The Doctor Who Helped Defeat Smallpox Explains What's Coming • Hacker News Board

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

#111

Post by oefrha » Sat, Mar 21, 2020, 1:32 PM UTC

mnl wrote: post #66

throwaway_pdp09 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

I mean, any smooth curve (without singularities) is well approximated by simple polynomials locally, which is simply its power series expansion. Doesn’t mean simple polynomials would necessarily hold much predicative power, however well they fit the current data. Higher order terms, if any, will come to dominate.

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

#112

Post by tonetheman » Sat, Mar 21, 2020, 1:41 PM UTC

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…

We do not have tests.

https://covidtracking.com/data/

We have tested 150K people.

We have 327M people in the US, we have tested 0.00046% of the population.

We do not have tests.

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

#113

Post by nabla9 » Sat, Mar 21, 2020, 1:43 PM UTC

34679 wrote: post #101

nabla9 wrote: post #68

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 l…

Why don't we know the extent of seasonal transmission? At the very least, we have data from areas that are in opposite seasons, even if we've yet to collect data on the transition from one season to another. Can't we get some insight from comparing the rate of transmission in Australia, where it's summer, to the UK, where it's winter?

Australia is as close to equator as North Africa or Southern parts of Spain (Melbourne).

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

#114

Post by koheripbal » Sat, Mar 21, 2020, 1:45 PM UTC

DennisP wrote: post #95

w1ntermute wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 e…

We have plenty of flu tests. Covid-19 is also pretty distinctive on chest CT scans, if it's advanced enough to kill you. The numbers may be wrong in that article but the math itself seems straightforward. It's certainly true that we need more tests to be sure of the numbers. Here's a pretty interesting simulation from a research group at the University of Basel: https://neherlab.org/covid19/

It's not distinctive from other lower respiratory pneumonia cases - it's only distinctive from the flu, so it could have been confused with other infections.

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

#115

Post by bamboozled » Sat, Mar 21, 2020, 1:47 PM UTC

Frost1x wrote: post #87

bamboozled wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is scary because Japan seems to have had the virus for a long time and is hardly testing at all. Really makes me wonder how the Olympics will or won't look.

"We're virus free! Our strategy of extensively not testing has eliminated cases of the disease! Come to the 2020 Olympics, stay long, and please spend money here."

It’s a joke and everyone in Japan knows it too. The sooner they cancel or postpone and get on with solutions, the better.

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

#116

Post by acqq » Sat, Mar 21, 2020, 1:49 PM UTC

Lewton wrote: post #80

acqq wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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

I still don't see the difference? Why do you think that the cross-border movement of the disease should be different in Europe compared to the US? Why do you think that the US should be worse off, if that is your point? Do you think people more fly back to the US compared to the people moving from country to country recently in Europe in the last period (including Italy)? Are you aware of how Europe functioned up to now? Many people worked in other countries, and they typically don't even have to fly to achieve that, especially not across the ocean.

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

#117

Post by YeGoblynQueenne » Sat, Mar 21, 2020, 1:53 PM UTC

DyslexicAtheist wrote: post #84

andrepd wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

counter points: Many doctors lack training in epidemiology. Many epidemiologists aren't actual doctors. Healthcare in general is horrible with generating accurate raw data (JHU data comes often from scraping websites and the CDC itself has stopped publishing number of daily tests weeks ago). You don't have to be a Dr. med in order to see gaps and problems with statistics and a large part of the conjecturing actually…

>> Many doctors lack training in epidemiology. Many epidemiologists aren't actual doctors.

Yes, and this is why doctors aren't being asked to do epidemiology and epidemiologists aren't being asked to care for patients.

And (likely) sofware engineers are not asked to do either.

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

#118

Post by yotamoron » Sat, Mar 21, 2020, 1:53 PM UTC

monkeynotes wrote: post #83

logicchains wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Heath system going out has huge cascading problems for society. Worse than the huge cascading problems caused by making a double digit percentage of the population unemployed indefinitely?

You think there would not be widespread panic if we just let the health system melt down? What do you think a world without a health system would look like? Unemployment is going to be very hard to deal with, but it really feels like the best option out of the very difficult choices we have in front of us. Fact is, shit is seriously bad whichever way you look at it.

A prolonged lockdown will cause - as a certainty - such a huge economical crisis, that all those people at risk we are trying to save today - will die tomorrow from non-existant care (along with many many others who will die and suffer). The sad truth is that a lockdown and huge economic crisis that will definitely follow can't really save them (other options might help - but not this one).

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

#119

Post by georgeek » Sat, Mar 21, 2020, 1:54 PM UTC

yread wrote: post #72

165M deaths actually sounds plausible for covid19, if it overwhelms health care in India and developing world countries...

Yes: as usual with disease the poorest countries are going to be hit the hardest. If you think that Lombardy's medical facilities are bad, this will be quite the next level.

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

#120

Post by dhimes » Sat, Mar 21, 2020, 1:58 PM UTC

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…

Indeed, you have a point. But in the US at least we have a serious trust issue with what we hear. I believe Fauci, but he still has to play by somebody else's rules.

I too am tracking the numbers. I seriously and honestly expect them to become unavailable- or at least very hard to get to, if things go very very bad.

I expect to see a bump in the "infection rate" in the next few days as testing becomes more widespread. In fact, I expected to see the start of that already, but if it's happened it's not obvious. The number of cases continues to double every two days and change.