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Corona Simulator

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Corona Simulator

#71

Post by iso1631 »

maxerickson wrote: post #70
iso1631 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were zero cases in Italy 6 weeks ago. Lets assume China and South Korea manage to stop every single person from having it - even people with mild symptoms, and get 99% of people crossing the borders into quarantine for 14 days. They then lift the lockdown. Aren't they simply back to the stage Italy was in 6 weeks ago? A couple of weeks later one or two of the 1% of people avoiding quarantine. They can try the "…

It'll be (at a minimum) months with no new outbreaks in an area before social behavior starts to return to what it was before an outbreak. New outbreaks won't look the same as the first ones. I think it is still early to say we know, but it also looks like there is a period of immunity after infection. So there's a fair chance that will also slow the spread of each repeated outbreak.

Only if a measurable number of people have that immunity. Assuming having it gives you immunity, Hubei has 1 in 10,000 with immunity, that's not enough to change it's spread

Re: Corona Simulator

#72

Post by azinman2 »

iso1631 wrote: post #68
azinman2 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

New cases in China and South Korea have slowed to a crawl.

There were zero cases in Italy 6 weeks ago. Lets assume China and South Korea manage to stop every single person from having it - even people with mild symptoms, and get 99% of people crossing the borders into quarantine for 14 days. They then lift the lockdown. Aren't they simply back to the stage Italy was in 6 weeks ago? A couple of weeks later one or two of the 1% of people avoiding quarantine. They can try the "…

“ Polio does still exist, although polio cases have decreased by over 99% since 1988, from an estimated more than 350 000 cases to 22 reported cases in 2017. This reduction is the result of the global effort to eradicate the disease. Today, only 3 countries in the world have never stopped transmission of polio (Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria).” -WHO

You can make a very large dent. My guess is in these 3 countries you’re not seeing every child vaccinated with Polio. Hopefully with COVID-19 the anti-vaxers will quiet down and we’ll get more herd immunity generally.

We don’t know what measures China will take to ensure their curve stays flat. They might keep the lockdown until there are 0 cases and fully close their borders. This is where having a competent authoritarian government that people trust is actually beneficial. They might be able to do it.

Meanwhile I have zero faith that the US gov (where I live) will be able to handle this situation. It’s going to be wide spread, and will leave a giant unemployed workforce in its wake.

Re: Corona Simulator

#73

Post by glaive123 »

maxerickson wrote: post #36
glaive123 wrote: post #27

The people who don't understand this stuff, aren't failing to understand it because no one wrote about it. It's because they are not white collar or college graduates and are not likely to read The Washington Post in the first place. My father is the perfect example of this. He's dyslexic and so he struggles to read detailed journalism and gets all of his information from cable TV news like Fox News.

There's really not a 1:1 relationship between "college" and "white collar", and "curiosity". Plenty of people with their fancy college degree are incurious, and plenty of people that barely made it out of high school are curious. It's an appealing shorthand, but it's not a great one.

Obviously there's not a 1:1 relationship. And I never made such claim. I am saying that the people who read detailed journalism tend to have a higher reading level, e.g. they work in a job where reading and analysis is a daily part of their work, this would be considered white collar.

Please don't put words in my mouth when I never said there was a 1:1 relationship.

Re: Corona Simulator

#74

Post by masonic »

iso1631 wrote: post #67
qalmakka wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about stopping the pandemic altogether - it's about reducing the number of people in critical condition at a given time. Italy it's already at peak capacity in it's ICUs, and only thorough social distancing it's possible to reduce the number of people at risk getting infected and clogging an health system that is already short on ventilators and hospital beds.

59 million people in Hubei province. 67,000 confirmed cases, 3000 deaths. Lets assume all cases were identified. 59 million did not get the disease. It kills 4%. A vaccine will take at least 18 months to develop. Can China keep Hubei locked down at the current rate for 18 months? Could we do that in the West? If the answer is no, what happens when we reduce the social distancing?

  A vaccine will take at least 18 months to develop.
You can argue that a vaccine would take 18 months to test and deploy, but candidates already exist and are under trial. Moderna (MA, USA) shipped theirs three weeks ago, for one.

Re: Corona Simulator

#75

Post by glaive123 »

gamegod wrote: post #28
glaive123 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

except it may not be successful yet you are just taking for granted the data provided to you by an authoritarian state

You don't need to rely on the data by the Chinese government, for several reasons: 1) Lots of epidemiological papers about the Wuhan epidemic use data from phone carriers (not the government) to track the spread and make predictions, and they were generally pretty good with their forecasts. The numbers reported by the government are consistent with the forecasts from scientists. 2) The numbers reported by China are a…

> Lots of epidemiological papers about the Wuhan epidemic use data from phone carriers (not the government) to track the spread and make predictions, and they were generally pretty good with their forecasts. The numbers reported by the government are consistent with the forecasts from scientists.

