[rrsteer]

Originally Posted by vivek95

[b] Not all first world countries mismanaged this crisis. Some of them were way ahead of the curve right from the beginning and it's none other than Germany on the forefront.

Its true not all first world countries mis-managed, but all of them were late in their responses to the pandemic.

The best response actually came from a middle eastern country - Lebanon. I think Taiwan too was very quick to act. In the case of epidemic, whoever acts earliest (displays a paranoia to act) realizes the best results.


I would highly recommend a read through the quoted article:

Taleb: The only man who has a clue
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2020...as-a-clue.html

By the way, this guy -Taleb, has been telling everyone who would care to listen - since 26th Jan- to seal their borders and stop the pandemic or you would have to pay a higher price later, which the whole world is doing now!

Incidentally, this guy has a relationship with the Government of India, he gets a keen ear from some of our union ministers.

I’ve been reading up on this for a while, adding -much- more stuff as I went along (this will be a long essay), and at some point realized that the coronavirus is an issue you can’t leave to epidemiologists and virologists, because there are far too many unknowns for them to create a working model, and without such a model they are lost. These fine people are not good at 10-dimensional chess, even if they like you to think otherwise.

These people are useful for the knowledge they possess of past epidemics, not for predicting what will happen in the next one, certainly not if it’s caused by a virus which they -and we- simply don’t know enough about to build a reliable model. In that case, you need to step back and apply more basic principles. This leads us into a territory that is not familiar to epidemiologists and virologists. Since a virus, and a pandemic, like the one we’re in the middle of, is linked to so many different facets and factors, and so many uncertainties, it takes us into the territory of risk management, assessment, engineering, and from there eventually pretty seamlessly into complex systems.

At present, they are asked to do things beyond their knowledge. And, typical human trait, they don’t tend to acknowledge that. Well, there’s a second reason: some actually think they do understand. The outcome is the same: we- and they- are led astray, away from science and into “scientism” (more on that in a moment).

Which would be fine if this concerned just a hobby, or even if it was only an academic paper left to discuss in classrooms and web forums. But we are talking about 10s of 1000s of deaths, 100s of 1000s of gravely ill people, and in the wake of that an economy as much in need of assisted breathing as the human patients involved.

Lucky for us, we have people who DO understand these things. Unlucky for us, our “leadership” doesn’t listen to them. They think that an epidemiologist or two, three, should be enough. But neither the “leaders” nor the epidemiologists understand the limits every single scientific field has. They don’t understand what happens when scientists venture out of their chosen field. And most of all, they don’t understand what complex systems are.

Please note that the above also means that any and all virus modeling going forward should be taken with an ocean full of salt. We get new examples every day of “qualities” of the virus that are not in any models. Where the virus originated, asymptomatic patients, re-infection, huge discrepancies in ‘modeled’ numbers predicted vs factual ones, Asians vs whites, blacks vs whites, men vs women, smokers vs non-smokers, chloroquine (non-)effectiveness, contagiousness, the list goes on for miles.
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I’ll refer to “Taleb” here, nice and short, but that often means his co-operators too. Key terminology you’ll find, and need, is “asymmetry”, “precautionary principle” (“first do no harm”, which is close to the Hippocratic Oath’s “to abstain from doing harm”), and perhaps also “convexity” (a term from the finance world that depicts a relation between interest rates and bond duration).
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These are ground rules for approaching a pandemic such as this one, but they are also ground rules for -any- other problems with too many unknown variables.

This is crucial because it denotes that if you have a disease that is both contagious and deadly, you don’t -have to- first wait and (build a model to) see how deadly and contagious it is, as an epidemiologist is wont to do, you can act right off the bat. Of course the scientists at the WHO and various government know this basic stuff, but they still haven’t acted accordingly. On January 26 and after, the ground rules were ignored.
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There are things that you cannot afford to take risks with. Mankind, the animal kingdom, the planet, are some of these things. You can’t argue that a lockdown might cost jobs if and when a non-lockdown will cost lives; you can’t argue for measures that kill people.

The only thing we can really do is to apply those measures that best mitigate job losses, not the ones that keep jobs but mitigate loss of life. It’s not even an actual choice; it’s a false dichotomy, because the risk of consciously allowing people to continue to infect others who may then die, which you could have prevented from happening, is so much greater than the loss of a job. The risk is asymmetric. A job is not a life.

It’s nuts to argue that we should allow someone to die because his/her neighbor might lose their job or because his/her neighbor beats his wife. In case someone loses their job, a government can issue a bailout or even a UBI. That they don’t do that and/or not properly, is another matter. But not one that justifies murder.

[V.Narayan]

Originally Posted by civic-sense

Top ten states. It looks like the curve is beginning to flatten in many states. But Maharashtra and Gujarat continues there steep upward climb. Easing of lockdown restrictions could see a jump in numbers in the coming weeks. Still scary.

Attachment 1995737

Thank you for both the charts.

