.5 billion in economic benefits each year.

Sources: Water.org

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describing MRO-related master data, our Standard Modifier Dictionary (the SMD). The SMD is known worldwide as the optimum dictionary to apply to master MRO data so there are no duplicates and there is no ambiguity throughout the hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of master data records that a customer might have.

The SpheraCloud MDM solution doesn’t stop at just cleaning and standardizing your existing master data. It also provides easy-to-use master data governance tools to make sure newly created data is free of errors and does not duplicate something already in your master data catalog. And the SpheraCloud Governance tools apply the same trusted and proven SMD so that a customer’s master data catalog stays clean and standardized and does not require repeated data optimization service projects in the future.

And much like the water mains and piping that send clean water throughout New York City, SpheraCloud MDM has connectors to send clean master data to the enterprise resource planning, material requirements planning and other systems that need it to help users make the most cost-effective and efficient procurement, inventory and maintenance decisions and strategies possible. Our customers have been achieving Operational Excellence around their MRO master

FACTS ABOUT THE:

NEW YORK CITY WATER TOWERS data for decades, and more recently we have seen customers approach us to apply SpheraCloud MDM to other master data, like for products and finished goods, and for industrial and facility services.

I had no idea back in the ’80s that the fun stuff I learned around the New York City water supply would come to mind 35 years later around something that would be called “Master Data Management,” but I’m glad it did!

I do need to mention that the coolest thing that ever happened when I tagged along with my dad to work had nothing to do with the water supply. One early morning I was with him as he did an inspection at New York City’s Central Park reservoir and suddenly the giant pop star Madonna appeared as she was out for a run on the reservoir jogging path. I was a big fan, and my dad and I got to exchange some small talk with her as she wished us a great day. And it was! So, not to be too cheesy, but if you need to “Get into the groove” on cleaning, governing and connecting your master data to support your Operational Excellence programs, please contact us.

If you’ve been to New York City, you may have noticed the very old-looking water towers on top of many of the buildings. What many don’t realize is that these water towers are hardly antiques — in fact, these towers provide approximately 1.2 billion gallons of high quality drinking water to nearly one-half the population of New York City every day.

HOW IS THE WATER? Water from the towers are considered to be the “Champagne” of drinking water. It consistently wins annual taste tests against other NYS water sources. The majority of the water (i.e., Catskill and Delaware Watersheds portion) is of very high quality and continues to meet all federal and state drinking water quality standards without the need for filtration.

HOW THEY WORK: From the roof, gravity sends water to pipes throughout the building.

They provide water for domestic uses and fire supply.

As tenants use the water, the level in the tank goes down and, just like in a toilet, a ballcock lets more in.

Water is fed to buildings through pipes in the basement.

Electric pumps push the water from the basement to the roof.

It takes two to three hours to fill the average 10,000-gallon tank.

Sources: AMNY | Department of Environmental Conservation, New York State

Neal Rosen is Sphera’s vice president of Master Data Management. He has worked in the EHS&S and Operational Excellence IT space for more than 25 years.

SpheraNOW is a podcast for Environmental Health, Safety & Sustainability professionals around the globe. Join Sphera on our journey to help companies keep their employees safe, their products sustainable and their operations productive.

Listen now at sphera.com/podcasts

COLUMN INSPIRING TECHNOLOGY

TECH TALK

A Bigger Bite of the EHS&S Pie IF ‘SOFTWARE IS EATING THE WORLD,’ WHY ISN’T EHS&S TAKING A BIGGER BITE?

BY STEPHEN RYLANDER

IN A LINKEDIN POST FROM A FEW YEARS AGO, David Metcalfe, Verdantix’s president and CEO, asked: “Why Aren’t EHS Professionals Technology Leaders?” It’s 2020, and the question is still relevant.

It is surprising how far the Environmental Health, Safety & Sustainability profession is behind as an industry. And if Metcalfe and Verdantix aren’t accurate in this assessment, then who is? This is especially notable considering the resources at disposal within large organizations. We can attest that this is not for a lack of technology solutions.

