Worldwide deaths per day from the Wuhan Virus have been
dropping for several days:
The US Government model predicting max deaths has been revised lower, down from 90,000 to 80,000. Of course,
as with climate modeling, take the model predictions with a
big grain of salt.
Next step: start easing up on the lockdowns.
UPDATE 7 April 2020 11:18: Ed Bonderenka in the comments Links to another post at W.M. Briggs (Statistian to the Stars!) (I link to an older post of his above). It's very important and I recommend you
read the whole thing.
11 comments:
This guy is a statistician:
Good stuff.
https://wmbriggs.com/post/30182/
As for opening it up, my friend Patrick (a former rocket scientist) has some ideas.
https://www.facebook.com/notes/patrick-colbeck/looking-for-a-rational-data-driven-policy-solution-to-covid-19/907262986385263
Of course.
Hmmmm. I suppose the next thing from these panic driven doom sayers will be - how could we have been so mistaken???? Welp - with exponential functions like pandemics, if ya make an error on your constants or your coefficients - chances are the amount of error will be exponential as well.
Or you suspect that locking down as much of the country as possible has been effective and undoing that too soon will see it spike back up. Not enough data to say.
It is 'interesting' to see the arguments between the modelers... LOL And we will probably never know the true numbers of infected nor the dead, no thanks to China... I find it interesting that the JHU map never shows anyone recovering, yet we have, as of this morning, six recovered.
You need to understand how exponential progressions work, ASM, and the basics of virology to see the error in your statement. To squash that curve, you’d need to literally lock people down in their homes, with the doors welded shut, with no exceptions for anyone, and you’d have to be 100% successful with it too. As it is on any given day, hundreds of thousands, if not millions... violated lockdowns and social distancing recommendations. All that would easily keep a serious pandemic going, if it were one. Casual compliance like that will do nothing to impact the numbers on the y axis, though it may shift it over on the x (or time axis).
The only way to seriously flatten that curve would be with using exponentially expanding efforts to treat the flu: with vaccines, and medicines and personnel and facilities to handle the symptoms. America is actually doing a decent job of that given the resources available and the political roadblocks that inevitably spring up.
This is exactly what our leaders want you to think: everything’s good, they took the proper precautions, nothing to worry about, all is well. We got this! In point of fact We lucked out; the transmission rates and lethality and mortality rates were grossly over estimated. If everyone magically healed up and got over it today... we’d still be behind the 8 ball. Aesop and his clucky hens are absolutely right that we are sitting ducks for the first bug that comes along that DOES have a serious transmission/mortality rate. The only thing they got wrong was that this was the bug to do it.
The way forward isn’t to point fingers and blame, or sweep it under the carpet and claim victory. At a start, I’d say we need to take back our supply chains. Mask availability should not have been an issue. We need to defend and enforce our borders, airports and ports. And we need to look at ways to bring the industrial might of our nations to bear on a medical emergencies like this. Given the politics on any of those, we can pretty much guess what our leaders will do. If a real pandemic comes for us... we are going to be on our own in short order.
California locked things down early.
New York waited until it was too late.
Look at the numbers of infected and dead in each state, and decide whether switching to the NYFS model at this point is the smarter way to go.
Aesop -
California has cars. NYfC has trains and buses.
And in California they crap on the sidewalks because they can’t be bothered with the washrooms, never mind lock down restrictions. In fact I think just recently they were worrying about polio outbreaks.
I see that Irish is coming to the same conclusion I have:
https://theferalirishman.blogspot.com/2020/04/people-should-ask-themselves-whether.html
I wish. But no. Local to me news just released a report from someone that essentially says that the only way to keep the curve flat enough to keep the local to me hospitals from being overwhelmed is to keep us all on lockdown into fall.
Mind, I don't think lockdown was the right solution, but I'm also of the opinion that the problem with this virus isn't so much the death rate (regardless of the medials panic mongering), but the hospitalization (of people who'll survive with additional medical care) rate, and I FULLY expect that once they release lockdown we're going to see another spike. And then the panic is REALLY going to be bad.
@McChuck and Glen,
While both are true, they're both also entirely irrelevant variables.
Both also have zoos with elephants.
Maybe CA has koala bears.
Maybe NYFC doesn't.
Who cares?
Lockdowns work in both cases.
Failures to do so fail in both cases.
Learning from what works is illustrative, and predictive.
So is failing to do so.
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