Why some governments appear not to be acting on the Covid-19 threat • Hacker News Board

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

#361

Post by zaroth » Thu, Mar 12, 2020, 3:35 PM UTC

cperciva wrote: post #309

TeMPOraL wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

So how do you explain South Korea? Their cases have decisively peaked. So one of three things happened;

1) Herd immunity has kicked in, meaning a majority of people have already been infected and are recovering/recovered

2) Containment measures were effective against a highly communicative virus which can live in the air for 3 hours and on surfaces for up to 12 hours.

3) They just stopped testing and/or are lying about the results and are hiding the resulting health care burden.

IMO the only one here that doesn’t require competency on the part of the government is #1, making it by far the most likely scenario.

If #1 is true to any extent, then it means IFR is actually quite low, more like 2009’s H1N1.

The other fundamental question I keep going back and forth on is the final total population infection rate. For H1N1 and other flus it’s usually on the order of 10-30% of the population. (There are arguments why this one might be higher, although I think some people confuse exposure numbers with infection numbers...)

Containment supposedly will not meaningfully reduce this ultimate number but would just slow down how long it takes for everyone to ultimately be exposed.

So while there are very few new cases in China (and they are closing their temporary hospitals) what happens when people go back to work?

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

#362

Post by Certhas » Thu, Mar 12, 2020, 3:37 PM UTC

hef19898 wrote: post #272

Certhas wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Mathematically wrong is not a relevant category here. There is no "ground truth" that is approximated by an exponential growth. Every disease model is counterfactual "spread of the disease if no countermeasures were taken", etc...

Modelling the beginning of an epidemic as exponential growth is useful, sensible and empirically validated. As, countermeasures are taken during the beginning of the epidemic, for discussions of the effect of countermeasures, exponential is the correct model.

In fact, hopefully the countermeasures taken will be sufficient that the intrinsic disease dynamic will never get past the exponential stage...

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

#363

Post by zaroth » Thu, Mar 12, 2020, 3:37 PM UTC

whatshisface wrote: post #324

hef19898 wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not wrong: it has produced extremely good predictive results day after day for total cases outside of China for months now. Using a simpler approximate function in place of a more complicated exact function is far from wrong, it is bread and butter for getting practical results in all areas of science.

It’s right until it’s totally wrong, e.g. for any country which has already peaked, of which there are several.

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

#364

Post by hef19898 » Thu, Mar 12, 2020, 3:39 PM UTC

whatshisface wrote: post #350

hef19898 wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why I didn't inlcude the cabinets, did I? Just in Germany, the relvant data comes from the WHO (global picture), Robert Koch Institut (national), state health ministries (regional) and community health authorities (locally). All are relevant, the international numbers show the large picture, inlcuding the declining cases in China. The national ones provide more detailed insights into the country in question, w…

> But if their function is "professor at university X", my gut feeling tells me that they might like the public attention a tad too much. This is a very interesting perspective, which is very different from my own. Being in the US, my attitude is that officials are usually chosen based on criteria other than their skills in the domain they are administrating, and I would expect the best knowledge on any subject to be…

Second that, I would love to hear from the frontline guys. But I don't. It is either elected officials (fair enough, that's part of their job) using input from said experts.

You don't hear from the frontline people / orgs, I assume because the are simply too busy right now. Which brings me back to the professor acting basically as a free agent. That should change.

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

#365

Post by angry_octet » Thu, Mar 12, 2020, 3:39 PM UTC

I've read a lot of dumb COVID-19 takes, and this has to be in the top 10.

Disregard the wishful thinking, psychopath level lack of empathy and poor graphing. The problem with this is the lack of any actual model or incorporation of any variables that disagree with it. Things like confidence, certainty, the value of all those parents & grandparents.

I'm chalking this one down to ostrich syndrome.

