
Coronavirus Work from Home Model - SQL2219
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17YyCmjb2Z2QwMiRRwAb7W0vQoEAiL9Co0ARsl03dSlw/htmlview?usp=sharing&sle=true#
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dahart
I’d genuinely like to hear about it if I’m off base, but I took one look at
the 2nd tab named something like “When to Close The Office” and it appears to
contain dozens and dozens of assumptions. I can’t imagine that this
calculation is meaningful in any way. The errors don’t average out here; the
curve we’re modeling is exponential, tiny errors in assumptions can lead to
roughly 100% error in the output. Isn’t there a word for when a lot of math
and complexity and specific numbers with names imbue an article with some
extra sense of being true or having authority?

The virus is blooming right now. If a business intends to close or start a
work-from-home phase, then it should be happening right now, there’s no
calculation to make and no risk model that’s going to tell you to wait another
week or two.

There are legitimate reasons some businesses shouldn’t close, but those
reasons don’t depend on how many people live nearby, how many are currently
infected, etc..

~~~
boulos
> I can’t imagine that this calculation is meaningful in any way. The errors
> don’t average out here; the curve we’re modeling is exponential, tiny errors
> in assumptions can lead to roughly 100% error in the output. Isn’t there a
> word for when a lot of math and complexity and specific numbers with names
> imbue an article with some extra sense of being true or having authority?

The official term for the issue is False Precision [1], though I usually just
say “false sense of precision”.

If someone does actually carry through and calculate margins of error due to
their varied assumptions, it lets the reader decide. Unfortunately, I’ve
rarely seen folks treat errors as anything other than independent, unless
they’re actually building a model that they evaluate with a Monte Carlo method
(e.g., system temperature and cpu busy-ness are correlated when machine
failure rates).

[1]
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_precision](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_precision)

~~~
dahart
That’s pretty good, and does apply here I think. But FWIW I was thinking about
something slightly closer to Occam’s Razor and/or the Law of Parsimony, but
specific to how adding more data or assumptions or ‘evidence’ can sometimes
make something seem more true, even though it’s the opposite.

~~~
boulos
Yeah, that’s how you ended, but I think the root cause in the piece you linked
isn’t “deception” but false precision. The false precision is what gives the
sense that it seems true.

Perhaps this is a variant of curse of dimensionality for errors? That is, if
each piece of evidence is only 80% “likely”, 80% to the Nth drops like a
stone.

Perhaps Dave’s Law? :).

~~~
dahart
Ooh, I like the sound of Dave’s Law. :P

More seriously, I love the idea of the curse of dimensionality for errors.
Random tangent, but phrasing it that way totally reminds me of the phrase
‘flaw of averages’ and the story about US jet fighters.

I wasn’t thinking the author was being intentionally deceptive. It can feel
like accounting for more things makes something more accurate. Sometimes it’s
actually true, sometimes failing to account for all the relevant inputs is a
real problem. It’s legitimately difficult to know when you’ve accounted for
too little or too much, right? I guess this is just one of those times when
each piece being accounted for is making the result less accurate rather than
more accurate, because the data truly does have a false precision, like you
said.

Didn’t Google go on work-from-home a week ago? I did mid-week last week and
I’m feeling stir-crazy already, but starting to wonder if the most responsible
thing to do wouldn’t be to catch the virus right now and quarantine myself;
guarantee I don’t spread it around.

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robtaylor
Before the pivot to Covid content, the previous articles from the same creator
included ...

"How to Deliver Your Funny Speech" "What The Rise of Skywalker Can Teach about
Storytelling" "8 Reasons Why Your Ad Attribution Approach Is Wrong" "What I
Learned Building a Horoscope That Blew Up on Facebook"

Not for me, Clive.

~~~
TeMPOraL
FWIW, there's no sophisticated science in that Medium article. All of the
things in there come from basic understanding of how exponents work, plus
thinking for 10 seconds about what the graphs from Wuhan from February showed.
Author's biggest contribution is quality explanation of these points that's
comprehensible by a wide audience. That doesn't require skills in
epidemiology, but precisely the ones the author has.

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mirekrusin
Nobody seems to be taking real estimated number of infections, instead they
take number of confirmed cases. Confirmed cases don't include - infected
people in incubation phase, infected people with non-severe symptoms that were
not scanned (age weighted on probability and mapped back on age weighted
population) - then you calculate dubling on this estimate, you may have
surprise when geometric growth shoots above hospital capacity.

All of above can be calculated with one exception - kids will have to be
excluded because we don't know if they carry/infect and don't get symptoms or
they don't have symptoms because they are immune.

But this calculation is easy enough to give rule of thumb estimate formula to
apply to official confimed cases to get back real estimated number of
infections.

