Aha, you are Spanish?
I always thought you were Greek :S
It’s paywalled for me, but if true, just…wow.
That’s a fucktonne of money.
And the real question is where does it come from?
Its the US Federal Goverment.
So…
The BBC has posted an update on the course change in UK with the modelling that led to those changes here:
What caught my eye is that they link the report from Imperial College which outlined the likely results of the previous strategy:
The report also contains this warning about how long a suppression strategy will need to be maintained for:
The major challenge of suppression is that this type of intensive intervention package – or something equivalently effective at reducing transmission – will need to be maintained until a vaccine becomes available (potentially 18 months or more) – given that we predict that transmission will quickly rebound if interventions are relaxed. We show that intermittent social distancing – triggered by trends in disease surveillance – may allow interventions to be relaxed temporarily in relative short time windows, but measures will need to be reintroduced if or when case numbers rebound. Last, while experience in China and now South Korea show that suppression is possible in the short term, it remains to be seen whether it is possible long-term, and whether the social and economic costs of the interventions adopted thus far can be reduced.
The Methods section has a lot of information on the model. I’ll have to read in more detail after work.
The expected deaths both in the UK and US without a sustained suppression technique are also detailed in the paper:
Perhaps our most significant conclusion is that mitigation is unlikely to be feasible without emergency surge capacity limits of the UK and US healthcare systems being exceeded many times over. In the most effective mitigation strategy examined, which leads to a single, relatively short epidemic (case isolation, household quarantine and social distancing of the elderly), the surge limits for both general ward and ICU beds would be exceeded by at least 8-fold under the more optimistic scenario for critical care requirements that we examined. In addition, even if all patients were able to be treated, we predict there would still be in the order of 250,000 deaths in GB, and 1.1-1.2 million in the US.
In the UK, this conclusion has only been reached in the last few days, with the refinement of estimates of likely ICU demand due to COVID-19 based on experience in Italy and the UK (previous planning estimates assumed half the demand now estimated) and with the NHS providing increasing certainty around the limits of hospital surge capacity.
We therefore conclude that epidemic suppression is the only viable strategy at the current time. The social and economic effects of the measures which are needed to achieve this policy goal will be profound. Many countries have adopted such measures already, but even those countries at an earlier stage of their epidemic (such as the UK) will need to do so imminently.
Our analysis informs the evaluation of both the nature of the measures required to suppress COVID19 and the likely duration that these measures will need to be in place. Results in this paper have informed policymaking in the UK and other countries in the last weeks. However, we emphasise that is not at all certain that suppression will succeed long term; no public health intervention with such disruptive effects on society has been previously attempted for such a long duration of time. How populations and societies will respond remains unclear.
Well, this is why you don’t go into trillion-dollar deficit spending during a good economy. Because, eventually, that cataclysmic, 5-alarm-fire is going to flare…
It is almost exactly the same amount as the stimulus package in 2009, after the GFC. Which probably means it is not nearly enough.
It can be borrowed for free.
We discussed a little bit earlier the
Some interesting numbers from Norwegian NAV (Social services).
Since 3/9, people have been able to city Covid-19 as a diagnosis on their sick leave. In the week since then, they’ve registered 12,200 Covid-19 sick leaves - 4000 yesterday. Even assuming some fraud and a lot of people with flu symptoms are mistakenly checking the corona box, that’s a large number compared to the 1400 officially diagnosed. Considering that there is a lag in processing and the fact that there will be a fair number of people who will have mild corona that won’t apply for sick leave, I think the earlier estimate of 80-95% people with mild symptoms not getting picked up in tests/by the health services, sounds pretty reasonable. At least for countries with non-comprehensive test strategies.
Notably, until last week thursday (when the testing strategy changed), authorities thought they had good control on the number of infected. With these type of numbers, I’m even less convinced of that than I was before.
Diddums
4531
Also @Thrag :)
I recreated the original chart, as best I could. (Please excuse the lack of the line graph, but the columns appear to be accurate).
Using the same data, I re-made the chart as a percentage of the respective populations. I also added (from the paper, but using the language of the tweet, e.g. “shutdown”) the date when the two provinces began social distancing.
I also made one other change, making Bergamo the soothing green and Lodi the angry red :)
Again, I’m not arguing at all against lockdowns, and in fact I believe lockdowns are one of the best ways to slow the spread, but I personally don’t care for that original chart at all.
This is bizarre. The assumption that at these levels of infection population size doesn’t matter seems entirely reasonable to me, and ‘I don’t like the chart’ isn’t much of a counter argument.
Edit: thought experiment — consider two cities, one at 1m pop and 1 at 2m. Each city has 1 infected person and no counter measures. How does pop size impact the rate of infection? When does pop size begin to constrain the total number of infected? Certainly not at 0.5%.
Teiman
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To be honest, I am from the internet. But I was born in Madrid, Spain. On Carabanchel.
News about the Olimpics:
Diddums
4534
Well, we’ll see. The tweet has plenty of folks criticizing the massive differences in the population in the comments, and the authors have promised to respond.
Let’s have another thought experiment; consider a village of 20,000 and a city of 100,000. For which would you expect a greater volume of cases?
It’s a meaningless question without adding time as a factor. In the absence of counter measures, starting with the same number of cases, I’d expect the same number of new cases until the total number of infected approaches the pop limit of the smaller town. Then they will diverge, of course. This is because people’s circle of acquaintance or contact isn’t a function of pop size. What would you expect and why, exactly?
Edit: Also, why didn’t you respond to my question?
Because of corona virus, we are all now you!
My PI would give you a stern stare-down for flipping the colors in the legend between plots. But thanks for giving it a crack.
Diddums
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I only did that because of the connotations associated with green and red. If the authors had gone with blue and yellow I would have rolled with it across both charts.
And Scott, I am formulating my response. One moment please so I can give it my full attention.
Enidigm
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That’s relatively benign. We had a knife attack on an asian woman and her two kids in a consumer goods wholesaler here.
See, it’s not all bad news, we’re gonna be Champions for at least another year… :D
