April 13, 2020
As
a counterpoint of sorts, read the article linked above. I agree that a
total economic shutdown is a bad idea, but I do support social
distancing, not because of the risk to myself, but because of the risk
to others more vulnerable than me. I don't think the author of the
American Thinker article really considers that. This article from
Outside Online is a thoughtful response.
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April 14, 2020
As for legit data, I'll go back to what I said weeks ago: the only thing
that matters is deaths. Yes, I know there's some controversy over
dying with versus dying of, but it's still the closest thing to
impartial that we have. In Georgia it looks like the old and infirm are
hit hard and sadly we're finding out that a lot, and I mean an awful
lot, of nursing homes have this stuff spreading in them. Just around
here we have cases in Greensboro and Union Point at three different
facilities. Clarke County's deaths are largely old people in nursing
homes.
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April 17, 2020
I think I basically agree with what's outlined in this
short article, but I'm leery of the numbers since they're mostly relying
on China data. Regardless, the truth is that the virus is not going to
disappear anytime soon, so how do we live with it in the two or three
years it'll take to develop a vaccine? We'll have to abandon the
current lockdown, either officially or in large incidents of civil
disobedience. I'd rather do it officially to avoid hurting vulnerable
populations.
Link is below.
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April 18, 2020
Exactly what I see in the data and exactly what I saw
them do today - drop it from 3.6k deaths in Georgia to 1.7k deaths.
Story linked below, but the parts that match what I've been saying: "...many locations are now predicted to have longer peaks and are taking longer to move down the epidemic curve to zero death..."
This
is what I have been saying the data for Georgia shows. What they say
is a longer peak is what I see as a plateau, same thing. And I said
that the downward curve would be different from the upward curve. Now
they're saying it too, but I said it first.
The
fact that they've changed it so much means their model is pretty poor
as a source for policy decisions, and that I'm right when I say look at
the deaths and only the deaths. Predictions have been really shit,
while me looking at the data day to day has presented a clearer
picture. It's scary how many smart people are only now coming around to
what I've been seeing for a while. Maybe they're not so smart.
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April 20, 2020
From a paper I can barely understand that's highly
critical of all these models and estimates there's this. I've
underlined the parts that bolster my argument that what I'm looking at
with my little bit of real world practical data analysis from an
industrial setting is probably a good way to deal with all this noisy
and incomplete data. I've left out major chunks of mostly math to focus
on the implications.
“...Estimating R from noisy real-world data when
you don’t know the underlying model is fundamentally difficult...often be badly (and
confidently) wrong about that because it fails to account for how the
confirmed count data it’s based on is noisy enough to be mostly
garbage. (Many serious modelers have given up on case counts and just
model death counts.)
...Digging into the data and the
math, you can see that a few days of falling case counts will make the
system confident of a very low R, and a few days of rising counts will
make it confident of a very high one, but we know from other sources
that both can and do happen due to changes in test and test processing
availability. (There are additional serious methodological problems with
rt.live, but trying to nowcast R from observed case counts is already
garbage-in so will be garbage-out.)
And since that's what
I've been doing, I've probably got as good a handle on the trends as
anybody else, and better than some who don't know what they don't know.
I'm just concentrating on the death counts and not trying to estimate
anything at all about the underlying mechanics (since I don't know how),
and looking at the shape of the data, techniques I've used in
industrial settings to make decisions in the absence of complete data.
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That was an excellent summary. Points two and three I
especially agree with wholeheartedly: what happens in the second wave?
And what are we going to do about it?
The
virus is here. It's not going away. The ball is in our court; what's
our next move? I hope we eventually stumble into doing what we probably
should have done from the start: go all in on protecting our vulnerable
folks better than we have so far, while everybody else takes reasonable
precautions and gets on with their lives.
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April 23, 2020
Not at all surprised by this, other than the fact that it
was nearly universal. This says our quarantine and stay home measures
should be a lot more tightly focused on people who are obese, diabetic,
elderly or otherwise prone to sickness. The rest of us should stay away
from those people we can hurt by infecting them, but if we're otherwise
healthy, we can probably survive the virus.
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