The statistical community has not been doing well with the coronavirus epidemic. Nobody's models seem to be predicting well. Nor is the source data for anything but deaths very good.
This matters, because the current plan US plan seems to be "open things up and wait for herd immunity". How much time, and how many deaths, lie between now and that point? I dunno.
The models are mostly easy to understand (from simple differential equations for the simplest models to agent-based monte carlos modeling everyone ina region), but the parameters in the models depend on people's behavior, which is not something that can easily be predicted.
Argonne National Lab has simulations where they simulate every person Chicago and where they might go and who they might run into, which, given the correct set of behaviors would probably work very well. But... how do you predict how people will act in a week? That will depend on the weather, court decisions, number of deaths in random countries, how rousing a speech a politician might give, etc. If we could control how people acted, I bet the models would work very well.
> This matters, because the current plan US plan seems to be "open things up and wait for herd immunity". How much time, and how many deaths, lie between now and that point? I dunno.
This seems pretty straightforward, no? You re-open cautiously, wait a few weeks, make sure your hospital resources aren't being overwhelmed, then open up a bit more, rinse and repeat. I wasn't aware there was another way.
The trace model: identify each infected person, trace all their contacts, test all of them, expand outwards. Full quarantine the infected. Intensive but it works; see South Korea and New Zealand.
The "herd immunity" plan can only work with more than 50% of the population infected, of which about 1% will die and some slightly higher percentage suffer lingering ill health, which in the US means at least a million people.
The "herd immunity" plan can only work with more than 50% of the population infected, of which about 1% will die and some slightly higher percentage suffer lingering ill health, which in the US means at least a million people.
That's current US policy. That's what the "Get and Keep America Open" plan does.[1] Current death rate for the US is around 1,400 per day.
This could be a naive question, but everything I've heard is that coronaviruses don't disappear, they just sorta integrate and mutate into our normal "known set" that we deal with year-to-year.
If that is true, doesn't the strategy taken by SK and NZ put them at continued risk for a another outbreak if the virus sneaks back in? Without a vaccine, and then significant uptake by the population yearly, doesn't the risk of covid-19, and its mutations, come back every year?
> The statistical community has not been doing well with the coronavirus epidemic.
I'm curious how you concluded this. Can you (or anyone) recommend a reasoned evaluation of the existing models? We've got a few months of hindsight now and I'm curious hear what any reputable data scientist might have to say.
I see criticism of the models online (in op-eds and social media), but the criticisms are usually agenda driven and opaque on technical details, which isn't particularly helpful.
The actuals from now and the predictions from a few weeks ago aren't aligning quantitatively. The shapes of the curves, though, do make sense.
Here's the Financial Times graph of actuals, country by country.[1] No predictions. The pattern that shows up in some of the actuals is "huge spike, tight lockdown, big drop". See Italy, Belgium and the Isle of Man. The Isle of Man puts people in jail for weeks for violating quarantine rules. The US didn't have a huge spike, but isn't seeing a big drop, either. US deaths are at about 2/3 of peak.
Even that's iffy when compared to "excess deaths" (in lots of places, excluding all covid deaths still results in more people dying this year compared to previous years).
The statistical community has not been doing well with the coronavirus epidemic. Nobody's models seem to be predicting well. Nor is the source data for anything but deaths very good.
This matters, because the current plan US plan seems to be "open things up and wait for herd immunity". How much time, and how many deaths, lie between now and that point? I dunno.