321–330 of 436 posts
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.…
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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 r…
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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.
It does a good job of visual storytelling, the author obviously is good at being a "growth hacker," but it points to something deeply wrong when people are basing their decision-making on a document like this rather than communications from actual public health professionals.
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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.
Yes, but extrapolating the early exponential phase is, plain and simple, mathematically wrong. No idea why data scientists aren't going the first mile and look up the relevant functions before spitting data out. Total fail on their part, IMHO.
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> 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…
You don't have to wait until half the country is sick, though. If you restrict movement, you see a sharp reduction in transmission when you start getting neighborhoods hitting 50%. Some will get there faster than others.
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France population: 66.99 million. Denmark population: 5.6 million. Doesn't seem like an accurate comparison.
Has there every been a time when, "Country X can't do what country Y can, because X is too [big/small] while Y is [small/big]" has not been a useless comment? Is there a generic term for this sort of fallacy, where someone brings up a random difference between [cities/states/countries] as an excuse for why one can't do what the other has already done, without ever bothering to explain why the difference matters?
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> So please stop your bullshit about game theory. Your comment is fine except for that attack. Please don't stoop to that here, regardless of how strongly emotions are running. It helps no one and only makes this place worse. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
You are right, fixed this in an edit.
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.…
Call for the resignation of Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, WHO Director General http://chng.it/vj6Kwnsz8R
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…
> 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.…
If you are an expert in anything watching this play out everyday has become a gigantic nuisance and a distraction. Not because it matters what the herd is debating but because of the effect it has on leaders, decision makers etc. It piles pressure on them to waste time/resources/energy reacting to the herd.
Even with the info explosion the educated herd is as dumb as it has ever been, probably dumber, for the simple fact there is always more info than whatever you hear on the news or can read up in 2 weeks.
As if the educated herd made a diff to the election of Trump or Brexit. Some people argue the response is evolving with each crisis. I haven't seen any evidence of that.
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I believe only Moscow faces restrictions for travel from Europe. Maybe they just had much less travel anyway and that's why few got infected.
I thought I heard on the radio they shut the entire border. It seems they shut the border with China after doing a quick web search. https://metro.co.uk/2020/01/30/russia-closes-2700-mile-borde...