Guest post: It can’t be blocked by call display
Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on Largely in a lot of parts of the world.
“It’s overhyped,” she said.
For this degree of media and institutional attention, she was expecting a lot more deaths. This? Pfft! This is just weak sauce. Should be tucked in under the horoscopes.
“And I don’t wish anybody ill will. You know I don’t wish that…
But we don’t know that, do we? There’s a strong whiff of the other, like, you know that sentence you just uttered in regards to a pandemic that, in less than four months, has come within spitting distance of killing more Americans than the Vietnam war, in which you thought that it has been “overhyped?” Besides, is it a good idea to “underhype” a pandemic?
but I think it hurts certain ages in certain places and largely in a lot of parts of the world.
Problem is, given the correct circumstances, you could end up being one of those people of a certain age, in a certain place. The virus doesn’t issue invitations which you can decline, it doesn’t announce its presence, it can’t be blocked by call display. It would only take a single slip-up or mistake amongst the security people* of your gated community, or amongst your household staff** (assuming you haven’t cut them off from the outside world) and you might very well be our next contestant.
* I bet they’re well equipped with PPE, and using social distancing protocols to keep you safe.
** See *above.
“In the country it’s not as rampant as the press would have you make it.”
It’s certainly more rampant than you’d want to be in the midst of, though, isn’t it? Because of the combination of woeful, criminal lack of testing, and asymptomatic spread, there’s no way to know just how rampant it is. And opening businesses prematurely will only make it MORE RAMPANT.
In just a month surely?
https://twitter.com/DavidAFrench/status/1252800729636634625?s=20
Indeed, you’re correct. I was including the long, shallow tail to the left of the steep climb of recent weeks.
I started journaling about what was happening on March 17. Looking back, it’s hard to believe how much the case and death rates have exploded and I’m an epidemiologist. I understand things like exponential growth. I modeled the data back then and my prediction for tomorrow was 848,186 cases (spurious accuracy, I know) and predicted we’d hit 1m on 4/30. At the time I made it, there were fewer than 5K cases in the US and less than 100 deaths. I’m glad I started journaling, no matter the morbidness of it. It helps document how my life is changing and I would like to be able to look back to the heady days of mid-March when nobody believed my predictions.
Today is ~890K cases and climbing. I remodeled the data to add all the extra data points. Now I’ve calculated will hit the 1m mark on Monday, 3 days earlier than my older model. It could even be earlier, my prediction for Sunday is ~985K but the 95% confidence intervals cross the 1m mark.
I said a million cases in on St Patricks Day. Everyone outside of my work colleagues thought I was nuts. The joke would be on them were it not so serious.
Claire, out of interest did your (spookily accurate) model take into account the effects of the various lockdown initiatives that were being discussed in mid March? I can’t recall if any were actually in place in Washington, NY or California by then. If not, your model was optimistic!
Rob, no it was a very simple logistic regression, real back of an envelope stuff. I didn’t adjust for any potential confounders (like social distancing) or model the uneven spread across the country(urban vs rural essentially). Given its simplicity, I’m as surprised as anyone at the error rate. What it suggests is that so far the spread has behaved almost perfectly mathematically. Not much is retarding the growth.
We’ll see in 2-3 weeks how well the social distancing is working. They managed to significantly flatten the curve in the Bay Area. Nationwide, the results will be more mixed for a number of reasons; population density, date lockdown was issued, urban vs rural environment, and good old fashioned politics.
Yay! A victory for basic science, I guess. Sometimes victory tastes bitter.
Just more evidence that models can be highly effective and predictive if done by someone who knows what they’re doing.
“In the country it’s not as rampant as the press would have you make it.”
It’s certainly more rampant than you’d want to be in the midst of, though, isn’t it?
Gentle reader, you may have misconstrued her comment here, if I may be so bold. It’s entirely possible she wasn’t commenting on a lack of COVID-19 cases in the USA. It may be that she was referring to the lower prevalence of the disease in the ‘country’ – you know the rural heartland of America that is fighting to preserve our 18th century values and her economic supremacy in the face of all those wretched urbanites who threaten to exert as much influence on the country’s political future as their 60+ % majority would normally allow absent GOP gerrymandering.