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RE: COVID-19 start of a new era
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Piwin
Posts: 3559
Joined: Feb. 9 2016
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 RE: COVID-19 start of a new era (in reply to kitarist)
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 Well, I guess he must be doing something if so many of you are reacting this way! I don't see it.
Just a few posts up, we have a fellow foro member arguing that the best way forward is to allow the virus to spread at a controlled rate. That's an idea I've found somewhat regularly in some media sources as well (they justify current measures not as a way to eradicate the virus, but simply as a way to "slow it down", awaiting either a vaccine, herd immunity or something like that). The way I interpreted it, the article I linked to just offers some rough ideas as to why controlled propagation is not a viable solution and why instead we should favour full containment, and that's why I posted it.
Of course there are other factors that comes to mind when thinking of why controlled propagation isn't a viable solution. For instance, whether long-term immunity to this virus is even possible (like Brendan I thought this was a question mark at this point). If we don't know that, then going after herd immunity seems like one hell of a gambit. Then there's the fact that the more people get infected, the more chances there are for further mutations, which we probably don't want to risk. All in all, it seems to me that our ambition should be full containment and eradication of this virus, not just slowing down its propagation
I don't have any medical expertise at all. And a lot of things that might seem commonsensical to me may in fact be flat-out wrong. So this isn't the hill I'm going to die on! These are just fun musings to pass the time, but all that really matters to me right now is to follow the rules for containment issued by authorities I want to trust.
And that's probably why I found this article refreshing when a lot of you found it contrarian. It doesn't beat around the bush, at a time when trust in authorities is, perhaps not eroding, but, well, let's say they could be more straightforward. For weeks now I've been surrounded by messaging that I just feel isn't telling me the truth. And I think I can guess why: it's not some grand conspiracy or anything sinister, it's just that the authorities, and media, don't want to needlessly scare people. Ironically though, it ends up being scarier now because we all suspect they're not telling us the truth and many of us are left with a sense of not having any firm ground to stand on.
Take for example the fact that both in Spain and in France they announced full lock-down for 2 weeks. Now go looking for a Frenchman or Spaniard who actually believes the lock-down will be over in 2 weeks. Good luck! ^^ Nobody believes it will be over by then... And so you ask yourself: why then did they tell us just 2 weeks? Or why are they saying it's just about managing hospital case load and not about entirely containing and annihilating this thing from the planet? Personally, if you tell me: "we're going to have a full lock-down for 6 weeks (pick a number, but certainly more than 2...). We can't afford to just slow this thing down, we have to eradicate it", well, that would pump me up with drive, courage and even hope. Instead what I'm getting is a measly "we're having a sort-of shutdown for 2 weeks, maybe a bit longer, we don't really know, and really it's just about making sure that the hospitals aren't overloaded coz in the end it's going to spread either way"...  In that context, an article with probably some poetic license but that's driving home the point that the endgame has to be containment, I'll admit, I find that refreshing.
On a related note, I suspect that if many (most?) of you go back to the beginning of this thread and look at your replies, you may find yourself thinking that, if you knew then what you know now, you might have replied differently. I still strongly disagree with sartorius, very much so, and I found the message about "lethargy" to be insulting to the fellow humans I know who are struggling everyday just to get by and manage to find even a shred of happiness on this odd planet. But I also think that, if those who inform me hadn't downplayed the gravity of the situation, as they seem to be doing even to this day, I would have replied very differently to him.
Anyway, I don't have much else to add on SARS-2 or whatever we're calling it. So I'll move on now after this long rant
oh, @kitarist, in the dust-kicking update, I hope you didn't miss this link: https://alhill.shinyapps.io/COVID19seir/
I thought the mathematically minded like you and Richard might enjoy that.
edit: quote:
you get a lot less infections in total, not just a slower pace of spread
Not important, but I don't understand this point. He's working backwards from a fixed amount that is his (granted, rather casually defined) estimate of total cases required for herd immunity. How can there be any less cases in this argument? If there were any less, then we would not reach herd immunity. It has to be a fixed value otherwise he would be arguing something entirely different, no?
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Date Mar. 20 2020 7:11:07
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RobF
Posts: 1611
Joined: Aug. 24 2017
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RE: COVID-19 start of a new era (in reply to flyeogh)
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quote:
Piwin you can't tell them it will be 6 weeks as sadly many would say "that's impossible. Let's ignore it".
My friends in Granada are sure taking it seriously. Most of them are totally dependant on playing for money and my best buddy lives on a shoe string at the best of times. He sent me a picture the other day from the hospital. It looks like he walked into a window or something, cut himself, and now has a 2.5” scar across his face. He already looked pretty rough and tumble, but in a good way, he’s now worried the scar will make him look scary. Not good, but stress leads to this kind of thing.
Another recently posted that, for him, one of things he was missing the most was the hugs of his friends. These guys are hurting.
I think the whole world is gonna need a big abrazo by the time this is over....and I appreciate Richard’s posting of the potential good news out of China. It seems a lot of us here have engineering backgrounds or similar and it’s in our nature to draw some level of comfort or distraction from the data crunching articles, even the ones we disagree with. So, it’s all good to me, in that respect.
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Date Mar. 20 2020 9:33:43
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kitarist
Posts: 1715
Joined: Dec. 4 2012
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RE: COVID-19 start of a new era (in reply to Piwin)
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quote:
oh, @kitarist, in the dust-kicking update, I hope you didn't miss this link: https://alhill.shinyapps.io/COVID19seir/
I saw it. The mistake there is to assume a constant rate of transmission (once the user sets it). This is obviously wrong, and we now have the example of , say, South Korea, to show this modelling is bunk. The rate slows down to essentially zero (see Hubei province as well). Therefore the total is much less.
