Coronavirus

Believe it or not some of us do consider the complexities of issues before making a decision. Yes, we are probably heading into a depression from this and lots of people are going to become poor(er) from this, unemployment, medical bills, and so on. That ship has sailed, imo, because the majority will lockdown regardless of what you and I do. So the only moral choice I see left is to either help now or make things worse now.

Ohio locks down as of midnight tomorrow.

I wonder how many times a day people advise Trump to not fire Dr. Fauci?

Rand Paul has tested positive for coronavirus. He is asymptomatic for now, but previous damage to one of his lungs makes it unusually risky for him. I don't have anything nice to say about Rand Paul and his sociopathic worldview, but maybe this will be a learning experience for him.

I predict that the number of people in the U.S. with coronavirus will blow past Italy by Tuesday and even surpass China by the end of this week. Italy's aggressive lockdown finally stopped the spread of the virus there, and most victims in China have already either recovered or died. But our weak president and our ignorant red state governors have been too slow to react, and it's going to get bad soon.

I have friends that work at the CDC. Including one person who is quite literally on the frontlines of policy making and guidance. The situation is as bad as it is ONE HUNDRED PERCENT because of Donald Trump and his Republican sycophants. This person has told me in no uncertain terms that the Trump administration has in some way stymied, hamstrung, or crippled every single effort to form a unified and proactive response. Funding cuts, firings, lies, and plain ignorance instead of federal leadership and coordination This is why there is so much chaos and disorganization. Yet this fucking shitrag continues to lie and do everything he can to shift the blame. It is HIM. Donald Trump should be charged with manslaughter for every single American death. I’m not exaggerating.

And a large part of this is that we are seeing the death of American capitalism, is which Trump is the logical endpoint for the social and moral cancer that capitalism has become. Maybe this apocalypse- this is World War III- is pointing to a BETTER time ahead. If we pay attention and LEARN from it all. I’m at the point now where I don’t want things to go back to the way they were were. Maybe there is a better future now than there was last month...but we have to fight to get to it.

^I disagree because I think the US would not have performed any better than the northern european countries even with actual leadership. But I also agree because it wouldn't have been this bad and we would have been more prepared and also that our private healthcare system is uniquely positioned to do as little good as possible on this kind of pandemic.

I definitely think that east asia's previous experience with SARS has citizens much more vigilant and conscientious about these issues. I hear people say it's some cultural thing and I think that's kind of BS. It's because they've had exactly these sorts of scares before so they ain't going out to the fucking beach and getting drunk with everyone when they hear there's a scary disease around.

If/when we get through this I think people are going to start taking this shit more seriously too.

MB is correct in that Trump's extraordinary unsuitability for the position he now holds has massively contributed to these conditions. His firing of the pandemic response team at CDC two years ago; his constantly lauding false "cures" on Twitter; his insistence that there was no problem and refusal to listen to his own HHS secretary (Azar) two months ago because of his typical desire to ignore bad news; and on and on. He's definitely made this worse.

However, it's true that the US health system is also completely unsuited for this and some aspects of US culture feed into that. Individualism, "pull yourself up by your own bootstraps", and the "I'll do what I want because there's no law that says I can't" perspective. (This has also been a problem in Italy, which they are now paying dearly for. The initial lockdown order in Lombardy saw people immediately fleeing to their homes in the south so they could move around as they liked and, consequently, spread the virus. There's an outrageous video of Italian mayors literally yelling at their citizens to stay inside or threatening to come break up their parties with police (and flamethrowers!))

East Asia did have a much more difficult time with SARS and H1N1, so they were more prepared to deal with this. However, there's also a sense of social responsibility in many of those cultures that is more prominent than it is in the US or places like Australia. If the government says "Don't leave home", it's assumed that there's a good reason for it, rather than suspicion that people are overreacting.