All, IMHO the only reason populous states such as West Bengal, Karnataka, Bihar, UP are not as high up as MH or DL is because they are testing so little. If you don't test, you don't know. If you don't know you don't need to report it and it shows up as a nice report card for the CM. MH, DL, GJ, RJ, KL deserve credit for testing in greater numbers than the rest.

[venkyhere]

Originally Posted by V.Narayan

All, IMHO the only reason populous states such as West Bengal, Karnataka, Bihar, UP are not as high up as MH or DL is because they are testing so little.

As I mentioned in some previous post, the biggest 'elephant in the room' is WB.

These are the top cities with large numbers :

Delhi - 2003
Mumbai - 2268
Pune - 591
Thane - 341
Ahmedabad - 1192
Surat - 242
Vadodara - 180
Jaipur - 543
Jodhpur - 230
Chennai - 290
Coimbatore - 133
Tiruppur - 108
Indore - 841
Bhopal - 197
Agra - 242
Lucknow - 162
Hyderabad - 486
Kurnool - 158
Guntur - 128
Kasargod - 169
Bengaluru - 100
Mysore - 84

Kolkata - 11 (how is this possible ? I simply cannot digest this)

[Chetan_Rao]

Originally Posted by rrsteer

...In the case of epidemic, whoever acts earliest (displays a paranoia to act) realizes the best results...

Makes logical sense, take administrative measures first (as they can be mobilized quickest), buying epidemiologists time to study, healthcare services to assess/prepare, and the economy to shift to prioritise essential goods and sevices.

The CRITICAL bit, is to NOT focus on one and forego others, because ultimately it only works in tandem.

[DCEite]

Professor Jay Bhattacharya's latest interview, where he concludes that the actual infection rate of COVID-19 is much higher than initially thought, and on the brighter side, the actually Mortality rate is somewhere near normal Flu!


He conducted study in Santa Clara County, California.

Excerpts from https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/17/h...udy/index.html

Far more people may have been infected with Covid-19 than have been confirmed by health officials in Santa Clara County, California, according to a study released Friday in preprint.

The study used an antibody blood test to estimate how many people had been infected with Covid-19 in the past. Other tests, like those performed with nasal swabs or saliva, test for the virus' genetic material, which does not persist long after recovery, as antibodies do.
"We found that there are many, many unidentified cases of people having Covid infection that were never identified with it with a virus test," said Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University and one of the paper's authors. "It's consistent with findings from around the world that this disease, this epidemic is further along than we thought."
The study estimated that 2.49% to 4.16% of people in Santa Clara Country had been infected with Covid-19 by April 1. This represents between 48,000 and 81,000 people, which is 50 to 85 times what county officials recorded by that date: 956 confirmed cases.
The research may also give a more realistic sense of how deadly the virus really is.

"If I get the infection, how likely is it I'm going to die? That number depends on knowing how many people have had the infection -- not just actively have it now, but have had it and recovered from it," Bhattacharya said.
If 50 times more people have had the infection, the death rate could drop by that same factor, putting it "somewhere between 'little worse than the flu' to 'twice as bad as the flu' in terms of case fatality rate," Bhattacharya said.

Link to interview on Youtube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7v2F3usNVA

[srishiva]

Originally Posted by V.Narayan

Thank you for both the charts.

All, IMHO the only reason populous states such as West Bengal, Karnataka, Bihar, UP are not as high up as MH or DL is because they are testing so little. If you don't test, you don't know. If you don't know you don't need to report it and it shows up as a nice report card for the CM. MH, DL, GJ, RJ, KL deserve credit for testing in greater numbers than the rest.

Agree to some extent. The testing methodology is same and there is no random testing anywhere. KL and KA testing numbers were almost same until couple of days ago.
We need data on tests per million or thousands to compare ideally.

Hope we take the antibody tests cautiously. Everywhere its been reported as not reliable. It will just make Chinese companies prosperous since most are imported from there.

Heard that normal flu cases have also come down with the steps taken for lockdown and social distancing around the world.

[RaviK]

Originally Posted by Thad E Ginathom

Outside hospital: yes, I'd much rather be in my Chennai suburb than in London. One economic factor is that I'm rich enough to keep a maid, and she is shopping for us. My wife has been out on the street a couple of times: I have not, at all, in several weeks (I've lost count). A London friend asked if we would like to stay with her. At that point the corvid numbers for Tamil Nadu were insignificant compared to her London borough alone.
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I cannot speak of or for other countries, but I would say that UK/London is not a desirable place to be in this pandemic. IF I do end up in hospital with this thing, and IF I was to come out again on my feet, we could then revisit the question!

