Corona Simulator

*Hubei

You don't need to rely on the data by the Chinese government, for several reasons:

1) Lots of epidemiological papers about the Wuhan epidemic use data from phone carriers (not the government) to track the spread and make predictions, and they were generally pretty good with their forecasts. The numbers reported by the government are consistent with the forecasts from scientists.

2) The numbers reported by China are also consistent with the spread observed _outside_ of China. You can't lie about the numbers because every other country would detect an anomalous number of imported cases. (Case point - In Canada, we're importing way more cases from the US than you'd expect if there were actually only 1200 cases in the US. This is rather because the US is lagging so far behind in testing, rather than outright deception.)

The absolute numbers don't even matter that much - what matters is the trend and the number of new cases going to zero. Look at epidemiology paper - they always assume only like 10% of infected cases are tested and confirmed. The epidemic really is coming to a close in China, still gaining momentum in Europe, and coming in a big way soon to North America.

It's uncanny, because the various testing regimes implemented in the places where there have been outbreaks ought to be providing wildly inconsistent data, but the data from around the world is all showing a strikingly similar pattern. Once there's a community outbreak, the starting gun is off and it plays out like clockwork. The best you can hope to do is gum up that clockwork with draconian quarantine measures, because the starting gun is off all over the continental United States. Wash hands across America.

It's not about stopping the pandemic altogether - it's about reducing the number of people in critical condition at a given time. Italy it's already at peak capacity in it's ICUs, and only thorough social distancing it's possible to reduce the number of people at risk getting infected and clogging an health system that is already short on ventilators and hospital beds.

Economically it doesn't make much difference. You can either isolate people now or later. The period of isolation will be roughly the same because you have to wait for the virus to exhaust its pool of hosts (in a household). Definitely politically it makes a big difference.

This article, to start, for multiple paragraphs:

As Lawrence O. Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University, put it: “The truth is those kinds of lockdowns are very rare and never effective.”

What if it gives the survivors the strength to resist or fight back something else? If we think about it, human (and not human) very ancient history must be full of these interactions, and our evolution is a consequence also of this kind of thing. Only recently we know how to "protect" ourselves. But if we are in the what-if domain... what if letting it go make us a biologically better being? What if it by chance will give us the protection against some kind of tumor? What if its overall effect, not counting the deaths, is positive and not negative like making us infertile? What if.... We can't know. But we'll see one side of the coin when we'll have defeated this threat. (Which is not an existential threat, anyway, i.e. it won't make us go extinct)

The major error with the model used in the article is that, in real life, all the points will eventually start to move again.

To be fair, the # of infected never died off completely (the simulation didn't run long enough)

"Another kind of snake", you mean!

Exactly. The most, at best, could be 1,000, but will that be enough? This project was likely built on a tight deadline and getting it out quickly onto multiple devices was the goal.

If someone has a better approach, I’d love to hear it.

Obviously there's not a 1:1 relationship. And I never made such claim. I am saying that the people who read detailed journalism tend to have a higher reading level, e.g. they work in a job where reading and analysis is a daily part of their work, this would be considered white collar.

Please don't put words in my mouth when I never said there was a 1:1 relationship.

Because it isn't nearly worth $90 to me, I barely ever read any of their articles.

It's also not something I can look at before deciding whether I want to pay for it, not like a product in a shop or something I can order and return (unused) for 14 days. If paying 50 cents for this article was possible, I would have no idea what I'm getting (beyond the title "Corona Simulator") or whether it's worth it, though a one-time 50 cents charge would definitely be more considerable than a recurring and more expensive subscription.

What was interesting on the cruise ships is how few got it. Of the 3,681 tested, only 696 had it - after a month of close quarters. That's under 20%.

Doesn't that suggest it doesn't spread particularly easily?

All in all, 1% of those that caught it died, and cruise ships skew towards older people.