And it's that suspicion which removes some of the burden from Trump's shoulders, since he remains simply the most obvious symptom of the rot at the core of American society. Since Reagan uttered the famous line: "The scariest nine words in the English language are: 'I'm from the government and I'm here to help.'", a segment of the body politic has continued to push the idea that government- all government -is bad for society. That segment has grown to the point where people simply not suited to govern (like Trump) are being regularly elected and a propaganda machine has been reinforcing this warped image of government in people's minds for 25 years (Fox News.) No one will believe governmental institutions like the CDC after a quarter century of being told that everything that comes from government is wrong.

But that's also part of a larger picture, wherein the best way to take the power of government- of democracy -from people is to make them oppose it. If you discourage people from voting or convince them their votes don't count, they'll stop voting. That's precisely what the ownership class wants: a docile, servile public that hates the instruments of power that the law says should be theirs to use to protect themselves. The more they elect people that also hate those instruments, the more they think that those instruments are useless or corrupt. And the vicious circle continues.

I said when Trump was elected, here and elsewhere, that it may turn out to be the best thing in the long term because he will make people wake up and pay attention to what has happened to their government; to their nation. And he has done that, to some degree. The flip side of it is that he's also revealed the deep-rooted racism and ignorance in this country that was always there, but simply wasn't always expressed. Now its expression is viewed by 40% of the public as True America, spurred on by the chief executive. So, instead of simply the long-awaited revolt, we're probably looking at civil war of one kind or another; all of which could've been avoided if only a few at the top weren't so greedy. But that's what people were thinking back in 1789, too, so maybe it was inevitable. Jefferson thought so.

I have run some numbers on Italy vs US vs California, and these are the curves I see in a log plot:


You can see Italy started to act around Day 8 (Day 1 is the first day with over 100 cases for each locale) and bend their curve slightly flatter. Flatter is better on this kind of plot, so California's relatively quick reaction to the cruise ship folks coming back causing some quick closures and piquing interest and measures by a lot of folks have managed to keep their curve on a lower trajectory. But the US seems to be getting worse. It may be a function of more testing finally happening, but this is a not a great look. It's exponential growth with R² of .9987, which means it's about as exponential as a thing can get.

Some joker out there is throwing around Farr's Law and predicting a bell curve, but I don't see it, and to claim it from these numbers is misleading, and likely charlatanism.

I'd mentioned R0 back on the first post, and heard this little factoid about it. R0 is the reproduction number, the number of people an infected person will likely infect. Consider influenza, which has an R0 around 1.4. So, on average, if I get sick, I will get 1.4 other people sick. They will go on to get 1.4 others sick in the next round, and so on. Ten generations from me, there are 14 sick people that can trace their infection back to me. R0 is not known for SARS-CoV-2, but it might be as big as 3. This doesn't sound like a lot more than 1.4, but if I get three people sick, and they each infect three people, in ten generations 59,000 people can trace their infection back to me. You need to NOT SPREAD THIS DISEASE. It's very important. Maybe it is 3; but if you get it, do your part, and make it 0. Isolate, wear a mask, quarantine your house, ask all your contacts to isolate for at least ten days since they last interacted with your sick ass.

I'm not going to wish this disease on anyone. I hope we come out of this with a lot more appreciation for the important work that laborers do in our grocery stores, sanitation fields, and everywhere; and we have perhaps a lot less appreciation for rentiers and CEOs that don't do fuck all and still earn 300x as much as the people that matter.

Jeb - A couple of things:

An R0 of 1.4 should be somewhere around 29 people after 10 generations (1.4^10) ; not trying to take away from your point, just clarifying how it is calculated.. In reality, it will be a bit lower given the way our social networks form, but still a daunting and scary number.

What is the estimated exponent value for the exponential growth?

Did you compute the R^2 of the log-plot? In all likelihood, that is an overestimate because the exponential distribution is not going to meet the Gaussian error assumption used in the linear regression on the log-plot (if you want a distraction from the world for a bit, check out this paper -- gets into the weeds on this: arxiv.org/pdf/0706.1062.pdf ).

I don't know that looking at the US as a whole is good. Given the geographic differences and the fact that individual states can have different approaches, it might be best to break it out into states by state.

