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The Doctor Who Helped Defeat Smallpox Explains What's Coming

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Re: The Doctor Who Helped Defeat Smallpox Explains What's Coming

#61

Post by [deleted] »

simonh wrote: post #13
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But how much of the US’s growth is due to us finally having some (albeit not enough) testing?

This is key. We really can't compare countries confirmed case numbers directly because they are operating very different testing programmes. Just look at Germany. More confirmed cases than the USA, but a quarter of the deaths. Germany also has 80% as many cases as Spain, but about 5% as many deaths. All that, without a severe lockdown. Clearly something completely different is going on there than in many other countr…

[deleted]

Re: The Doctor Who Helped Defeat Smallpox Explains What's Coming

#62

Post by DanBC »

yotamoron wrote: post #60
flyinglizard wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s true only when hospitals are functioning. Corona spread saturates hospitals and then mortality goes up to near 10%, from the virus itself as well as other unrelated causes which get no ICU treatment.

Hospitals are saturated, because people are panicking. For almost all people, just staying at home for a few days is enough.

You don't get admitted to ICU because you're panicking. You get admitted to ICU because multiple doctors think you need to be there.

London hospitals have started to become overwhelmed with patients, and this is only going to get worse. https://www.hsj.co.uk/news/hospitals-critical-care-unit-over...

Re: The Doctor Who Helped Defeat Smallpox Explains What's Coming

#63

Post by mnl »

throwaway_pdp09 wrote: post #52
mnl wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not an exponential, it's a logistic curve, just approximate with the SIS model, it's easier. Yeah I knew by Sunday that tomorrow we're hitting 30,000 cases in Spain. My assumptions worked. And it's just the tip, because I don't know anything about whether there's been randomized sampling, so who knows about the normalization. I just can't believe this. No one listens and this is in-your-face obvious.

> I just can't believe this. No one listens and this is in-your-face obvious Can you clarify. I can modify the top post (mine) if you're saying I'm overstating things. Happy to be wrong here.

I mean, it's just frustration. You have to expect this from a novel disease once you realize its R0 has been characterized, it's greater than 2, it's airborne and asymptomatic patients can transmit it. What have been people expecting? I'm a physicist, I've seen this kind of growth. We also have this totalitarian principle which states that "Everything not forbidden is compulsory", I see no fundamental difference, it has to happen. Just don't act like in ordinary politics where problems can be waved away, Nature doesn't care about that.

Re: The Doctor Who Helped Defeat Smallpox Explains What's Coming

#64

Post by acqq »

nemo44x wrote: post #53
emmelaich wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Related, there's also the distinct possibility that many had Covid-19 well before it was in public consciousness. Look for ILI (Influenza-like Illness) stats which were appreciably higher in January. The obvious inference is that many had Covid-19 before it was recognised as such. This might be a good thing.

I think this is underrated. This thing must have been spreading since November here. I know a person who back in January acquired something like pneumonia and a bad fever, went to the hospital for awhile and tests were negative for flu, etc. doctors just didn’t know what it was. The person has COPD however. But anecdotally I’ve noticed quite a few more colleagues over the last few months out sick “with the flu or som…

> If it’s as contagious as they say and spreads in asymptotic people then why wouldn’t there be a significant population that has acquired and recovered from this?

Because all the effects are limited by the time it takes for them to happen. We know the speed of growth, it's much faster than the expected recovery times. From all known COVID-19 cases the number of recovered are still dominated by the recovered in China.

   China: reported cases: 81,008
          dead:       3,255 
          recovered: 71,740

   Whole world: reported cases: 282,395
                dead:      11,822
                recovered: 93,189
Virus causing COVID-19 is "novel" meaning not existing among humans at all until a few months ago.

Re: The Doctor Who Helped Defeat Smallpox Explains What's Coming

#65

Post by rzzzt »

notahacker wrote: post #27
cowsandmilk wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the USA curve is fearsomely steep This analysis is difficult because it is related to testing capacity. We all know testing capacity was limited early on. It remains limited, but is growing. The faster capacity grows, the steeper the curve will be. Want to have a less steep curve? Lower the amount of testing. In another comment, you claim looking at the curves leaves out politics completely, but it doesn't. Any pol…

Yep. Ventilator usage [if available] and deaths are more reliable indicators, but they're also lagging ones [and even deaths aren't entirely consistently measured since many of the most severely affected patients exhibit comorbities, and many nations don't test the dead]

Others do, and that skews the results as well (at the very least, it makes numbers incomparable).

Re: The Doctor Who Helped Defeat Smallpox Explains What's Coming

#66

Post by mnl »

throwaway_pdp09 wrote: post #55
mnl wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently not with this when you're early. I took it seriously when a third degree polynomial fit worked too well and then suddenly didn't.

OK, looking at this, the curve is upwards without inflection. What would you expect to get if you fitted a D3 poly to it? Why would you even try? Serious Q.

First thing you do is try to make sense of the data, if I can model 15 points with 2, 3, 4 parameters and further ones don't add any improvement I'm onto something. I've always done polynomials first, you can see if there's something much simpler than Lagrange interpolation, which in my experience means you have to go straight to the literature about that kind of problem.