Coming out of finance, the two worlds feel almost like opposites. Not just the day to day or trying to compare mutual fund management to high-risk, capital-intensive, labor-intensive industries. There is no relevant comparison there. Except that every company is a technology company now, and finance has acknowledged that, which produced an avalanche of movement. We’ve not seen that kind of moment publicly in EHS&S—but it’s building beneath the waves.

With that, finance employed technology rapidly comparatively over the past 15 years. In finance they deployed and continue to deploy machine learning, robotic process automation and other technologies to squeeze out remaining efficiencies. Most workflows are already digital. They are picking off the remaining human intervention operations and squeezing, and moving toward an optimization trend now.

We could follow this lead in EHS&S across the board. At Sphera, we are doing so by building cloud-first, integration-first and digital-first solutions. As an industry, are we going to manage carbon emissions with nondigital workflows? Really?

Measure incidents in spreadsheets … who does this benefit?

The premise that less than half (only 35% in 2017) of EHS&S respondents think software is a critical success

factor will always hold us back. In 2011 Marc Andreessen, who co-created the Mosaic browser, said that “software is eating the world.” And it has been ever since. Today, artificial intelligence and machine learning are starting to supersede software. It’s moving at an incredible pace. If EHS&S is behind on digitization today, then can they leap the chasm? Of course they can. They must. If not, many large organizations will suffer greatly. It takes deploying integrated, secure, cloud-ready solutions to win now.

So Metcalfe is proposing modifying career tracks inside of large organizations to add additional focus for EHS&S professionals with technology. I applaud this train of thought.

Here are some other ideas I’ll add: • Put EHS&S and technology into Digital Transformation initiatives.

• Offer digital workflow training (EHS&S or otherwise) so professionals can see the possibilities.

• Inject team members from other professions into the EHS&S practice as catalysts.

Sphera believes we can change this trend with our integrated SpheraCloud solutions and hybrid take on moving from on-premise to cloud. That, combined with an integrated solution built by professional software teams and world-class subject-matter experts, can “lift all boats” and benefit providers, EHS&S professionals and everyone’s bottom lines.

Stephen Rylander runs technology and software engineering for Sphera. He has a background in distributed systems, software architecture and process. Before Sphera, Rylander ran technology for two business units at a global investment research firm.

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FILM REVIEW:

Film Rating: Safety Rating: NO STARS RATING R RELEASED (U.S.) Dec. 25, 2019 (U.S., limited) DIRECTOR Sam Mendes WRITTEN BY Sam Mendes, Krysty Wilson-Cairns CAST Dean-Charles Chapman, George MacKay, Pip Carter, Daniel Mays, Colin Firth, Mark Strong, Benedict Cumberbatch RUNNING TIME 1h 59mins PLOT April 1917, the Western Front. Two young British soldiers during the First World War are given an impossible mission: deliver a message deep in enemy territory that will stop 1,600 men, and one of the soldiers’ brothers, from walking straight into a deadly trap.

ACCOLADES Winner of three Academy Awards, including Best Cinematography, and winner of Best Picture and Best Director awards from the 2020 Golden Globes and British Academy of Film and Television Awards.

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BY J A M E S

T E H R A N I

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1917� captures an ugly event with breathtaking beauty.

Cinematographer Roger Deakins, left, and Director Sam Mendes.

World War I Airplanes Airplanes were made of canvas, wood and wire.

During the war, they were first used for surveillance purposes, but later they were equipped with machine guns for aerial battles.

The most famous fighter pilot was Manfred Albrecht Freiherr von Richthofen, better known as “The Red Baron.” He was credited with 80 air combat victories for the Germans before being shot down in April 1918.

Types of Airplanes

A disorienting, disturbing, day-in-the-life film, and that, in part, is what makes it great.

While the plot is rather simple— get from Point A to Point B as quickly as possible—the movie tackles war, a complex subject, in a cinematically masterful way.

The planning and rehearsing that went into being able to bring this film to life is quite astonishing.

Cleverly, by filming it through a 360-degree angle that moves from back to side to front throughout the film, there are no noticeable cuts in “1917.” It doesn’t allow for speeding the plot ahead or cutting away from an intense, risky moment. There are “calm” moments in the film, too, but they are never dull. The soldiers don’t get to skip ahead, and neither does the audience. Outside of a couple of times when everything goes dark, including an uncomfortably

long fade-to-black pause in the film that makes one wonder if the film is ending prematurely, we see the protagonists’ journey from start to finish.

