The Doctor Who Helped Defeat Smallpox Explains What's Coming

Post by mrfusion » Sat, Mar 21, 2020, 2:12 PM UTC

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…

Post by marvin » Sat, Mar 21, 2020, 2:15 PM UTC

throwaway_pdp09 wrote: post #104

andrepd wrote: post #69

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>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…

And I am having serious misgivings about posting it, nonetheless, many people have expressed deep concerned, and I'm doing the same, only with actual data. I made it clear the limits of my knowledge - which may still not excuse me, however I have to ask if you are an epidemiologist and if so, please tell me how to model the data better. And I don't mean randomly google up some papers to dump here and pretend you are…

Post by throwaway_pdp09 » Sat, Mar 21, 2020, 2:21 PM UTC

travisporter wrote: post #125

throwaway_pdp09 wrote: post #67

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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).

ISWYM - I see what you mean?

Post by polishdude20 » Sat, Mar 21, 2020, 2:24 PM UTC

ochoseis wrote: post #94

mnl wrote: post #35

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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.

3blue1brown did a good video explaining the logistic shape of pandemic curves: https://youtu.be/Kas0tIxDvrg My key takeaway was that once you see the inflection point, you know that you’ll have roughly 2x the number infections by the time it’s done.

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Mar 21, 2020, 2:29 PM UTC

mnl wrote: post #66

throwaway_pdp09 wrote: post #55

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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…