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

#366

Post by andrei_says_ » Thu, Mar 12, 2020, 3:40 PM UTC

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.…

I wish this was the most shared resource as it is the most practical, educational and positive one I’ve seen so far.

https://www.flattenthecurve.com/

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

#367

Post by angry_octet » Thu, Mar 12, 2020, 3:42 PM UTC

jvvw wrote: post #352

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…

I have heard through word-of-mouth (third hand) that there are models made by experts not being shared publicly (but presumably with governments etc).

This is definitely the case. I don't know if the lack of sharing is purely reflexive or because they want to avoid societal breakdown.

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

#368

Post by paulmd » Thu, Mar 12, 2020, 3:43 PM UTC

varjag wrote: post #2

Doesn't seem very well thought out. The economic cost of the first scenario (numerous deaths in peak period) would likely be the highest with the impact both on workforce and market sentiment. The impact of long tail scenarios lower because death toll would not be just redistributed but also reduced by likely an order of magnitude.

> The economic cost of the first scenario (numerous deaths in peak period) would likely be the highest with the impact both on workforce and market sentiment

The deaths from Coronavirus are mostly not people of working age. The death rate for 50-59 is around 1%, below that it drops to 0.2%. For seniors it's as high as 20%.

If you want to be cold-blooded about it, there is certainly a case to be made for shrugging and plowing on, as that will minimize the duration of the impact (quarantines, etc) and the people who will die are mostly not economically productive.

To be even more crass - before long we will probably be in a triage situation where there are more cases than resources available to treat. There are only about 20 full-service respirators per 100k people, around 62k nationwide, and many of those are already in use (people will still get in car accidents, have strokes, get meningitis, whatever). We can't treat everybody. So who gets it? Little Timmy who has a long and productive life ahead of him, or great-aunt Susan who's 75 and barely gets around anymore?

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21149215

At a first approximation there will be around 100 times as many seniors who need treatment as youngs. From a social perspective it's pretty obvious that treatment should be prioritized for those younger patients.

(reminder that not making a choice is still making a choice, whether that means treatment ends up being first-come first-serve or a financial/insurance basis. Triage sucks, but you have to prioritize your resources somehow or other, the whole problem is there is not enough treatment to go around.)

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

#369

Post by TheFiend7 » Thu, Mar 12, 2020, 3:45 PM UTC

dx034 wrote: post #229

A-Train wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What? There is tons of stuff governments can do to flatten the curve. Educating people, closing schools, people gatherings, obligatory masks for all (or DIY bandanas), testing more.

> obligatory masks for all States struggle to get enough masks for medical staff, diverting any for the general public doesn't seem smart. And self made masks will have so little effect that they could be detrimental if people decide to be less careful because they wear a masks. To the other points, education about hand washing and behavior in public is the one thing governments have all done for weeks now. It just s…

This mentality is just false. If more people of the general populous have masks, how does that not reduce transmission therefore flatten the curve?

Now I understand the logic behind there being shortages. But saying that the general populous shouldn't wear masks because it doesn't do anything doesn't sound accurate.

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

#370

Post by oefrha » Thu, Mar 12, 2020, 3:47 PM UTC

whatshisface wrote: post #341

hef19898 wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, just giving the top search spots to updates from WHO, followed by the national, regional and local sources. Play with the search algorythm to push the more alarmist ones further down. Help the above mentioned institutions to write their "content" in a social media optimized way. That would be agreat opportunity for these tech giants to gain trust they lost since 2016. Not doing anything right now moght very well…

The WHO waited an extra month before declaring a pandemic, and US national sources are generally considered by experts to be understating the severity of the issue. What you want is the top slots to go to the experts, who are not necessarily ranked correspondingly to the hierarchy of political bodies. For example the top virologists are probably in labs and universities, not the Cabinet.

WHO has been shouting “take action now” the whole time and the official stance was “it could be stopped if governments act now.” Governments didn’t listen, so here we are. I fail to see what good declaring a month earlier would achieve, as governments clearly don’t give much of a crap about WHO advice unless the situation is seemingly spiraling out of control. One likely outcome of declaring one month earlier is being taken even less seriously; they can’t just re-emerge a month later and declare it’s really a pandemic this time.