The disorientation applies to both the characters in the film and the people in the audience. Unused to the British accents, there were several lines that I missed, but that fits the war theme appropriately.

Confusion often reigns in wartime, so why should the people witnessing it not share in the murkiness of the unknown?

Fokker Eindecker — Singleseat German fighter plane.

The Fokker was perhaps the most famous fighter plane during WWI as it introduced the synchronized machine gun and provided Germany with air superiority for a period of time during the war.

Siemens-Schuckert — Singleseat German fighter plane.

Sopwith Camel — Single-seat British fighter plane.

Handley Page 0/400 — Long range British bomber.

Gotha G V — Long range German bomber.

Sources: State Library of North Carolina, Ducksters.com and History.com

SAFETY WAS HARD TO COME BY We can think of no situation that is more unsafe than war. There are countless risks, and World War I, “the war to end all wars,” was filled with danger that led to a reported 20 million deaths among 40 million casualties. This in no ▸▸

Photos: François Duhamel, Universal Pictures and DreamWorks Pictures

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“If you fail, it will be a massacre ...”

— Gen. Erinmore (Colin Firth)

way minimizes the dangers that today’s soldiers face, but well before computers and analytics and, of course, advanced weapons and medical technology, soldiers who fought wars did so mostly “flying blind” by moving or crawling one pace at a time. One false move …

While powered aircraft had been used for military combat as far back as 1911, they became much more important tools for warfare during World War I, and their advancements—and fragileness—play a key role in the risk we see presented in the film.

As the movie begins, we see Lance Cpl. Tom Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman) of the British Armed Forces asleep on the ground. A soldier gives him a less-than polite boot to the ribs to wake him up, and orders him to grab his kit, “pick a man” and follow him. He chooses Lance Cpl. William Schofield (George MacKay), who is leaning peacefully on a nearby tree. The fact that he is resting on such a pillar of strength is an important foreshadow. And the two men go off to learn what they’ve been selected to do.

Gen. Erinmore (Colin Firth) tells the soldiers that through aerial surveillance it has been determined that 1,600 troops who are primed for battle the next day are walking into a trap, and he explains that they must deliver a note calling off the attack. “If you fail, it will be a massacre,” Erinmore says. And one of those troops is Blake’s brother. The mission to deliver the notice is about as risky as it gets. It’s not stated, but it is presumed that Blake was chosen because he would have no choice but to accept this harrowing mission since his sibling’s life could depend on it. After all, this is not the type

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of ordeal many would want to volunteer for. The mission is beyond dangerous. The men, of course, accept the mission, but they do look scared. Frankly, even before they learn about what they have to do, they look like apparitions with their extrapale faces.

ENTERING THE FRAY The two soldiers leave the “comforts” of their regiment in a warm, inviting field and head off alone together to warn the 2nd Battalion. Even carrying the bayonet looks hazardous even though it’s a form of protection against the enemy.

One slip and it could cut or kill you or your partner. It doesn’t in this case, but the mission starts off badly when Schofield cuts his hand on barbed wire in no man’s land. The first thing that comes to mind is tetanus. A tetanus vaccine would not be invented until 1924, and it would not be widely used until World War II, so the dangers of catching the disease are real.

Shortly after this he accidentally pushes his hand into a corpse, so the threat of germs and infection emerge as well.

While the sun is out, the ground is damp and muddy and filled with battle remnants, including the carcasses of horses, cows and men—lots of men. As noted earlier, the trees play an important role in the film. The falling cherry blossoms produce a snowy effect that adds a degree of hope or maybe even despair depending on your perspective. Some of the trees are downed in the film to show how, like the soldiers, war has uprooted them; other trees stand tall but contain pointy, bare branches that stick out announcing danger ahead. There is one tree that symbolically stands alone in a field. ▸▸

Dangers of War Did you know the Battle of Somme produced the heaviest loss of life of any battle during World War I? On July 1, 1916, over 19,000 British soldiers were killed and there were more than 57,000 casualties. Part of the battle was filmed as part of a propaganda film by Geoffrey Malins and John McDowell who were the official cinematographers. If you’re curious, the video can be found on YouTube.