~~~
k__
I also read:

Infected people measured also includes dead people who would have died anyway
and just happen to be infected before their death.

And more than 50% of people without symptoms were tested false positive.

~~~
adrianN
It's pretty hard to get a false positive from the Coronavirus PCR test we're
using. False negatives happen, but false positives are extremely rare.

~~~
k__
Good to know, thanks.

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stared
I find "When to Close The Office" with "risk you want to take" set at 1%
profoundly disturbing.

Sure, from a company perspective it makes sense: 2 weeks of medical leave for
everyone now + a few new hires later. If you multiply it by the risk factor,
it may make good business sense.

Yet, if there is an infection, it will spread to their families, and to other
people, accelerating the infection spread (and potentially killing orders of
magnitude more people than within office). It is irresponsible, to put it
mildly.

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SQL2219
Author found here:

[https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-
peop...](https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-people-will-
die-f4d3d9cd99ca)

~~~
Etheryte
That's quite a lot of sensationalism for one article. While it's true that the
situation needs to be actively dealt with, phrases like the below help no one:

> Now it’s a pandemic that nobody can stop.

It's incredibly weird to read that in the same article that also points out
how many countries did in fact stop the spread. There are many other similar
examples in the text.

~~~
paganel
There are only two countries (China, South Korea) and two city-states (Hong
Kong, Singapore) that have managed to stop the spread, I wouldn't call that
"many". For comparison all of Europe plus the US and Canada in North America
are navigating in the dark, with no visible end in sight.

~~~
gamegod
Now you're being sensationalist - Those places that stopped their local
epidemics were A) the first ones to have the epidemics, and B) took effective
action to stop it.

Saying there's "no visible end in sight" is meaningless in this context. If
you model the epidemic, as many researchers have, you will see when the end of
the epidemic is.

~~~
paganel
> If you model the epidemic, as many researchers have, you will see when the
> end of the epidemic is.

Do you have a link to a study of said researchers saying when the epidemic
will end? I'm asking because I've been following this whole epidemic thing
since just before Wuhan was put into lockdown, I currently live in Europe and
I don't see us getting out of the dark with the current measures being taken.

~~~
whatshisface
It is generally accepted that the pandemic will end once just about everybody
has caught it, because even those cases where people are thought to have re-
caught it, if you assume they really happened, are a small fraction of the
population.

~~~
paganel
> It is generally accepted that the pandemic will end once just about
> everybody has caught it

Yeah, that's probably how the Black Death ended in the mid-1300s, everything
"ends" at some point, I was inquiring of the possibility of this "ending"
without the obituary pages in local newspapers growing ten-fold in a matter of
7 or 8 days.

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elbac
I believe this model was created by Tomas Pueyo. His full article is well
worth a read: [https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-
peop...](https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-people-will-
die-f4d3d9cd99ca)

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unexpected
Man, I'm trying to just copy the model and keep getting the error "The file
might be unavailable to heavy traffic". Never seen that before.

~~~
snazz
Yeah, Google Docs isn't really intended to handle much more than 100 or so
concurrent viewers. They've optimized it for "1 million simultaneous users
looking at 300k documents", not "1 million simultaneous users looking at 1
document".

~~~
EGreg
Can’t seem to access it at all, it says don’t have access to it

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fs111
a no spreadsheet model:
[https://staythefuckhome.com/](https://staythefuckhome.com/)

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mirrorlake
Preventing hospitals from being overwhelmed with this disease is like rapidly
accumulating compound interest, and the dividends are people's lives. Early
investment is monumentally better than late investment.

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jonathanstrange
As someone specialized in the moral aspects of decision theory I unfortunately
find this dubious. Any decision model makes value judgments and trade-offs
between them, and normally you would have to elicit those judgments from the
decision maker.

I don't understand how this could work without taking the individual value
judgments into account, especially since the long-term consequences of home
work differ from business to business.

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topkai22
The author provide a "direct link to copy"
at:[https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/1/d/17YyCmjb2Z2QwMiRR...](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/1/d/17YyCmjb2Z2QwMiRRwAb7W0vQoEAiL9Co0ARsl03dSlw/copy)

However, its currently not working due to heavy traffic.

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snvzz
Mildly related, DRACO[0] needs funding.

[0]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRACO](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DRACO)