I was thinking a better metric might be modeling the cumulative increase in deaths versus the increase in cases. Increasing in testing is likely going to cause the curve to look steeper than the process actually is -- I don't know if there is good data on rates of testing in different countries to attempt to align the curves in that fashion? New York Times has a graph here of deaths:

www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/21/u...aths-by-country.html

This reinforces your point that CA/WA kind of have things under control. NY/FL/GA might be entering a nightmare scenario. People really need to take this seriously. We know so many people that are still going on play dates to keep their kids entertained while school is out -- this is just insane.

As for Farr's law, doesn't that have to kick in sometime? Eventually, the exponential curve has to turn into a logistic curve due to either: (a) successful strategies for mitigating the spread, (b) enough people get herd immunity that the R0 is decreased due to many potential vectors getting cutoff, or (c) everyone just gets infected. So eventually we will get a decreasing rate of new infections, which will probably be close to a normal curve. But, I don't think anyone has a great estimate of when the peak of the curve will occur.

As things progress it's getting harder to not be really anxious about all of this. I work for a global non-profit (a church, to be specific) and I have this sense that we have really taken a gut-shot from this. So much of our funding comes from local churches in the US, and the inability of those churches to meet is going to cripple the whole gig. I don't know what that means for me, but I'm trying to not overreact. A lot of institutions around here are specifically designed to cater to missions organizations, and I don't know how they weather this one unscathed.

Then there are all these issues relating to how easily we can travel between countries. We're supposed to be heading back to the US in May, but now I'm not at all sure if we can, and I'm not sure what we can do if we actually DO head back, or if we'll be able to come back at all. It's very possible that I'm spiralling a bit here, but living as an ex-pat through all of this has been pretty nerve-racking.

Thankfully, the previously mentioned Asian tendency to deal better with these kinds of threats has been exhibited here in Manila. We're able to get groceries still for the time being, because people here don't have the money or the space to hoard stuff. I'm not at all sure how the Philippines is doing with this right now, it looks like case numbers have ramped way up over the last day or two. We have friends in other countries who have already been sent back to the US, and I keep waiting for an e-mail telling me that we're headed back too.

In the meantime I'm trying to keep busy. I made bread today and it turned out really well. And in a few hours I'm going to start reading the Hobbit on Facebook Live. Better than sitting around fretting anyway.

Jackwraith wrote: This is only if you assume that the only way to build out of this tragedy is to do things exactly the way they were done before. This is potentially a transformative moment, where people realize that the proper way to run a government (and a country) is not to cater to the interests of a wealthy few (by, say, paying a ridiculous amount for 90 F-35 fighter jets, 1/3 of which the Pentagon doesn't even want, which Congress decided was a high priority this week) but instead to make sure that the bulk of the population has an opportunity to move forward without the fear of losing their health insurance by losing a job, of being homeless from losing that job, or being bankrupted even with a job by a medical emergency. If the approach to the economy, post-crisis, has to be radically different and depend on a fair amount of government spending (paid for by the wealthiest, who can easily afford to), then so be it. It will simply bring the US up to the level at which many other industrialized democracies currently function.

I think we end up with Biden. Senate remains largely the same. Ergo I assume we don't recover properly.

Myself, I am going with the guidance, teleworking and only going out for runs. I am a government employee at just the right time to be a government employee. Silver lining is I imagine my agency is going to offer early buyouts at some point. Then I could retire and start homesteading, I'd definitely be able to afford it in W.VA. It's just that in the US you need health insurance. I think that is the US's greatest failure and apparent in spades at this moment.

Space Ghost wrote: Jeb - A couple of things:

An R0 of 1.4 should be somewhere around 29 people after 10 generations (1.4^10) ; not trying to take away from your point, just clarifying how it is calculated.. In reality, it will be a bit lower given the way our social networks form, but still a daunting and scary number.

What is the estimated exponent value for the exponential growth?

