Not a good sign if people are making actual decisions based on this.
I feel like I’m taking crazy pills with the way people are talking about this whole thing still being out of control, when data shows the situation is even better than the most optimistic models were predicting. And by that I mean, pretend I was on HN 3 weeks ago predicting 25K deaths in the USA by today. I’d have been downvoted into oblivion and told I was delusional. But here we are.
Clearly NYC was hit far harder than the rest of the country, but it seems like every state and municipality is simply basing their models on NYC case numbers scaled by population. I don’t get it.
A week ago, I remember reading how the Bay Area was bracing for a bracing for a surge and it was the calm before the storm. The Santa Clara county covid-19 dashboard told a different story: day-over-day, new cases were roughly the same for the past two weeks. 2+ weeks into the lockdown, there was obviously no surge coming.
https://i.imgur.com/LrFZj3S.png
Looking at that chart on the April 7th, nothing pointed to a surge.
It's mid-April now. Where is the Death Wave? Either this virus is much less infectuous than it was touted, or much less deadly. Or both.
Sweden never locked down. Denmark is opening up after a lockdown. Italy that was touted as the prime example of hell on earth, had ~21,000 people died by official count. Even if it was undercounted by 50%, that's roughly 40,000 people, mostly elders on their last breath, out of country of 60 mln. And that's the worst case so far, in the world of 7 billion people.
Disregard all that, we're still being told daily that it's "war zone", the zombie apocalypse is just around the corner, etc. Only Big Brother like surveillance is going to save us. The lockdown is not an extraordinary measure anymore, it was an absolutely necessary first step, and now we have to take it further. Much further.
I wonder what it felt like for people in 1932 Germany.
1,200 people dead of 10.3 mln is 0.012% of the populace. Not good but not scary either, for the Worst Pandemic Of Our Lifetime.
I would agree that modeling after NYC seems like a bad idea given the lack of density and public transportation. On the other hand, Michigan looked pretty exponential, and as the lagging cases came in from other states, they also began to look fairly exponential as well. Despite cases staying elevated for now, the exponential growth has died down.
The US missed the worst of hospitals being overrun and it running away in multiple cities.
I want to add ", so far" to the end of that sentence. I do not hold hope that this will be true as we fight among ourselves to reopen various portions of the country/economy.
But things won’t be the same after reopening as they were before. People will be wearing masks (I see a lot of that already), keeping distance, etc. Couple that with common sense restrictions like “keep the elderly and sick at home”, “no big public events”, “no sporting events”, and “lots of restaurants have gone out of business”, it’s clear the opportunity for infection spread will be lower.
This shows laudable transparency, in my view.
(Also the model was directionally correct, it’s not like it was entirely the wrong shape.)
[1] https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america/cali...
If you want to see examples, check out their predictions on Italy. Their figures have been underestimating by over 50%, and the gaps will widen each day over the upcoming week. Heck, the ranges for the last few days have been outside their confidence interval.
Do you have a background in disease modeling or anything?
I'm curious.
The brighter dashed line is there to show what happens if intervention is disabled completely.
I really like that the milestones are placed as questions, rather than dates. It is the right way to message the unknown.
It turns out that social distancing is working better than expected, or the virus isn’t as contagious as expected, or slightly less severe than expected. That doesn’t mean the lockdown was the wrong thing to do, or that it isn’t still necessary. What it does mean is that we’ll be able to start easing restrictions as the hospitalizations continue to drop — and perhaps we can stop it completely with testing and contact tracing.
It's pretty sloppy to show surge capacity on the same graph as total hospitalizations, not active active hospitalizations.
Further, these estimates are much older than the data so showing their accuracy is useful.