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Why some governments appear not to be acting on the Covid-19 threat

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Re: Why some governments appear not to be acting on the Covid-19 threat

#291

Post by ComputerGuru »

PaulHoule wrote: post #274
ericol wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Treating you in emergency now might involve kicking someone else off respiratory support. This has been my standard reply to the "It's just a flu" concept for some time now. Aside from all this, it's incredible how difficult it is for people to think about this using all the info available (long onset of symptoms, asymptomatic spread, high % of hospitalizations / intensive care, etc) plus thinking in the long term.…

I think we're out of N95 masks in the U.S. and we have to wait a month or so to get them from China.

3M is retooling their US factories. They should be producing by now.

Re: Why some governments appear not to be acting on the Covid-19 threat

#292

Post by hef19898 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #256
ThePhysicist wrote: post #178

It's disappointing that the WHO and national agencies seem not able to adequately inform the public about their assessment of the situations, the models they're using and the conclusions they're drawing. Right now, the most shared article on Corona is written by a growth hacker from SF who cobbled together an Excel sheet and recommends it to people to decide whether they should close their companies or stay at home.…

It is surprising to me to. If this was Star Trek world, you'd have computational models built by experts shared and discussed the very first day, forming the very foundation of the discussion and policy around the virus. I know of a certain company whose entire purpose is building and selling a product that lets you plug in equations of complex, dynamic systems and play with the models to understand and predict thing…

Industrial grade is the key word here. They have there customers, so they don't need "cheap" PR. They are specialized in chemical plants, usually professional organizations know there limits (conditions apply). Plus, the WHO and others have these models and tools as well. Plus the domain knowledge needed.

Why wo don't have anything from these bodies is a different story, so.

Re: Why some governments appear not to be acting on the Covid-19 threat

#293

Post by hef19898 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #264
hef19898 wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly this! I kind of understand the WHO, the broad public, including media, doesn't care about models and such things. Providing to much details can have the opposite effect, instead of calming things down it could spark more fear. On the other hand, online stuff like said growth hacker can draw a lot of attention. This will end up in the mainstream. That diseases aren't exponential, who cares when exponential cur…

> That diseases aren't exponential, who cares when exponential curves fit so nicely early on. Shouting this point does more bad than good. Outbreaks are exponential in their initial stage, to an extremely good level of approximation. Sure, they're ultimately s-shaped, but we're far from the bend point. That the growth starts to deviate from the exponent a tiny bit when half of your country is sick isn't a useful obse…

And ignoring the long term s-shape is just wrong. It is completely different function. Facts matter.

Re: Why some governments appear not to be acting on the Covid-19 threat

#294

Post by maest »

shadowprofile77 wrote: post #288
ThePhysicist wrote: post #178

It's disappointing that the WHO and national agencies seem not able to adequately inform the public about their assessment of the situations, the models they're using and the conclusions they're drawing. Right now, the most shared article on Corona is written by a growth hacker from SF who cobbled together an Excel sheet and recommends it to people to decide whether they should close their companies or stay at home.…

Do you have a link for this article BTW? the one that's so widely shared.

https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-peop...

Not sure how "widely" shared it is, but it's a good, informative piece.

Re: Why some governments appear not to be acting on the Covid-19 threat

#295

Post by TeMPOraL »

PaulHoule wrote: post #276
TeMPOraL wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is surprising to me to. If this was Star Trek world, you'd have computational models built by experts shared and discussed the very first day, forming the very foundation of the discussion and policy around the virus. I know of a certain company whose entire purpose is building and selling a product that lets you plug in equations of complex, dynamic systems and play with the models to understand and predict thing…

That kind of tool will give you accuracy without precision. There are so many unknown assumptions involved that a model like that is going to give at most qualitatively correct results. People who model the effects of climate change, like Nate Silver and the 538 crew, run thousands of simulations and present a summary. Even then you can get hung up on the "unknown unknowns". For instance 1970s estimates of nuclear re…

I'm not saying someone should throw a model with 100 parameters and say it's the truth. But you could incrementally build up a model for questions like "should we close schools and when", refining it step by step and getting a range of outcomes, a probability distribution. Sure, the precision is still limited, but it's much, much better than how the discussion looks today: "oh, our government decided to close all schools for the next two weeks, I guess that buys us a couple of days, so we're maybe no longer 3 weeks behind Italy, but 4". Because that's the level of the discussion on the smarter end.

My point is: we have the tooling necessary to talk about this problem better, more accurately, more precisely, in real-time, and to cover more angles simultaneously - which would lead to better decisions. But we're not using it. At least not publicly.

(This is a part of a general issue of mine, that we absolutely suck at having any kind of data-based discussion; best what we do is exchange badly made charts and context-free data points. We should be exchanging and discussing whole dynamic models. But I suppose this wider issue can wait until we're done with the coronavirus mess.)

Re: Why some governments appear not to be acting on the Covid-19 threat

#296

Post by bujak »

imustbeevil wrote: post #163
rcMgD2BwE72F wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Denmark did close every school and most administrations. France did not. Many decisions can be taken, but are not (for various reasons). Most experts recommend to limit contacts rather than closing down borders, and no one is pretending to stop the virus but they all should try to flatten the curve. You don't seem to pay attention to the current situation.