Please provide a source for this. I have not seen any of this data used. The data I see used is from the CCP's official data.

> You can't lie about the numbers because every other country would detect an anomalous number of imported cases.

This is absolutely false. Because flights have been suspended from China to most countries, and China itself has been on lockdown, the number of imported cases to other countries does not reflect the growth of the virus inside of China.

> The absolute numbers don't even matter that much - what matters is the trend and the number of new cases going to zero. Look at epidemiology paper - they always assume only like 10% of infected cases are tested and confirmed. The epidemic really is coming to a close in China

Please provide proof that is not coming from CCP.

No offense, but there's no reason to believe you on this without providing sources. Most of what you have said smells like BS.

Re: Corona Simulator

#76

Post by dennisgorelik »

nyolfen wrote: post #15

> “As Lawrence O. Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University, put it: “The truth is those kinds of lockdowns are very rare and never effective.”” uh, except... the one we all just watched be successfully implemented in wuhan?

China did not prevent Covid-19 from spreading.

They simply did not test for Covid-19 in other states. US repeated the same strategy: no testing for Covid-19 - means no information about Covid-19 cases.

Re: Corona Simulator

#77

Post by catacombs »

lucb1e wrote: post #58
catacombs wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why don’t you support the paper and buy a subscription?

Because it isn't nearly worth $90 to me, I barely ever read any of their articles. It's also not something I can look at before deciding whether I want to pay for it, not like a product in a shop or something I can order and return (unused) for 14 days. If paying 50 cents for this article was possible, I would have no idea what I'm getting (beyond the title "Corona Simulator") or whether it's worth it, though a one-t…

Where do you get your news?

Re: Corona Simulator

#78

Post by IgorPartola »

iso1631 wrote: post #67
qalmakka wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about stopping the pandemic altogether - it's about reducing the number of people in critical condition at a given time. Italy it's already at peak capacity in it's ICUs, and only thorough social distancing it's possible to reduce the number of people at risk getting infected and clogging an health system that is already short on ventilators and hospital beds.

59 million people in Hubei province. 67,000 confirmed cases, 3000 deaths. Lets assume all cases were identified. 59 million did not get the disease. It kills 4%. A vaccine will take at least 18 months to develop. Can China keep Hubei locked down at the current rate for 18 months? Could we do that in the West? If the answer is no, what happens when we reduce the social distancing?

The idea is that you have say 1000 ICU spots available. Based on your numbers 4.5% of the cases are deadly, but let’s say 10% are severe-to-deadly and require two weeks of ICU care. So that’s 6,700 people or roughly 94,000 man-days of ICU time. In other words if you slow down the rate of infection enough you could fit that 94k into the 1k of beds over time. But if all of them get sick on day one, you are fucked.

Social distancing is about slowing down the spread, not eradicating the disease. What will eradicate it one way or the other is the immune system or death: once you’ve had it you are unlikely to get reinfected or you will die. To avoid the latter case you need ICU time or eventually a vaccine. Also consider that buying a month of time means an extra month to provide more ICU beds, better testing capacity, better understanding of what is effective prevention, etc.

Re: Corona Simulator

#79

Post by IgorPartola »

robotresearcher wrote: post #32

One thing about this sim bothers me. Having points bounce off each other means they migrate more slowly and increases the effective contact graph diameter. Bouncing points aren't meaningful for the system being modeled. Me staying at home doesn't restrict your movements: our decisions are independent. IMHO he should turn off the collision model. The effect will still be there, but the logistic parameters will be diff…

Yeah this is good for cells in a blood stream, not humans. Also humans interact with other humans unevenly: you see your family and coworkers more often and for more time than a random barista. Except the barista where you always get your coffee on your lunch break. And then you have social mavens who interact with loads of people. If you work in an office with 15 other people, your social circle is likely on the order of like 100-200 people. If you do public speaking for a living, your social circle is in the thousands. Would be better to simulate it that way.

Re: Corona Simulator

#80

Post by lucb1e »

catacombs wrote: post #77
lucb1e wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it isn't nearly worth $90 to me, I barely ever read any of their articles. It's also not something I can look at before deciding whether I want to pay for it, not like a product in a shop or something I can order and return (unused) for 14 days. If paying 50 cents for this article was possible, I would have no idea what I'm getting (beyond the title "Corona Simulator") or whether it's worth it, though a one-t…

Where do you get your news?

General news? Most things that actually impact my life, people (colleagues, friends, family) will tell me about it; the rest mostly passes me by. Some comes from HN, and when there is a big story I'll sometimes browse to nos.nl, but that's about it.

Tech news I keep up with at Tweakers.net, where I have a subscription. Well, and HN again of course, but a lot of that is personal blogs, show/ask HN posts, and a minority of what I click is research/tech news which then breaks down further into many different outlets.

I also use Reddit but the closest sub I have to news is r/globaltalk, so that's mostly people talking about what's going on near them and not journalists that need to be paid.

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