Source: Imperial Wars Museum

While all films require rehearsals, the process for “1917” was much longer and more rigorous. Director Sam Mendes and cinematographer Roger Deakins filmed the movie to make it appear as if it was all one single shot.

War was dangerous, of course, but so was industry back in the teens. In 1913, there were 38 million people in the U.S. workforce, and 23,000 died on the job. That’s a rate of 61 deaths per 100,000 workers. In 2018, there were 5,250 fatalities in the United States, and the death rate was 3.5 deaths per 100,000 full-time equivalent workers.

Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

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Other than in photographs, only two females appear in the entire movie. The French woman (Claire Duburcq, pictured right) who helps Schofield (George MacKay) and the baby she is caring for.

As they’re walking, the soldiers find an abandoned German bunker. It’s risky to go in it as there could still be soldiers inside, but curiosity wins out. There are some creature comforts built in, including bunk beds. Compare that to the British soldiers seen earlier in the film who are sleeping in muddy terrain on the side of a trench and much more likely to get pneumonia or the flu. In fact, in 1918, more than 500 million people got the flu as part of a pandemic, and 50 million people died from it, so the threat was real in 1917, too, the year portrayed in the film.

The two British soldiers are impressed with the creature comforts of the German bunker. They also spot a ginormous rat.

We don’t know if this particular rat carried a disease, but we do know rats do carry

diseases, including the deadly hantavirus, which even today has few treatment options. While this rat doesn’t bite, it does bite off more than it can chew when it causes unintended mayhem by tripping a booby trap, which leads to an explosion that covers Schofield in debris and nearly kills him. Blake digs him out and guides a blinded Schofield to a leap-of-faith jump and then through the exit just in a nick of time.

Emerging from the bunker, Schofield uses his canteen to flush the dust out of his eyes. The two soldiers then witness a risky dogfight in the air between two British pilots and one German one. They watch with glee as the German plane is hit, but become panicked and endangered when the plane starts descending directly toward their path headed for a crash landing.

After the incident, the journey becomes even more perilous. At one point crossing a fallen bridge requires a risky balancing act upon the rail until it’s time to jump to try to avoid the bullets attacking through the air. And even getting a ride with some soldiers in the back of the truck is a bit unsafe as the vehicle is open, and the soldiers could have flown out the back of the truck when it hit a patch of mud.

Schofield, the wayfaring stranger, is given some sound advice along the way that, should he reach Col. MacKenzie (Benedict Cumberbatch) to deliver the message, he should read the note in front of witnesses because “some men just want the fight.” In any risk mitigation situation, it’s best to have a plan in place and have everything documented.

TOUGH TO SEE AT NIGHT While daytime is murky and filled with despair, the evening is beautifully lit albeit with fire and brimstone and more and more disorientation.

What hides in the darkness can kill you, and there are no shortage of risks in the area. But the nighttime chaos also leads to a poignant moment when Schofield meets a young woman who is hiding underground. Is she French, Belgian or even German? We don’t know for sure. She speaks French and a few words of English, but she and Schofield communicate well. In a drawer nearby is a sleeping baby. The woman says the girl is not hers, and she doesn’t even know the child’s name.

Schofield absentmindedly offers the baby food—the mental effects of being under excessive stress perhaps—but the woman explains the baby needs milk. Lucky for her, Schofield found some fresh milk on the journey and offered it to the woman to give to the child. Of course, it was never pasteurized, which would have killed any E. coli, listeria, etc., but in a war zone you take what you can get. When the child starts crying, Schofield starts reciting “The Jumblies.”

The first verse of Edward Lear’s poem “The Jumblies,” which you can read on the opposite page is nonsense. Who could stay afloat in a sieve? It’s preposterous. But when Schofield recites the first verse to amuse the baby, it makes perfect sense. At that point, he had a perfect view of the “sieve” he was “floating” on trying to complete an arduous, dangerous and soul-crushing mission.

Afterward, the woman begs him to stay, but he declines and leaves in hopes of completing his mission. What happens to the woman alone in a war zone caring for someone else’s child and how she got the baby in the first place, we never learn.