France has 11x Denmark's population and 4x it's confirmed cases, so it seems like doing nothing worked better.

these numbers don't mean anything anymore. there is no more systematic testing going on

Re: Why some governments appear not to be acting on the Covid-19 threat

#297

Post by smackay »

XorNot wrote: post #247

The graph this blog draws doesn't work that way. The whole point of not overloading the medical system - and definitely not getting it at 100% capacity, is that once you're at capacity, it's not just COVID-19 treatment which stops (which means, all those people who would otherwise survive die) - it's all treatment. Get appendicitis? Routine surgery, can be done in a few hours. And will definitely kill you without tre…

One chilling comment, among many, from the doctors in Italy, posted here a couple of days ago were that stroke victims were not being treated in any way. Basically they were on their own. A condition that was at least manageable, with intensive therapy, was now left untreated and the suffers had severe disability as the only outcome, if they survived.

Re: Why some governments appear not to be acting on the Covid-19 threat

#298

Post by stoicShell »

soyyo wrote: post #129

Last Sunday it was 8th of March, International Women's Day, and the current spanish government has appropriated it to the point that women from other political parties are not welcomed in the protests that happen that day. When gatherings of people started to be canceled all around the world, the government kept going ahead with the plans because this is a key event for their agenda. The very next day, they acknowled…

The saddest truth is perhaps that functionally, we have the leaders we deserve.

It's a simple projection from voter space to elected space. As a former pol.sci. student/researcher, I've grown disillusioned by the fact that representative democracy, in our day and age, quite evidently no longer works as intended — the projection is flawed with regards to the conduct of affairs.

I don't know why:

- might be that voting is skewed by marketing (permanent campaign) money, government is too corrupt and establishment too entrenched, the "conspiracy hidden in plain sight / normalcy" idea;

- could be that democracy simply doesn't work as a system, or maybe not anymore, because the "average" is somehow not good enough — that was certainly not my belief, not for a decade, but I had to come to terms: it's a question worth asking, I assure you. Just considering the quality of information and the noise/signal ratio throws a huge wrench in the mechanics of any sane decision-making process...

- ... (many more hypotheses)

Regardless, this may help us craft the next-new-better political system, which might or might not be a regime of increased freedom compared to now (my guess: much more in some domains, much less in others, and not everyone will like the distribution).

I mean, look where we are. We had 15 years to get ready for such an event since coronavirus of the 2000's — tons of reports and words of good will. “Guys, we're not ready for a massive outbreak!” — everybody and their Bill Gates said so! But alas, the political fantasy kept going and it's all been just words. It wasn't that hard to stockpile masks and various supplies for when the day comes...

It's a sad day in history when we must face the consequences of our choices, but it's like a cycle... We get too complacent and something slams us, again and again and again (give it 3-4 generations apart to "forget", it's as if written language doesn't exist).

I'm jaded at the irony of our collective behavior, and sad for all those who will suffer and leave. Hopefully this will be a painful but learning experience that will last. I'm sad to report that it almost exclusively takes real pain, real hurt for societies to learn anything meaningfully in the face of history, of evolution. So, here we are, destiny.

Re: Why some governments appear not to be acting on the Covid-19 threat

#299

Post by makomk »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #256
ThePhysicist wrote: post #178

It's disappointing that the WHO and national agencies seem not able to adequately inform the public about their assessment of the situations, the models they're using and the conclusions they're drawing. Right now, the most shared article on Corona is written by a growth hacker from SF who cobbled together an Excel sheet and recommends it to people to decide whether they should close their companies or stay at home.…

It is surprising to me to. If this was Star Trek world, you'd have computational models built by experts shared and discussed the very first day, forming the very foundation of the discussion and policy around the virus. I know of a certain company whose entire purpose is building and selling a product that lets you plug in equations of complex, dynamic systems and play with the models to understand and predict thing…

The trouble is that pretty much all of the data is garbage quality, and if you feed garbage into a computer you of course just get garbage out. The figures from Wuhan are particularly bad, probably just a function of their testing ramp-up until well after the peak, and the ones from Italy might not be much better. (The other problem is that China has taken the position that their numbers are an exact description of reality and their approach is a model for the rest of the world to follow, basically for domestic political reasons, and the WHO seems to be eagerly regurgitating this to the many people who'll listen.)

Re: Why some governments appear not to be acting on the Covid-19 threat

#300

Post by ericol »

Certhas wrote: post #260
hef19898 wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly this! I kind of understand the WHO, the broad public, including media, doesn't care about models and such things. Providing to much details can have the opposite effect, instead of calming things down it could spark more fear. On the other hand, online stuff like said growth hacker can draw a lot of attention. This will end up in the mainstream. That diseases aren't exponential, who cares when exponential cur…

But the early stages of disease spread _are_ exponential. And I find that people really fail to understand the meaning of that, and how scary numbers like "new confirmed cases doubling every two days, 500 new cases in France yesterday" truly are.

The problem is, exponential for how long? For instance, all seems to indicate measures in Italy are taken too late: and the exponential growth is still happening there (almost 3 weeks after the problem started)

    import pandas as pd
    import numpy as np
    import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
    %matplotlib inline

    it = pd.read_json('https://raw.githubusercontent.com/pcm-dpc/COVID-19/master/dati-json/dpc-covid19-ita-andamento-nazionale.json', 
    convert_dates=True).set_index('data')
    plt.plot(it[['deceduti', 'totale_casi']])
    plt.xticks(it.index.values, rotation=90);
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