3 ms·

I think we were all suspecting this, consider the graph at: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-cases/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavi

I think we were all suspecting this, consider the graph at: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-cases/ https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-cases/ Observe the "Daily New Cases" graph, that looks like a sawtooth. It's very easy to mentally fit a straight line on the left edge, and another straight line on the right edge. Now pretend the actual detected cases simply continued on the original straight line, then at ~Feb 11 it would reach about 6k per day, instead of falling down to 2k per day. So the missing triangle has a base of about 7 days, and a height of about (6k - 2k) = 4k per day. The missing people under the area is thus base * height / 2 = 7 days * 4k per day / 2 = 14k people... The reason we all knew the crooked graph had to be false was because if you consider the time distributions from infected to infectious, from infectious to encountering a new person etc... then these distributions convolve, so you never get these simple instantaneous hard bends. The new numbers tell us that the original trajectory is continuing roughly unabated! So was this deception to buy time? build hope? it doesn't make any sense. Unless Xi is so desperate as to become an inside trader and manipulate the worldwide markets?

bredren 7y ago
I was also tracking this graph and had built my own projection based on it. After a day or so of thinking about it and seeing my projection match what was being reported, I concluded China chose this function because it shows a concern but does not cause great alarm. A predictable upward linear growth. Unsettling, but not terrifying. I had considered how to get actual accurate death data, and figured it was impossible. However, there was some new, somewhat reporting from cremation facilities in Wuhan that, if true, paint a very dire picture. https://www.epochtimes.com/gb/20/2/5/n11845444.htm https://www.epochtimes.com/gb/20/2/5/n11845444.htm I doubt this is about markets now, this is as it has always been, about "stability." The emergence of a true threat to stability that can not be controlled by the worlds most successful authoritarian state is so unexpected that I suspect the Xi and the politburo have been caught completely off guard and unable to change strategies to contain the threat. If they had been truthful about the deaths from the beginning, demonstrations might have occurred that would have made things worse for everyone. I think that we are going to see continued sharp rises in reports of deaths now that WHO officials are on-site and it becomes more difficult to hide the scale of what is most likely a global catastrophe.
- DoctorOetker 7y ago
  >After a day or so of thinking about it and seeing my projection match what was being reported, I concluded China chose this function because it shows a concern but does not cause great alarm. A predictable upward linear growth. Unsettling, but not terrifying. Initially the expansion was clearly exponential as evidenced by the clean straight line in the log-linear plots. Under high mixing conditions (like a high N-dimensional cube) this is to be expected for the initial breakout. Then quarantine and lock-down measures came, and experts expected the second derivative of the cumulative infections to reach a constant, which subsequently happened. I witnessed a lot of people not understanding 1) why a simple quadratic? 2) why is a quadratic any better?? When there social distance measures are in effect, the virus can only diffuse on territory, and not "teleport" by public transport etc. This means that it can only spread in 2 dimensions. Consider the oversimplification of an epicenter, with a disklike area of infection, then a constant radial ground speed through diffusion, would mean the infected area would increase quadratically with radius. And the radius would increase proportionally to time (effective ground speed, since 2 months from now people will not be able to suddenly sneeze 2 times as far...). So the cumulative number of infections would hence increase quadratically with time. If we knew the eventual infection percentage (which Gabriel Leung estimated as potentially being 60%?), then we could calculate the effective radial ground speed: If P is the number of people per area A then rho = P / A is the population density. If only a susceptible fraction S can get infected and assuming a circular disk, with A = pi R ^ 2 = pi v ^ 2 t^ 2 Then we can calculate the cumulative number of infected people N as N = rho * A * S = rho * S * pi * v ^ 2 * t ^ 2 so the daily new cases would be dN / dt = rho * S * pi * v ^ 2 * ( 2 * t ) and its slope X would be: X = d ^ 2 N / dt ^ 2 = rho * S * pi * v ^2 * 2 (units: confirmations per day, per day or confirmations per day ^ 2) solving for ground speed: v = sqrt( X / ( rho * S * pi * 2 ) ) Sadly I can not read Chinese for your link, can you fluently read Chinese or did you use something like google translate?

bredren 7y ago

I was also tracking this graph and had built my own projection based on it. After a day or so of thinking about it and seeing my projection match what was being reported, I concluded China chose this function because it shows a concern but does not cause great alarm. A predictable upward linear growth. Unsettling, but not terrifying. I had considered how to get actual accurate death data, and figured it was impossible. However, there was some new, somewhat reporting from cremation facilities in Wuhan that, if true, paint a very dire picture. https://www.epochtimes.com/gb/20/2/5/n11845444.htm https://www.epochtimes.com/gb/20/2/5/n11845444.htm I doubt this is about markets now, this is as it has always been, about "stability." The emergence of a true threat to stability that can not be controlled by the worlds most successful authoritarian state is so unexpected that I suspect the Xi and the politburo have been caught completely off guard and unable to change strategies to contain the threat. If they had been truthful about the deaths from the beginning, demonstrations might have occurred that would have made things worse for everyone. I think that we are going to see continued sharp rises in reports of deaths now that WHO officials are on-site and it becomes more difficult to hide the scale of what is most likely a global catastrophe.

DoctorOetker 7y ago
>After a day or so of thinking about it and seeing my projection match what was being reported, I concluded China chose this function because it shows a concern but does not cause great alarm. A predictable upward linear growth. Unsettling, but not terrifying. Initially the expansion was clearly exponential as evidenced by the clean straight line in the log-linear plots. Under high mixing conditions (like a high N-dimensional cube) this is to be expected for the initial breakout. Then quarantine and lock-down measures came, and experts expected the second derivative of the cumulative infections to reach a constant, which subsequently happened. I witnessed a lot of people not understanding 1) why a simple quadratic? 2) why is a quadratic any better?? When there social distance measures are in effect, the virus can only diffuse on territory, and not "teleport" by public transport etc. This means that it can only spread in 2 dimensions. Consider the oversimplification of an epicenter, with a disklike area of infection, then a constant radial ground speed through diffusion, would mean the infected area would increase quadratically with radius. And the radius would increase proportionally to time (effective ground speed, since 2 months from now people will not be able to suddenly sneeze 2 times as far...). So the cumulative number of infections would hence increase quadratically with time. If we knew the eventual infection percentage (which Gabriel Leung estimated as potentially being 60%?), then we could calculate the effective radial ground speed: If P is the number of people per area A then rho = P / A is the population density. If only a susceptible fraction S can get infected and assuming a circular disk, with A = pi R ^ 2 = pi v ^ 2 t^ 2 Then we can calculate the cumulative number of infected people N as N = rho * A * S = rho * S * pi * v ^ 2 * t ^ 2 so the daily new cases would be dN / dt = rho * S * pi * v ^ 2 * ( 2 * t ) and its slope X would be: X = d ^ 2 N / dt ^ 2 = rho * S * pi * v ^2 * 2 (units: confirmations per day, per day or confirmations per day ^ 2) solving for ground speed: v = sqrt( X / ( rho * S * pi * 2 ) ) Sadly I can not read Chinese for your link, can you fluently read Chinese or did you use something like google translate?