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An update on a pre-registered result about the coronavirus

kalzumeus.com

11–20 of 182 posts

Re: An update on a pre-registered result about the coronavirus

#11

Oh my. The Japanese government should feel ashamed to have hidden all of this from the public (edit: I mean the real data and the real gravity of the situation, of course). I, for one, fled the US to come to Japan for a few weeks because I mostly believed these numbers. I hate this. I really hate that politicians (all over the world, in this specific case in Japan) can afford to treat us like this, and usually not fa…

>I, for one, fled the US to come to Japan for a few weeks because I mostly believed these numbers. SARS-CoV-2 thanks you for your efforts to help it find new populations to replicate in.

Yeah, considering that you can be asymptomatic for quite a few days that was an extraordinarily selfish act. Fear made them a vector. Feels like the guy in a zombie movie who tries to break the door down to get into the safe room.

Re: An update on a pre-registered result about the coronavirus

#12

I usually like patio11's writing style, but this is super verbose even by his standards and oddly evasive/defensive to boot. There's a number of important messages here, but they make up perhaps 10% of the content, and I still don't really fully understand the rationale behind the cloak and dagger "hash of report" business.

Perhaps that's on purpose. Perhaps he wants to avoid being sued, or similar things. Patrick has a ton of credibility and I would give him the benefit of the doubt here.

Re: An update on a pre-registered result about the coronavirus

#13

I usually like patio11's writing style, but this is super verbose even by his standards and oddly evasive/defensive to boot. There's a number of important messages here, but they make up perhaps 10% of the content, and I still don't really fully understand the rationale behind the cloak and dagger "hash of report" business.

Perhaps that's on purpose. Perhaps he wants to avoid being sued, or similar things. Patrick has a ton of credibility and I would give him the benefit of the doubt here.

Perhaps he wants to avoid being read.

Re: An update on a pre-registered result about the coronavirus

#14
> Over a roughly 2 week period, we would expect approximately 64,000 passengers to fly from Japan to Singapore. 3 infections in that population is a rate of approximately 47 basis points, which is 5X the 9 basis points rate of infection in Japan. If one believes the government, the rate with surveilled clusters backed out be a tiny fraction of 9 basis points.

This argument is a bit flawed. People that travel from Japan to Singapore are not a perfect sample of Japan's population - they might be more likely to be infected, as they might travel more than the average Japanese person.

Re: An update on a pre-registered result about the coronavirus

#16
post #7

>We project a true count of over 500,000 infections, including more than 5,000 severe cases, and a breakdown in provision of care (“overshoot”) in Nagoya, Osaka, and Tokyo, before the end of April. The current count is ~21,000 with the number of confirmed daily cases declining for 6 days straight, from 741 to 338 yesterday. So... not only wrong on the numbers themselves, but also on the scale, trajectory and impact o…

Maybe I read that wrong, but wasn't the point that Japan wasn't acting appropriately, and that white paper, along with other research, forced (for lack of a better word) them to own up to the scale of what they were seeing? Isn't the point that, while the particulars were proved false, the overall thrust of the article that Japan was stalling action which MAY lead to those numbers was true? Did I miss the point of th…

Everyone with disastrous predictions about the coronavirus can and does make that claim. If my predictions aren't true, give it a few weeks and exponential growth will make them true. If they still aren't true, then they would have been true, but whatever we did a few weeks ago must have been the correct reaction to my predictions.

The very general thrust - that Japan surely had community spread - I agree was true and not widely acknowledged at the time. But I don't think that exempts the more specific projections from analysis.

Re: An update on a pre-registered result about the coronavirus

#17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I, for one, fled the US to come to Japan for a few weeks because I mostly believed these numbers. SARS-CoV-2 thanks you for your efforts to help it find new populations to replicate in.

Yeah, considering that you can be asymptomatic for quite a few days that was an extraordinarily selfish act. Fear made them a vector. Feels like the guy in a zombie movie who tries to break the door down to get into the safe room.

Or like Charles Campion in The Stand.

Re: An update on a pre-registered result about the coronavirus

#18
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe I read that wrong, but wasn't the point that Japan wasn't acting appropriately, and that white paper, along with other research, forced (for lack of a better word) them to own up to the scale of what they were seeing? Isn't the point that, while the particulars were proved false, the overall thrust of the article that Japan was stalling action which MAY lead to those numbers was true? Did I miss the point of th…

Honestly, who has 1-1.5h to read this without skimming through most of the verbiage to tease out the point? I read the "pre-registered" part. It was wrong on a bunch of points, both numbers and impact. I strongly doubt a major world economy of 126 million people with many world-class epidemiologists and doctors and generally non-disastrous political leadership was 'forced' into anything by this. The hubris of this gu…

You would be surprised by how doctors are forced to agree with medicial associations or lose their licease.

Re: An update on a pre-registered result about the coronavirus

#19
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, who has 1-1.5h to read this without skimming through most of the verbiage to tease out the point? I read the "pre-registered" part. It was wrong on a bunch of points, both numbers and impact. I strongly doubt a major world economy of 126 million people with many world-class epidemiologists and doctors and generally non-disastrous political leadership was 'forced' into anything by this. The hubris of this gu…

You would be surprised by how doctors are forced to agree with medicial associations or lose their licease.

Can your point be made more explicitly? I fail to see a connection between my comment and your reply to it.

Re: An update on a pre-registered result about the coronavirus

#20
post #4

>We project a true count of over 500,000 infections, including more than 5,000 severe cases, and a breakdown in provision of care (“overshoot”) in Nagoya, Osaka, and Tokyo, before the end of April. The current count is ~21,000 with the number of confirmed daily cases declining for 6 days straight, from 741 to 338 yesterday. So... not only wrong on the numbers themselves, but also on the scale, trajectory and impact o…

Yeah, I'm withholding judgement till "the end of April", but given Japan's doubling time is roughly 10 days, you'd expect there to be ~2.5k severe cases right now. Given that Japan's official count is ~11k, is there reason to believe 1/4 of all official cases are "severe"? Does anyone have up-to-date data on "excess deaths" in Japan for the past few months?

> Given that Japan's official count is ~11k, is there reason to believe 1/4 of all official cases are "severe"?

Yes. That fits data out thus far.

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/69/wr/mm6912e2.htm

> Although the majority of reported COVID-19 cases in China were mild (81%)

Combine the 19% severe cases number out of China with Japan's aging population (which COVID-19 hits substantially harder), and 1/4 is entirely reasonable.

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