
Flatten the Coronavirus Curve - slowhand09
https://flowingdata.com/2020/03/09/flatten-the-coronavirus-curve/
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lubujackson
This is great and all, but misses the problem when containment doesn't happen
soon enough. I feel like people look at China and South Korea and say "oh it
peters out" but miss the need for extreme interventions to make that happen.
We still don't know how this turns out if everyone puts their head in the sand
like the U.S. is intent on doing with minimal testing and uneven regional
containment.

Seems to me like a typical measuring problem of having one hard metric so
everyone argues about it's implication rather than focusing on where the
number comes from.

~~~
koheripbal
Testing is ramping up pretty quickly now. I think we're going to see a major
shift in the next couple weeks with an explosion of newly-detected cases.

~~~
BoiledCabbage
To keep up with the capacity of South Korea, aftet adjusting for population
size the US would need to capable of running 70,000 tests per day. We aren't
remotely in that ball park.

This administration _massively_ dropped the ball here by being more concerned
with keeping statistics low than actually keeping people safe. Even though
they had weeks of advanced notice they only reinstated a task force after
Washington state started spiraling out of control.

They could have solved this testing issue at any point within an hr by simply
telling the FDA to authorize private testing. Instead they waited until
governors and patients were literally begging online to improve test capacity
for any change to happen.

You want to be in charge? That's what being in charge is. In times of crisis
accurately assessing the situation and taking decisive action to solve
problems. Not playing a leader on tv while sitting on your hands and passing
the buck blaming others while simultaneously giving a false sense of
unseriousness by downplaying the situation.

A month from now this wasted, squandered time is going to be absolutely
indefensible. This country (like every other that hasn't taken this seriously)
is gonna get hit hard.

~~~
harikb
We will discover years later that the delay was intentional, so that certain
investments/under the table deal with certain companies can occur first.

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baron_harkonnen
I wasn't too worried about covid19 until I realized the radical disconnect
between the understanding of the real risk of this I see here and on twitter
vs in the real world. At least in the US people won't take this seriously
until we see very high numbers of cases. Which means when people do take it
seriously, we'll be in trouble.

It's not simply a case of not understanding exponential growth, Americans
actively do not want to understand what's happening. I was in a meeting
yesterday and someone, with no hint of reservation, said they felt very
optimistic about the business in the next quarter.

This bizarre denial means that things will inevitably get much worse in the US
then they will in Italy (and we don't have the political will to solve this
like China has even in the most extreme cases).

~~~
blowski
If nobody is diagnosed as having COVID19, then Trump was right that COVID19
wasn't a problem. So how do you keep diagnoses low - by not testing anybody!
It's like turning off your phone so you can argue "I didn't get any phone
calls".

~~~
dkarl
He already hedged his bets by saying it was a huge problem. Hoax, real, no
problem, big problem, he's doing a good job of covering the important
possibilities.

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asimilator
It's endlessly frustrating to me that animated graphs are published as
GIFs/videos (see r/dataisbeautiful on reddit for lots of examples). In this
particular one, I can't read the annotations before they disappear, and the
whole graph resets before I've figured out what anything means.

These graphs would really benefit from proper content aware controls (i.e. not
just play/pause and a timeline, something aware of the key timeline points of
the content). GIF/video is obviously used because it's so easily embeddable,
but IMO the format makes most of these graphs essentially incomprehensible.

~~~
jupp0r
On the other hand, a GIF is easy to share and can be viewed on very low end
devices.

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NPMaxwell
Nice demonstration that the entire point and argument can be presented in one
(animated) graphic -- like code that needs no comments.

