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Corona Game

koronahra.cz

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Re: Corona Game

#21

Post by GloriousKoji »

concordDance wrote: post #17

Doing absolutely nothing apparently leads to an infection fatality rate of 4%, which I'm extremely skeptical about.

Early into the pandemic last year I did a rough calculation multiplying out the death rate per age group by the US population by age and I recall it was something roughly around 5% so a number of 4% doesn't seem too far off. Granted the big assumption was infection rate and hospital capacity remained the same (eg New York was at 0% but other states were not).

Taking in data present today and looking at countries that are doing nothing (Sweden), their total population death rate isn't as high as 4% either.

Re: Corona Game

#22

Post by IYasha »

Infectonator: World Dominator was much, much funnier. And it was a bit scarying how realisticly it served as a model. I stopped playing in 2020, for obvious reasons (Flash stopped updating :) ).

Re: Corona Game

#23

Post by black_puppydog »

zupa-hu wrote: post #14

It's really cool, it's so powerful that it makes people realize the trade-offs. The only problem is that in hindsight of course we can do pretty well. I guess most governments could do better after the fact. Too bad you can't play the future with random-generated possibilities. The fact that we don't know what's going to happen would make it in part more accurate.

I don't know the folks behind this, but to me the take-away to "in hindsight of course we can do pretty well" is that really, the whole pandemic should have been addressed with (a lot of) hindsight.

The idea that viruses spread like this isn't new. It happened before. Africa had seen it. Asia had seen it. When Europe went crazy with "they're taking away our freedoms" a lot of my Chinese friends hopped on a plane to China, away from the "plague enthusiastic" westerners.

A lot of what happened over the last year was pure crazy, and entirely foreseeable. It wasn't clear when or where such a spillover event would occur, but what would happen (or not) after that, as a function of actions taken (or not) was painted out and experienced before, by epidemiologists and entire countries. And it was promptly ignored by policy-makers, journalists, and the general population.

I lost a lot of faith in (western) humanity over the last year. I have little hope left that we'll learn anything from it. In fact we're already seeing that some of the obvious promises made with easily verifiable binary outcomes, like better income or security for frontline workers, are being dropped.

I recently watched a youtube video from May 2020, and in the end the person on screen hears noise, goes to the balcony and starts clapping with everyone to celebrate "our heroes".

That didn't fucking age well.

Re: Corona Game

#24

Post by progbits »

blendergeek wrote: post #5

I don't like how there is no option for, "spend billions of dollars on buying enough rapid Covid tests to test every man, woman, and child in the country every single day". Given that rapid Covid tests cost about $5 a piece, this should be an economically feasible option that should be able to sharply reduce the spread of illness. Its too bad that nobody tried it in real life, or we would be able to see if it works.

Slovakia did this in November [1]. Population ~5.5M, 2.5M tested over a single weekend for the first run.

Afterwards there were a few more weekends with lower turnout and until about month or two ago there were free testing places all over the country. These were during many periods require to cross between regions, go to work or shops. Significant fraction of population was getting tested on weekly-biweekly basis.

I can't find a good chart because most only show PCR tests (for a good reason!) but according to [2] Slovakia averaged 7300 tests per 1000 people.

The initial mass testing weekend was useful to get an overview of distribution of the infections and remove a large chunk of the infected from the pool (despite high false negative rate of those tests). It was also good PR and made people more aware how serious the situation is and reconsider if they would rather wear the mask and distance than go through this.

However the continued testing is now viewed as mostly useless. More money spent or tracing and targeted PCR testing, plus vaccine campaigns could have helped more.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/01/half-slovakia-... [2] https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-testing#how-many-test...

Re: Corona Game

#25

Post by zupa-hu »

black_puppydog wrote: post #23
zupa-hu wrote: post #14

It's really cool, it's so powerful that it makes people realize the trade-offs. The only problem is that in hindsight of course we can do pretty well. I guess most governments could do better after the fact. Too bad you can't play the future with random-generated possibilities. The fact that we don't know what's going to happen would make it in part more accurate.

I don't know the folks behind this, but to me the take-away to "in hindsight of course we can do pretty well" is that really, the whole pandemic should have been addressed with (a lot of) hindsight. The idea that viruses spread like this isn't new. It happened before. Africa had seen it. Asia had seen it. When Europe went crazy with "they're taking away our freedoms" a lot of my Chinese friends hopped on a plane to C…

That's not what I meant. You can err on either side and both directions have their costs, which are much clearer in hindsight. There is a reason why the game doesn't predict the future. Because we don't know it.

I specifically meant erring on the other side.

Re: Corona Game

#26

Post by ASalazarMX »

concordDance wrote: post #17

Doing absolutely nothing apparently leads to an infection fatality rate of 4%, which I'm extremely skeptical about.

Deaths start to pile up when hospitals can't accept more people which otherwise would have recovered. A rapid transmission rate was bad, but hospital saturation was the real COVID killer.

Re: Corona Game

#28

Post by concordDance »

GloriousKoji wrote: post #21
concordDance wrote: post #17

Doing absolutely nothing apparently leads to an infection fatality rate of 4%, which I'm extremely skeptical about.

Early into the pandemic last year I did a rough calculation multiplying out the death rate per age group by the US population by age and I recall it was something roughly around 5% so a number of 4% doesn't seem too far off. Granted the big assumption was infection rate and hospital capacity remained the same (eg New York was at 0% but other states were not). Taking in data present today and looking at countries that…

Infection fatality rate for COVID in the Western world in practice was under 1%. I am quite skeptical of the idea that overwhelmed hospitals would quarduple that.

Do you have a source?

Re: Corona Game

#29

Post by richardwhiuk »

ggreer wrote: post #8
richardwhiuk wrote: post #2

The maximal lockdown is way too minimal.

According to the game's about page[1], the model is based on the paper Inferring the effectiveness of government interventions against COVID-19 [2]. The maximal lockdown is the combination of all the interventions studied in that paper: limit gatherings to 10 people, close all non-essential businesses, close schools, close universities, and order everyone to stay at home. The only thing more restrictive would be to p…

The UK's lockdown policies were much more strict than those outlined.

Re: Corona Game

#30

Post by daeglin »

Hi, game author here.

First, this URL https://covidgame.info/ loads the game in English by default. There was a plan to popularize the game outside of Czechia but, frankly, we missed the window when major news outlets were interested.

The game source code is here: https://github.com/swehq/corona-game

I added few comments on the other thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27763873#27766930

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