Re: Coronavirus - Modelling Aspects Only
Posted: May 28th, 2020, 12:55 pm
When I have looked at the WHO reports the hotter countries don't seem to have the same issues.
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johnhemming wrote:In any event we will need cooler weather or air conditioning for infections to grow until autumn.
johnhemming wrote:When I have looked at the WHO reports the hotter countries don't seem to have the same issues.
spasmodicus wrote:regarding "They estimate that 35% are infectious, but not symptomatic", I wonder how this impacts the effectiveness of the UK govts "track and trace" scheme. This relies on infected people reporting themselves i.e. "But from now on, everyone with symptoms should ask for a test online or phone to arrange a test by calling 119". But if 35% fail to report, because they don't have symptoms and an unknown proportion prefer not to for privacy or other reasons, or even do not realise that they have to report, how effective is this system likely to be?
johnhemming wrote:In a battle between cockup and conspiracy in government cockup normally wins hands down.#
In any event we will need cooler weather or air conditioning for infections to grow until autumn.
9873210 wrote:spasmodicus wrote:regarding "They estimate that 35% are infectious, but not symptomatic", I wonder how this impacts the effectiveness of the UK govts "track and trace" scheme. This relies on infected people reporting themselves i.e. "But from now on, everyone with symptoms should ask for a test online or phone to arrange a test by calling 119". But if 35% fail to report, because they don't have symptoms and an unknown proportion prefer not to for privacy or other reasons, or even do not realise that they have to report, how effective is this system likely to be?
More effective than not doing it. Measures do not have to be perfect to have a positive impact.
If we keep R below 1 the number of cases decreases and it's a manageable situation. A rational goal is to find the least costly* actions that will do this. Having a cooperative portion of the population self identify, test and quarantine is one of the easiest ways to reduce new cases. Each case avoided reduces R. It may not reduce R enough, and we have to adopt more costly measures as well, but that's no reason not to do the easy stuff.
* balancing money, effort, intrusiveness, hygge, and anything else anybody considers important.
Mike4 wrote:johnhemming wrote:In a battle between cockup and conspiracy in government cockup normally wins hands down.#
In any event we will need cooler weather or air conditioning for infections to grow until autumn.
Surely that was debunked long ago. Or do you hold that places like Singapore and Malaysia are getting good control of it due to their hot climate? How do hot places with dreadful stats like Brasil fit in with this?
Mike4 wrote:Totally agree with you. Masks in public are another example, but it seems to be the English way to resist taking any measure until proven perfect, in case sometimes it doesn't work. Desperately frustrating. Masks in public are cheap as chips to implement and have virtually no downside, yet there are endless arguments here resisting the use of them.
If we just took all the imperfect but obvious measures available to us immediately (stopping inbound travel, locking down hard and early, masks in public, a phone app, manual contact tracing) like the Asian countries e.g. Malaysia instead of insisting everything is gold plated first, we could have had this thing licked long ago. These measures would have looked like an overreaction taken early but our economy would have had suffered only a small fraction of the damage being done now.
Mike4 wrote:If we just took all the imperfect but obvious measures available to us immediately (stopping inbound travel, ...............
Mike4 wrote:Surely that was debunked long ago. Or do you hold that places like Singapore and Malaysia are getting good control of it due to their hot climate? How do hot places with dreadful stats like Brasil fit in with this?
servodude wrote:Mike4 wrote:Totally agree with you. Masks in public are another example, but it seems to be the English way to resist taking any measure until proven perfect, in case sometimes it doesn't work. Desperately frustrating. Masks in public are cheap as chips to implement and have virtually no downside, yet there are endless arguments here resisting the use of them.
If we just took all the imperfect but obvious measures available to us immediately (stopping inbound travel, locking down hard and early, masks in public, a phone app, manual contact tracing) like the Asian countries e.g. Malaysia instead of insisting everything is gold plated first, we could have had this thing licked long ago. These measures would have looked like an overreaction taken early but our economy would have had suffered only a small fraction of the damage being done now.
