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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

#371

Post by whatshisface »

hef19898 wrote: post #364
whatshisface wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The professor is the front-line guy. I'm talking about epidemiologists, not physicists. If he wasn't acting as a "free agent," then you would be back to hearing from elected officials, who are mired in compromises and not entirely trustworthy.

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

#372

Post by TulliusCicero »

jessaustin wrote: post #326
TulliusCicero wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It's even worse than useless. Giant states are often assumed to be much better than small states, because "efficiency". Yet, whenever actual conditions are examined, and (inevitably) small states turn out to be better for humans, we get this sort of "well of course smaller problems are easier to solve" apologia.

I mean, I'm sure in some cases being bigger or smaller is helpful. It just feels incredibly lazy, borderline disingenuous to throw it out there without bothering to connect the dots or analyze how size would matter in that specific case.

> small states turn out to be better for humans

Source/examples of this? In Europe, the larger countries like the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain don't seem obviously worse off to me than their smaller counterparts. Like if you compare the UK to Ireland, Germany to Austria, Spain to Portugal, etc.

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

#373

Post by shadowprofile77 »

maest wrote: post #294
shadowprofile77 wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thanks!.

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

#374

Post by jononor »

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.

The effects of this will be seen in 4-8 weeks. Revisit this comment then

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

#375

Post by koonsolo »

true_religion wrote: post #354
koonsolo wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So, politicians choose (1), no action, as the most likely winning scenario. I'm from Belgium myself, so I can chime in. Our minister of health is a docter herself, and is advised by a panel of experts including a professor of virology. They know very well what they are doing with the current 400 known infections. Closing schools makes no sense currently because of following factors: - kids are not the main factor i…

Closing schools makes senses in democratic nations for two reasons. First, it puts societal pressure on businesses to close or modify their operations by allowing people to work from home. Many families are simply not setup to have kids at home, but parents at work, so factoring that in will cause businesses to change. Most importantly, all this happens without government directly intervening in business decisions. S…

Kids will be dropped with their grandparents, as I stated before.

And medical staff needs to stay home and take care of the kids too?

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

#376

Post by koonsolo »

sumedh wrote: post #314
koonsolo wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So, politicians choose (1), no action, as the most likely winning scenario. I'm from Belgium myself, so I can chime in. Our minister of health is a docter herself, and is advised by a panel of experts including a professor of virology. They know very well what they are doing with the current 400 known infections. Closing schools makes no sense currently because of following factors: - kids are not the main factor i…

> kids are not the main factor in spreading the virus, as seen in other countries. Why did Japan close down schools, do they know something which Belgium does not or did Japan make a mistake by closing down schools.

What I know from Japan is that a lot of moms stay at home, so closing schools mean the kids stay at home.

In Belgium, almost everybody works, so kids will go to their grandparents, which is arguable a worse situation.

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

#377

Post by hef19898 »

Certhas wrote: post #362
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.

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 discussio…

I don't find any differentiation between early stage and later stage nor references to exponential functions:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_modelling_of_infe...

If you find any source, idealy scientific papers on the subject, that shows that contagious diseases can be modelled with simple exponential functions, please share them. I am not an expert on that matter, so I would be really interessted to see some reliable sources confirming the use of exponential functions.

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

#378

Post by goatlover »

zaroth wrote: post #363
whatshisface wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Countries that implemented extreme measures to slow the spread of the virus. It will be different for countries which haven't. The WHO and other health officials around the world are saying the same thing. This will spread to a large number of people. It's too late for containment, you can only hope to flatten the curve. That's why it's now a pandemic.

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

#379

Post by zaroth »

goatlover wrote: post #378
zaroth wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Countries that implemented extreme measures to slow the spread of the virus. It will be different for countries which haven't. The WHO and other health officials around the world are saying the same thing. This will spread to a large number of people. It's too late for containment, you can only hope to flatten the curve. That's why it's now a pandemic.

> This will spread to a large number of people. It's too late for containment, you can only hope to flatten the curve.

Follow the logic through.

South Korea is detecting ~100 cases per day on top of a total of 7,700 and 66 deaths. Total population is 50 million people.

How long do you shut down the economy over a disease where you are detecting 100 cases per day with a CFR of 0.8%?

Seems like this is a perfect example of the curve being too flat.

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

#380

Post by cvwright »

hef19898 wrote: post #377
Certhas wrote: post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 discussio…

I don't find any differentiation between early stage and later stage nor references to exponential functions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_modelling_of_infe... If you find any source, idealy scientific papers on the subject, that shows that contagious diseases can be modelled with simple exponential functions, please share them. I am not an expert on that matter, so I would be really interessted to see…

Ok, look at the differential equations on this page about the Kermack-McKendrick model: https://mathworld.wolfram.com/Kermack-McKendrickModel.html

Notice that the rate of change in the infected population (dI/dt) is proportional to the current number of infected (I) and the current number of susceptible (S).

In the early stages, when S is large and I is still small, this acts just like an exponential function in I.

For example, think about what happens when you double I the first several times. S stays relatively unchanged, and so dI/dt roughly doubles each time you double I.

Does that make sense?

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