There’s so much more that happens in the film that speaks directly to the risks of war, but there’s one important scene that needs to be recognized. Near the end of the film, we see Schofield running through a battle almost oblivious of the turmoil and destruction taking place around him, which we see at the beginning of this article. He’s laser-focused on delivering the message.

Along the way, he knocks into a couple of soldiers, which makes it feel even more chaotic, but as Insider reports, it wasn’t part of the script: “As George is running out of the trench, you’ll see him bump into some extras. That wasn’t planned. The actor bumped into them by accident, and they just kept the camera rolling. Had they called ‘cut’ right away, this great, genuine moment capturing the chaos of the war would never have made it into the movie.”

There are hazards in war and moviemaking as well, and “1917” captures such an ugly event with breathtaking beauty.

The film is dedicated to Sam Mendes’ grandfather, Lance Cpl. Alfred H. Mendes, in The Kings Royal Rifle Corps during The Great War.

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COLUMN SPARKING CONVERSATION

Every Breath We Take

By James Tehrani

“Asthma is the most common chronic disease among children worldwide. Around 235 million people are living with asthma. Over 80% of asthma-related deaths occur in low- and lowermiddle income countries.

Treatment and effective management of asthma saves lives.”

— The World Health Organization

IT MUST HAVE BEEN 1993, which would have been the start of my junior year in college.

As someone who has been an asthmatic as long as I can remember, the end of summer/ beginning of fall is often my toughest time. My allergies often kick in, which sometimes triggers my asthma.

This time though, when my asthma started to kick in, it just felt different. My rescue inhaler didn’t seem to be working at all, and I was taking it way more than I should have anyways just to find some relief. During an asthma attack, you can’t catch your breath. It’s like someone held your head under water for a minute or two and then pulled it up. Your lungs are trying to suck in air as quickly as possible trying to get that much–needed oxygen as quickly as possible, but, like the “Hamilton” song, they never seem satisfied.

My fraternity house was all set for fall rush, the time when freshmen and a few sophomores here and there, get to check out the fraternities. My house was struggling with numbers, so it was an important rush for us.

As the day went on and I played tour guide, my asthma kept getting worse. Even climbing the stairs was difficult. I wanted to go to student health, but I was asked if I could stick it out until rush was over.

I reluctantly agreed. It seemed really important to press on—or at least it did then.

By the time I got to student health sometime in the afternoon, my breathing was severely labored. They gave me a nebulizer treatment, which is a breathing therapy, and still the asthma wouldn’t subside. Eventually they decided I needed to go to the emergency room, so they called an ambulance.

I remember feeling really embarrassed. The paramedics carried me on a gurney down a short flight of stairs, even though I could have walked, and then they put me in an ambulance and drove me to the local hospital. I’d later find out I had to pay the bill for that ambulance ride, which set me back a few hundred dollars. Big bucks to a college student.

At the emergency room, I believe I had yet another nebulizer treatment, but my oxygen level was still low. So after a while, they decided to admit me. I had a restless night, but, with treatments, I was feeling better in the morning and able to leave around lunchtime. It was the first and only time I ever spent a night in the hospital for asthma.

So why am I telling you all this? With the COVID-19 outbreak, it’s important to take things seriously, especially for people over 65 years old, people living in a nursing home or long-termcare facility, people with heart conditions or who are immunocompromised, and, yes, people with chronic lung diseases like asthma.

I’ve been social distancing for almost three weeks at this writing. Is it fun? No. Is it necessary? Yes. The last thing I want to do is catch COVID-19 and pass it on to anyone, and as an asthmatic, I certainly don’t want to test the waters of what it would feel like to have COVID-19 either. After all, a ventilator shortage could be playing out by the time you read this.

We all have a role to play in the Ballad of COVID-19. Being the hero has nothing to do with slaying a dragon or hiding in a wooden horse, but it has everything to do with a narrative where people exhale virtue through social distancing and patience. And every breath we take away from people will help breathe new life into the tale we know as humanity.

James Tehrani is an award-winning writer and editor based in Chicago.

He is Spark’s editor-in-chief. Contact him at spark@sphera.com Spark Volume 3, Issue 4

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