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nebulous1
I think this animated version is terrible and offers mostly confusion. The
version here is much easier to understand:
[https://twitter.com/_rospearce/status/1235603201648402432](https://twitter.com/_rospearce/status/1235603201648402432)

~~~
krick
Yeah, this is how it usually is with animation. That's much better.

Regardless, "measures" is too abstract to provide any meaningful information.
At this point of reduction what the plot offers is basically self-evident.
Well, maybe the only thing that might surprise someone is that the better the
thing is handled, the longer it will last.

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jrd259
I get that flattening is good, but the animation is actually harder to read
than the original static graph (Pearce). I can't stop it to read it. I can't
read which outcomes are fatalities, and which are not. I can't read the total
number of infections or total deaths.

In addition, like Pearce, neither axis has a scale so this is purely
qualitative. It's made to look like it's quantitative but it's not.

A rational decision maker (if only we had them) would trade the cost of
aggressive quarantines (economic and political) or aggressive testing vs the
cost of infection (economic and human). Flattening the curve saves lives, but
how many? Can I save 1000 lives in my country by an absolute ban on all
gatherings of 100 people? and so on.

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gringoDan
Here is the original animation linked in the post:
[https://twitter.com/alxrdk/status/1237021885239635969](https://twitter.com/alxrdk/status/1237021885239635969)

And the gif to maximize sharing: [https://giphy.com/gifs/delay-
covid19-containment-dWCcpgCRiOH...](https://giphy.com/gifs/delay-
covid19-containment-dWCcpgCRiOHk5B8znA)

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dkarl
Are we doing anything to increase capacity in the United States besides making
testing kits? I know we will learn more about treating patients with COVID-19
over time, but that doesn't add more beds and nurses. As healthcare workers
themselves get sick, and supply disruptions compound, I would expect capacity
to go down. It doesn't undermine the author's point, but I have no idea where
the positive slope on the capacity curve is coming from in liberal democracies
where the government can't commandeer labor and order factories to be built
overnight.

(Theoretically, the solution in liberal democracies would be to pay health
care companies to maintain the potential to expand capacity, like we pay
farmers not to grow crops. I'm sure we could have a huge off-topic
conversation about whether that would actually work, so let's just leave it at
"theoretically.")

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jacknews
To me, the animation does not help, and especially the meaningless x-axis
'early containment measures/time' doesn't make any sense.

I understand the point, but I think a few static graphs, or a 3d rendition,
could convey it much more clearly.

~~~
OJFord
> especially the meaningless x-axis 'early containment measures/time' doesn't
> make any sense.

The horizontal axis is labelled only 'Time', in the same font and relative
location as the vertical axis label.

'Early containment measures' is labelling the animation (or specifically the
black arrow that points in the direction it's animated) of the area under the
'sick curve', indicating what it is that causes that change.

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sgt101
Ok, get that, but it looks like hand washing isn't enough, and step 2 (lock
everything up) is a bit drastic, so how?

~~~
kradeelav
\- work from home voluntarily if you can

\- don't go to unnecessary crowded events if you can

\- start meal prep for medium term food storage (~1 month) if possible

\- wear face masks if you have them

~~~
sgt101
Interesting about the meal storage - what are the arrangements that places
like Italy are making for food distribution?

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JaDogg
From what I understand (correct me if I'm wrong) - Some people who can survive
the virus might need to use a nebuliser.. but what if medical care is
overburdened at that time? Then even they will die from difficulty in
breathing. This is why slowing the spread is important.

~~~
learc83
I can't respond to whether people need to use a nebulizer or not, but
nebulizers can be used at home with basically zero training. Or they can be
administered by minimally trained workers in tent hospitals.

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krick
I don't understand how to read this. Why is it animated? What's the 3rd
dimension?

~~~
slg
The third dimension is us slowing down the spread of the virus. It doesn't
necessarily prevent people from ultimately getting sick, but spreading it out
ensures that the medical infrastructure is not overwhelmed. If we do nothing
to stop the spread, we won't have the infrastructure to handle it and many
patients with potentially recoverable ailments (not just corona related
issues) will end up receiving subpar care and dying.

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lubujackson
Aaaand I completely missed the point of this post, sorry. Was just arguing
against someone about this now I'm jumping at shadows.

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kaiabwpdjqn
There’s an important bit in this that depends on age. If you’re young and
healthy, in addition to being less likely to die from the disease, you’re also
less likely to acquire the disease (exposure level being held equal). If
you’re older, you’re more likely to acquire the disease.

This implies the disease will spread much faster in areas with more old
people, because more people are vulnerable to it and they are more likely to
become infectious themselves. A similar statement could be made for how well
integrated the older generations are in a given society.

I don’t live there and have no particular horse in this race, but I would
predict the Bay Area will not look like Italy right now for this reason.

Edit: do be careful though. The takeaway is not that young people can ignore
this.

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_jal
Thank you!

I've been arguing this point, mostly without success, against some "just get
it over with" folks. Maybe a picture will help. (Yes, I should know better,
but in this case it can be hard to distinguish ignorance from sociopathy.)

~~~
HarryHirsch
In the US, there's the religious angle as well. People _really_ consider the
Apocalypse prophecy in the sense of foretelling the future, not forthtelling
the will of God. The faithful, so the widespread belief goes, will be raptured
in time, such as not to live under the Satanic authorities.

Twenty years ago, everyone thought that "Left Behind" was blasphemous, but
reality has overtaken fiction. We are living in a branch of reality not
intended for production use.