You're not alone to feel that way. I spent 4 years in UK & the most frustrating part of it was dealing with health system. The need to convince the receptionist, that you need immediate (or at least same/next day) attention makes the Indian healthcare system look better for non life threatening ailments. The treatments for which you can just walk into a hospital and get treated in hour or two(in India), have to be planned over days. Hence in certain aspects, our healthcare system does fare better

[SoumenD]

Originally Posted by V.Narayan

All, IMHO the only reason populous states such as West Bengal, Karnataka, Bihar, UP are not as high up as MH or DL is because they are testing so little. If you don't test, you don't know. If you don't know you don't need to report it and it shows up as a nice report card for the CM. MH, DL, GJ, RJ, KL deserve credit for testing in greater numbers than the rest.

Did you mean more tests per million population? That I agree the number of tests are lesser in the said states.

However if I look at absolute numbers KA seems to have done 2k more tests than KL and 3K less than DL till April 19th.







Uttar Pradesh too seems to have done more tests than them.



Source

[Thad E Ginathom]

Originally Posted by carboy

Did you create the graph? If yes, can you do a logarithmic scale for y-axis? That will show the rate of growth.

Far from being a statistician, I am even lousy at basic sums and was thrown out of the maths class at school. But...

I thought that the "purpose" of a logarithmic scale, in instances such as this, was to make things look less bad. By powers of ten.

Originally Posted by RaviK

You're not alone to feel that way. I spent 4 years in UK & the most frustrating part of it was dealing with health system. The need to convince the receptionist, that you need immediate (or at least same/next day) attention makes the Indian healthcare system look better for non life threatening ailments. The treatments for which you can just walk into a hospital and get treated in hour or two(in India), have to be planned over days. Hence in certain aspects, our healthcare system does fare better

Absolutely. We in India can not only walk into a general physician's clinic, but also into that of a specialist or surgeon and avail of advanced diagnostics easily and quickly. This can be done in UK only with expensive health insurance or a big bank balance.

The UK NHS wins on emergency/acute care, without any need of bank balance. Yes, I'd certainly rather be scraped off the road and into an ambulance in London than in Chennai.

In the time of Corvid... I just don't know. It would certainly cost me the new car I wasn't planning on buying even if I did survive.

Which brings me to the question that crosses my mind every time I read the latest this-medicine-might-help or vaccine-optimism story: will it be available to us? And will we be able to afford it?

Does vaccination have to be made available on a mass basis (sheesh, the anti-vaxxers ) to be of use at all? Or can it protect the privileged few? How does that work?

[anandmv]

The travelogue of our times



https://www.hindustantimes.com/india...xO63cyonM.html

[carboy]

Originally Posted by Thad E Ginathom

I thought that the "purpose" of a logarithmic scale, in instances such as this, was to make things look less bad. By powers of ten.

Logarithmic scale is used for 2 reasons
1) The extent of the data is too much to fit in linear scale. Not relevant in this case.

2) Linear scale is better to show absolute numbers while logarithmic gives a picture showing rate of growth which is what I was looking for. Rate of growth looks similar in different states except Kerala.

[V.Narayan]

Originally Posted by SoumenD

Did you mean more tests per million population? That I agree the number of tests are lesser in the said states.

However if I look at absolute numbers KA seems to have done 2k more tests than KL and 3K less than DL till April 19th.

Yes I meant it as XXX tests per million of population. For example UP's 28k tests on a population of 20 crores looks criminally poor compared to Delhi State's 24k tests on a population base 22 times smaller. Of course West Bengal leads!!!

[joslicx]

Originally Posted by Thad E Ginathom

Which brings me to the question that crosses my mind every time I read the latest this-medicine-might-help or vaccine-optimism story: will it be available to us? And will we be able to afford it?

Does vaccination have to be made available on a mass basis (sheesh, the anti-vaxxers ) to be of use at all? Or can it protect the privileged few? How does that work?

Yup, it's the right question to have. Suppose the vaccine was invented tomorrow. How soon will the pharma company be able to manufacture 7billion+ doses of it. How soon will it be available to people even in remotest regions (just imagine the logistics involved, and it's even more complex because of the corona virus all around us) then how many healthcare workers would be needed to administer the vaccine. Who will get it first? Presumably the vaccination can't happen for all in one day. It can take months actually. Will there be any riots for it?
It's also a nightmare scenario!

[JithinR]

Originally Posted by Thad E Ginathom

...(sheesh, the anti-vaxxers ) ...

About some of those anti-vaxxers (I am not at all sympathetic towards them..we can consider it as Darwins theory of evolution in effect if they loose their life since they don't trust vaccines but they would be endangering the rest of us and their own kids):

https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/20/healt...ntl/index.html

This would hopefully be one of those positive effects of this pandemic.

[Latheesh]

Originally Posted by SoumenD

Did you mean more tests per million population? That I agree the number of tests are lesser in the said states.

However if I look at absolute numbers KA seems to have done 2k more tests than KL and 3K less than DL till April 19th.

Not just tests per million population. Have a look at absolute numbers a week ago. All these states you listed - KA, DL, and UP were behind MH, RJ and KL. Sudden spike in total test numbers happened during last 1 week.