I absolutely agree that it does not need to be perfect - every little bit helps
It's always seemed to me like it's a big messy stochastic system with two main components
They can probably be best described as:
- the probability of exposure
- the probability of transmission
Probability of exposure is simply how likely you are to encounter the disease
- it's a function of the prevalence of the disease in a population
- and the behaviour of that population (specifically the amount of interactions)
This is the part of the "system" that a "lockdown" attempts to address by reducing the number of interactions with other humans
- it has an immediate limiting effect on the spread of a disease as it cannot move beyond the confines of a home (if adhered to)
As "lockdown" regulations are relaxed this aspect of the "system" can still be addressed by continuing to limit interactions (wrt normal exposure) along with tracing and quarantine of suspect/known cases - and yes an app might help here
Probablility of transmission
This is a function of our behaviour (during interactions) and the properties of the disease
We can't affect the time the virus survives suspended in moisture droplets or how it sits on surfaces but we can modify how we act based on what we know or suspect about it
- maintaining distance during interactions, keeping them as brief as possible
- hygiene: sneezing/coughing etiquette (conscientious isolation)
- amount of air expelled from lungs (stop SHOUTING!)
- wearing masks in public
- a vaccine or having gained immunity
- etc etc
Bringing either of those probabilities down decreases the likelihood of the disease being passed on
- sd
johnhemming wrote:Mike4 wrote:Surely that was debunked long ago. Or do you hold that places like Singapore and Malaysia are getting good control of it due to their hot climate? How do hot places with dreadful stats like Brasil fit in with this?
This document from the WHO is a reasonably good indicator
https://www.who.int/docs/default-source ... 5b154880_2
Places like the USA and Brazil need detailed consideration based upon the localised climate and to what extent air conditioning is used.
Mike4 wrote:There is another dimension, the development of effective treatments. As treatments get better, the fear will reduce
Until Thursday, the UK had a higher rate of death than in any country for which high-quality data exist. However, Spain made a revision to its mortality estimates, adding 12,000 to its toll of excess deaths from coronavirus in a one-off adjustment to 43,000. This increased its death rate to 921 per million, compared to UK's 891 per million.
Mike4 wrote:dspp wrote:Frigged is a technical term in every industry I've worked in
Have some here really not not encountered the term do you think? Like you, I've been using it since I was at skool. Probably learned it from my dad.
Frigging is to fiddle and adjust things to suit your needs.
So to frig the data means to deliberately change it or leave important bits out to support your argument. Dr Didier is suggesting The Lancet set out with the preconceived notion that HXQ doesn't work, and when the data didn't support this notion, someone frigged the data until it did. What other explanations might exist for the percentage of patients with hypertension to be near identical across all five continents. Same for smoking when the percentage of smokers in the general populations varies widely.
He is suggesting the data used by Lancet 'smells' wrong. Here is the data chart he is questioning, from his Twitter post. Not that I understand most of it.
zico wrote:Important update to the Financial Times's deaths/million country comparison since I posted earlier.Until Thursday, the UK had a higher rate of death than in any country for which high-quality data exist. However, Spain made a revision to its mortality estimates, adding 12,000 to its toll of excess deaths from coronavirus in a one-off adjustment to 43,000. This increased its death rate to 921 per million, compared to UK's 891 per million.
They also have a revised "lockdown time" graph, where infections/million are measured rather than total infections. This changes the picture somewhat, and gives an interesting graph. (Unfortunately you'll have to open the link to see it, because I can't copy it).
According to the graph UK locked down at a similar infections/million point to France, Switzerland, Portugal and Austria, but UK has done much worse than these countries.
Interestingly in the graph, "lockdown" is defined as "50% or less of normal transit usage" so Sweden has a data-point.
I'm a bit surprised that UK and Switzerland are shown as similar lockdown levels, because Switzerland banned mass gatherings, festivals only 3 days after discovering their first Covid-19 infection. By comparison, the first Covid-19 infection in the UK was discovered on 31st January in York, but the Cheltenham horse festival went ahead 12-14 March (well over a month later).
This may show that stopping potential "superspreader" events early on is a more effective (and less disruptive option) than general lockdown.
FT just compares 19 countries with comparable high-quality data on excess deaths. It's almost certain that Brazil will end up being the worst affected country in the world. Brazilian deaths have had a slower increase than countries such as USA, Spain, UK and Italy, but it's almost certainly due to under-reporting and under-recording. Their curve shows very few signs of tailing off and deaths are now in excess of 1,000 per day.
https://www.ft.com/content/6b4c784e-c25 ... 8ffde71bf0