Did you compute the R^2 of the log-plot? In all likelihood, that is an overestimate because the exponential distribution is not going to meet the Gaussian error assumption used in the linear regression on the log-plot (if you want a distraction from the world for a bit, check out this paper -- gets into the weeds on this: arxiv.org/pdf/0706.1062.pdf ).

I baited the actual statistician into the topic! Achievement unlocked! I also probably could have said something wrong about pinball, which was my other strat.

I used the R0 values/math from some video making the rounds. The source seems a little tabloid, but math is math, and it's a good demo of exponential growth in disease spread based on R0.

Here's the output from the regression:
Your caveats about linear errors on a log axis certainly apply. I tried using an (obviously wrong) linear regression, and the R² is less than 0.7. It's a well-described exponential, and there are a lot of people left.

I don't know that looking at the US as a whole is good. Given the geographic differences and the fact that individual states can have different approaches, it might be best to break it out into states by state.

I was thinking a better metric might be modeling the cumulative increase in deaths versus the increase in cases. Increasing in testing is likely going to cause the curve to look steeper than the process actually is -- I don't know if there is good data on rates of testing in different countries to attempt to align the curves in that fashion? New York Times has a graph here of deaths:

www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/21/u...aths-by-country.html

This reinforces your point that CA/WA kind of have things under control. NY/FL/GA might be entering a nightmare scenario. People really need to take this seriously. We know so many people that are still going on play dates to keep their kids entertained while school is out—this is just insane.

As for Farr's law, doesn't that have to kick in sometime? Eventually, the exponential curve has to turn into a logistic curve due to either: (a) successful strategies for mitigating the spread, (b) enough people get herd immunity that the R0 is decreased due to many potential vectors getting cutoff, or (c) everyone just gets infected. So eventually we will get a decreasing rate of new infections, which will probably be close to a normal curve. But, I don't think anyone has a great estimate of when the peak of the curve will occur.

I am mostly trying to counter a narrative I have seen in my feed from some joker already invoking Farr's Law† and saying how it's going to turn the corner soon. It's not, we are upswinging in a pretty huge way. The President is tweeting about everyone going back to work in 15 days and refusing to invoke his powers to increase production and control prices of necessary goods, and these bad stats feed that narrative. I want to counter it with a scared straight narrative of people keeping to themselves as we sort this shit out. If I am wrong, then people will have self-isolated and social distanced for a little too long. If the other narrative is wrong, there will be 10,000s of extra deaths as we shoot past healthcare capacity in pulses over the next few months.



I am reminded of Y2K. I see folks to this day crack jokes about how crazy it all was in the build-up and then "nothing happened." Yeah, nothing happened because I and million other nerds busted our asses and fixed tons of broken shit! Tons! And that was all just to make sure your bank accounts existed and traffic lights worked. Now the nerds are back and telling you to stay in your fucking house for a while to keep millions from dying. When folks survive we're going to have to hear about how "nothing really happened" and it will make me crazy.

†His post was pulled from Medium and has since been published elsewhere on right-wing media sites. I include the broken link here: www.zero(removeme)hedge.com/health/covid-19-evidence-over-hysteria This guy never read this paper I would guess: jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/article-abstract/381044

Yeah, Ginn is a crypto guy (aka professional grifter) whose thesis was that "I'm not a epidemiologist but I know how to make things go viral on the Internet and it's pretty much the same thing." This is a good thread by an actual expert explaining why that's not the soundest foundation and exposing a ton of flaws within Ginn's work:
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Good writeup on DKE-19 .

And from what I'm reading, in the epidemiology world, mentioning Farr's Law doesn't give you instant cred; in fact it does the opposite. Farr's Law says that the HIV/AIDS crisis should have blown over in the mid-90's.

ETA: Jackwraith beat me to it, sort of.

So we're clear—I am not an epidemiologist either, and I can't even make shit go viral on the web. But I am a scientist, and I have a quality role, and the Ginn write-up is of poor quality and I can smell it. I am smarter than the average bear, and probably the average human; from a risk-based perspective, erring on the side of caution seems like the way to go for some time.