Also, remember, we are going to have a vaccine within 1 year. So even with whatever the contrarian drew, that same graph, he should have cut it off after 1 year or so, thus cutting off the absurdly long tail, again making plain that the total cases would be much less.
It would be like this. I've graciously cut it off at about 1.5 years instead of 1.2 or 1 (time from beginning till a vaccine):
Do you see the reduced rate curve? It's there, but it is not that reddish line; it is the faint greyish thing barely distinguishable from the x-axis. Does that look like same area under both curves? Not to me.
Also see my second post below the one you quote from.
I guess I reacted strongly because the guy is going to get people killed; a contrarian post like that is a 'LOL nothing matters' post, implicitly advocating to do nothing different. Doing that means many thousands killed who did not have to die.
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Konstantin
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Date Mar. 20 2020 16:37:38
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Richard Jernigan
Posts: 3430
Joined: Jan. 20 2004
From: Austin, Texas USA
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RE: COVID-19 start of a new era (in reply to kitarist)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: kitarist
alas he forgot that the area under the two curves is NOT the same (his key stupid assumption is that the areas are the same, so he can bleat about how impossibly long the spread would be in the flattened curve case); you get a lot less infections in total, not just a slower pace of spread, in the case with social distancing and other effective measures. The concept he said was a lie was nothing of the kind. Nincompoop.
Thanks for putting your finger on it, Kitarist. Something looked phony when I glanced at it last night, but it was bedtime and I had appointments this morning. In fact I had made the calculation a couple of days ago. Population of Wuhan = 11.8-million, number of cases: 81,000. No new cases for two days in a row. Fraction of population infected before spread of disease was stopped 0.7%. The guy was assuming 60-70% of population infected under both scenarios. He was only off by a factor of 87.5.
Back in the '60s when computers were just becoming ubiquitous, we used to say, "GIGO" [garbage in, garbage out]. I worked at Austin's first high-tech startup in the '60s. There was a window, maybe 4 feet high by 20 feet long, where you could stand and watch the blinking lights on the impressive Univac mainframe. Down in one corner of the window was a cartoon. Two men in lab coats looked at a printout, an oversize mainframe computer in the background. One man was saying, "It would take 100 mathematicians working 50 years to make this mistake."
RNJ
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Date Mar. 20 2020 17:14:45
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Piwin
Posts: 3559
Joined: Feb. 9 2016
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RE: COVID-19 start of a new era (in reply to kitarist)
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I mean...to me it seems you're arguing the same thing he is... He's saying eradicate the virus, don't place your money on just slowing it down until we reach herd immunity within the total population, hence the need for heavy-hitting containment measures à la China and not just "slow it down" measures. It's like you're saying "the graph is bogus because it doesn't take into account the measures we can implement" when the whole point of the graph is to say this is why we have to implement these measures because if we don't you'd get something like this graph... As for a vaccine, we might have one within 1 year. Given the potential cost in human lives of letting this go on for however long it takes to find a vaccine, it seems unwise to me to bet on that when there is a much more immediate and certain option available to us.
Anyway, if others are reading this like a "LOL nothing matters" article, then I guess I'm misreading it, because I didn't get that at all, and in fact I interpreted it as saying quite the opposite of that. Thanks for your explanations but unfortunately I still don't see what the opposition is between your PoV and his. Best to just leave it at that. If I didn't get it by now, I probably never will. Sorry! See you guys around in the regular threads 
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Date Mar. 20 2020 17:20:46
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Piwin
Posts: 3559
Joined: Feb. 9 2016
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RE: COVID-19 start of a new era (in reply to kitarist)
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Well, European governments at least don't seem to have been giving much consideration to official WHO positions unfortunately. Maybe they do now, but the whole thing is moving so fast it's easy to forget what governmental positions were even just a week ago. For instance, in the very early stages WHO stressed time and time again the importance of testing, to no avail. Only the countries who had gone through SARS last time around were wise enough to do that. Now is not the time, but when this is over with, I hope we'll take the time to look back on how this whole thing developed. There are a few heads that need to roll (not literally of course, although who knows, I am French after all  ).
No worries. I didn't take it personally (and even if I had, it wouldn't be a big deal!). I just don't want you to waste your time banging your head against a wall because it really doesn't seem like I'm going to get it ^^. I guess it just went over my head, which wouldn't be a first.
Everyone is under a lot of stress because of this. One of my parents is quarantined at home because of it, under doctor's orders, which means the other parent is also likely to have/get it. They're both in their early 60s with no preconditions, so at higher risk but also not in the worst possible category either. Of course, because of these initial policy failings, testing has been pretty much abandoned now so they won't know with any kind of certainty unless it gets worse. They just get to wait for a week or so and see if they can still breathe, and if they can't, then they get to be tested... That this kind of situation (and of course the much worse situations that we've all heard of) is happening at all is a political failure, not some unavoidable "act of God" or "force majeure". We know this because other countries did react in the right way and avoided this entirely. And that's probably part of the reason why I disagree with mrstwinkle and liked this article calling for more stringent action. I don't think it's out of fear. If it's driven by an emotional response I'd say perhaps it would be more out of resentment, resentment borne from the realization that this is a political failure.
Anyway, for real this time , back to the other threads for me! Gotta keep up the flamenco and compose some coronarias. ^^
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"Anything you do can be fixed. What you cannot fix is the perfection of a blank page. What you cannot fix is that pristine, unsullied whiteness of a screen or a page with nothing on it—because there’s nothing there to fix."
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Date Mar. 20 2020 18:29:16
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