Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Doctor Who Helped Defeat Smallpox Explains What's Coming

wired.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 253 posts

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

#71

Post by Lewton »

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…

You have to bear in mind when doing any analysis of this that you shouldn’t treat the US as one country when comparing to Italy. The number of distinct outbreaks happening at once makes a big difference in the steepness of the curve in the beginning. Italy might have been 5-20 distinct outbreaks while what’s happening in the US looks much more like 50-100 separate outbreaks developing at once

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

#73

Post by xienze »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #5
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…

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

Yeah I’m not sure what people are expecting to happen here. This virus has been circulating in the US for months and testing was limited. There’s surely many multiples of infected people than currently reported, and that’s true for any country that isn’t doing blanket testing of entire population.

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

#74

Post by dnh44 »

throwaway_pdp09 wrote: post #11
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes - absolute criminal negligence in the US and UK. Possibly Australia too. The problem isn't just that a lot of people will die because the health system is swamped. That's hardly good news, but when you have a high peak you have a lot of people ill at the same time. And that means you run the risk of losing a significant percentage of critical workers in essential services including food, utilities, logistics, and…

Original poster. I'm from the UK. Looking at the curves only and leaving out politics completely, the UK curve is by far the slowest growing of the 3, for whatever reason. It's the US that has the most to fear at this point, of the 3 countries.

It’s taking a week for them to get test results at the NHS. So currently today’s results are from last weeks tests.

Of course that’s assuming the labs doing the testing are doing it first in first out.

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

#75

Post by DennisP »

cowsandmilk wrote: post #17
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…

> 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…

The death curve is also quite steep. Seven days ago we were at 57 total deaths, now it's 276. Daily deaths has gone from eight people seven days ago to 49.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/

Here's a good article on estimating current number of cases from number of deaths:

https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-peop...

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

#76

Post by ethbro »

Amygaz wrote: post #24
merricksb wrote: post #2

Earlier discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22635225

Thanks, except the discussion on this one are more relevant, to what is at stake. The other started pretty quickly on pooping the media.

As opposed to this one, which is starting with armchair statisticians extrapolating curves without considering the nuances of the underlying data?

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

#77

Post by acqq »

Lewton wrote: post #71
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…

You have to bear in mind when doing any analysis of this that you shouldn’t treat the US as one country when comparing to Italy. The number of distinct outbreaks happening at once makes a big difference in the steepness of the curve in the beginning. Italy might have been 5-20 distinct outbreaks while what’s happening in the US looks much more like 50-100 separate outbreaks developing at once

> The number of distinct outbreaks happening at once makes a big difference in the steepness of the curve in the beginning.

How come? "Distinct outbreaks" just means the older state was underdiagnosed, not that the characteristics of the pandemics change.

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

#78

Post by w1ntermute »

DennisP wrote: post #75
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…

The death curve is also quite steep. Seven days ago we were at 57 total deaths, now it's 276. Daily deaths has gone from eight people seven days ago to 49. https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/us/ Here's a good article on estimating current number of cases from number of deaths: https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-peop...

The death curve is also deceptive - there were likely many patients who were recorded as dying of the flu, or of influenza-like illness, that actually died of COVID-19, due to a lack of testing. The bottom line is that it’s very difficult to make a conclusive statement based on the data collected prior to widespread testing.

As for that Medium article, it’s written by a tech exec with zero education or professional experience in anything related to medicine or the life sciences, so I would treat it with a heavy dose of skepticism. Many of the deluge of preprint articles from academic institutions written by epidemiologists or public health experts would likely be a far better source of info.

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

#79

Post by jordinl »

andrepd wrote: post #69
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 com…

Who are these experts you speak of? Are they in US? UK? Italy? Spain?

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

#80

Post by Lewton »

acqq wrote: post #77
Lewton wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to bear in mind when doing any analysis of this that you shouldn’t treat the US as one country when comparing to Italy. The number of distinct outbreaks happening at once makes a big difference in the steepness of the curve in the beginning. Italy might have been 5-20 distinct outbreaks while what’s happening in the US looks much more like 50-100 separate outbreaks developing at once

> The number of distinct outbreaks happening at once makes a big difference in the steepness of the curve in the beginning. How come? "Distinct outbreaks" just means the older state was underdiagnosed, not that the characteristics of the pandemics change.

"Beginning" might be the wrong term, as it's a bit into the beginning that it starts to make a difference.

Local saturation happens fairly quickly. Having 100 infected in one place is very much different to having 1 infection happening 100 different places when you look at it after a week

When you're looking at the "country" view, the "older state" gets lost in the transmissions happening from people crossing borders. So what I mean is, people have been flying back to the states with infections spread out over the entire country while cross-border spread has been much more localized in italy

Post reply on HN