(Of course this works as long as you aren't seeing any peaks)

oefrha, for some reason I can't reply to your comment just yet so I'll post it here: Of course. This is just my own criterion when I start with a bunch of data I know nothing about. Is there a complicated law behind them or maybe not? Am I seeing noise or there's a signal? You can fit anything smooth with a low order polynomial, so maybe there's a differentiable function right in front of you. It's just something I do and if you see no reason for it I might even agree with you on that. It never ends up in the model, though. It's just something I find useful at a preliminary stage.

OK, We're not being responsible doing this and I'm not qualified to do it. I just have been fitting the data and maybe I've been lucky and I'm just an idiot. Having said that, this is also my problem, I have right now a hotspot in the vicinity and I'm worried. I just want to have a quantitative idea of what's going on. Now it's your job as experts to explain what's going on to the politicians and make sure they hear and they can do the right thing. I wouldn't be worried if the messages had matched the numbers when this started, they didn't. At some point we need someone to tell us "we're at this point and tomorrow we'll be at that point". I shouldn't feel compelled to find out by myself what all this is about. I feel awful by posting all this, I'm perfectly aware that non-experts in a field spout nonsense, but this is a very nonsensical situation and I'm tired of hearing we've been doing fine.

Re: The Doctor Who Helped Defeat Smallpox Explains What's Coming

#67

Post by throwaway_pdp09 »

mnl wrote: post #63
throwaway_pdp09 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I just can't believe this. No one listens and this is in-your-face obvious Can you clarify. I can modify the top post (mine) if you're saying I'm overstating things. Happy to be wrong here.

I mean, it's just frustration. You have to expect this from a novel disease once you realize its R0 has been characterized, it's greater than 2, it's airborne and asymptomatic patients can transmit it. What have been people expecting? I'm a physicist, I've seen this kind of growth. We also have this totalitarian principle which states that "Everything not forbidden is compulsory", I see no fundamental difference, it…

Oh heck yes. ISWYM and that's the way I treated it - seriously, starting 2 months ago, for exactly those reasons. I just don't get it either, it's like head-meets-wall every time you try to tell anybody. It's so depressing.

(what I thought you might have meant was a criticism of me misusing maths and you were getting pissed off telling people it was a sigmoid not an exponential).

Re: The Doctor Who Helped Defeat Smallpox Explains What's Coming

#68

Post by nabla9 »

Francois Balloux Computational biologist, director of Genetics Institute at UCL had interesting twitter post: https://twitter.com/BallouxFrancois/status/12388371580074475...

> Predictions from any model are only as good as the data that parametrised it. There are two major unknowns at this stage. (1) We don't know to what extent covid-19 transmission will be seasonal. (2) We don’t know if covid-19 infection induces long-lasting immunity.

>How long immunity lasts for following covid-19 infection is the biggest unknown. Comparison with other Coronaviridae suggests it may be relatively short-lived (i.e. months). If this were to be confirmed, it would add to the challenge of managing the pandemic.

>Short-lived immunisation would defeat both ‘flattening the curve’ and ‘herd immunity’ approaches. Devising an effective strategy would be even more challenging under low seasonal forcing. It would also considerably complicate effective vaccination campaigns.

Re: The Doctor Who Helped Defeat Smallpox Explains What's Coming

#69

Post by andrepd »

throwaway_pdp09 wrote: post #3

This is bad. I've been graphing the exp curve for Italy, UK and USA and the USA curve is fearsomely steep. Italy has more cases now but the USA is growing fastest and looks like it will match Italy's on ~March 28th (looking at the most recent 10 points, see below) The rate of growth in the USA, extrapolated, is just huge. Looking at the whole curve it does not match an exponential well, I think the early part is skew…

>I've been graphing the exp curve

As you can imagine, there's more to epidemiology than this. I'm a big fan of letting the qualified people do their work, while we do ours: shut up and do not spread misinformation.

In fact, at the risk of being rude ill even go so far and say that it's quite arrogant to pretend to pontificate about this when your knowledge about this issue is 0, and also when one major problem in combating this pandemic is the "epidemic of misinformation".

Re: The Doctor Who Helped Defeat Smallpox Explains What's Coming

#70

Post by ksrm »

Amygaz wrote: post #45
no_gravity wrote: post #6

From what I read in this article and other sources, performing more tests seems to be a very promising approach to get this pandemic under control. The number of positive tests and death rates are published every day on all channels. I wish the number of performed tests would be also published daily. What gets measured gets managed. I wonder what limits the number of tests that can be performed. How much would it cos…

It's not a question of cost at this point. It's a question of availability of reagents and consumables, materials to make those, and time it takes to ramp up. The supply chain is like a supertanker. At first we didn't have enough test, but that ramped up quickly, then we didn't have enough RNA extraction reagent, now we don't have enough swabs, and soon is the collection media that will be missing. There has been a c…

> At first we didn't have enough test, but that ramped up quickly, then we didn't have enough RNA extraction reagent, now we don't have enough swabs, and soon is the collection media that will be missing.

Where are you getting this information from?

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