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Coronavirus outbreak likely now ‘gathering steam’

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Re: Coronavirus outbreak likely now ‘gathering steam’

#102
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chloroquine is over-the-counter in England and other places. Hypothetically, anyone have an idea where to find someone willing to send a chloroquine care-package to the USA?

Careful to avoid the symptoms of hysteria.

When a building is burning, often, people's first reaction is to ignore the alarm and carry on with what they were doing. The first people to leave look like worry-warts. Those who make it out, though, are the ones who think for themselves and realize there is a problem, before the herd stampedes. Insurance is cheap before there's a problem, but impossible to get after. What is my "cost" and "risk" from having chloroquine? I'll probably never take it, so almost nothing. What is my upside? Maybe nothing, maybe everything.

I hear a lot of "it is just the flu." Maybe. The Spanish Flu was horrific, though. And when was the last time a city the size of london was quarantined for the flu?

I believe in data-driven fear. Care to go over the data?

Re: Coronavirus outbreak likely now ‘gathering steam’

#103
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depending on your strike and maturity, you may not lose anything. If the entire market sells off hard, correlation will go to 1 in the slide. Index options tend to price in some expectation of this (it's called "correlation skew") for downside options. So you'll make money on three things in a slide: * delta, ie the slide itself, * vega, ie the increased expectation of volatility for the remaining duration of the opt…

Can you recommend a good source to learn more about how options trading works in real life? Id like to know how you guys generate trading ideas, come up with bet size, study market sentiments etc

I'm going to jump in here.

Trading options is extremely risky and a lot of people teaching it, teach it because doing it is normally not profitable and they have already lost their money.

Unless you have some huge edge, which no one does, options are the last place to spend your time and blow your money.

Re: Coronavirus outbreak likely now ‘gathering steam’

#104
post #22
post #13

It's interesting that chloroquine, an old anti malarial drug is "highly effective in the control of 2019-nCoV infection in vitro". I wonder if anyone's doing a study to see if that stops it spreading in the real world? I almost thought I could do a double blind study myself with a website and a bunch of chloroquine pills and aspirins and randomly post volunteers one or the other. Dunno if the post works in Wuhan thou…

Chloroquine is over-the-counter in England and other places. Hypothetically, anyone have an idea where to find someone willing to send a chloroquine care-package to the USA?

I could probably send you one as the start of my experiment.

Re: Coronavirus outbreak likely now ‘gathering steam’

#105
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Chloroquine is over-the-counter in England and other places. Hypothetically, anyone have an idea where to find someone willing to send a chloroquine care-package to the USA?

Careful to avoid the symptoms of hysteria.

Yeah though chloroquine is fairly mild stuff - they used to give it to all travellers going to malarial places but have mostly stopped because malaria mostly became resistant. I'm not a medic but reading the letter to nature I'd put the odds of it protecting you in real life at say 50/50 so if you're getting exposed it could be a reasonable risk reward. Even if it didn't stop infection it could make the illness less severe.

Re: Coronavirus outbreak likely now ‘gathering steam’

#106
post #19
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"warm weather may have an effect on transmission" and "a warm city is dealing with infections" are not mutually exclusive statements. And for the record, as of a little over a week ago, there were only a dozen cases in Singapore according to the WHO. Even if they were mutually exclusive, Singapore isn't exactly the best example. https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situati...

As of yesterday it’s 47 cases in Singapore. https://www.moh.gov.sg/2019-ncov-wuhan

Hm, increasing 47/12 in 7 days is the same as doubling every 3.55 days.

Re: Coronavirus outbreak likely now ‘gathering steam’

#108
post #16
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a biologist, but "in vitro" isn't really that informative. Many things, including fire, are highly effective in stopping diseases in vitro.

https://xkcd.com/1217/

This is also the origin of the whole "alcohol kills brain cells" myth.

Re: Coronavirus outbreak likely now ‘gathering steam’

#110
post #83
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you point me to your review? A few years ago (circa 2010 or so) when I was seriously working on epidemic modeling, we tried to look for an effective seasonality model, based on temperature, humidity, etc that worked globally and failed miserably. What seemed to work in one country or area failed completely in others, and vice versa. I'm curious to see if things have improved since then

It's an older paper (circa 2006) but...to be honest, I revisit it occasionally, and the problems we point out are still there. https://jvi.asm.org/content/81/11/5429

Ahahahahah... HN really is a small world. I remember this paper. The section on “indoor heating and AC” stuck to my memory to this day. Back then we were hoping for a seasonality-based follow up to this paper: https://www.pnas.org/content/106/51/21484 but it was not meant to be.
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