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Politicians have no understanding of exponential growth. They look at low numbers and think "we have a lot of time" then are surprised later when they in fact d
by mantap 7y ago
Politicians have no understanding of exponential growth. They look at low numbers and think "we have a lot of time" then are surprised later when they in fact don't.
- asdfaoeu 7y agoThe other thing is the incubation period is around 5 days. So really the numbers are at least 5 days behind.
- hermitdev 7y agoWhat I've been seeing is the experts think an individual may be infectious up to 14 days before showing symptoms, hence the 2 week wuatantine.
- afiori 7y agoIt can be up to 21-24, even if mostly it is under 14
- bdamm 7y agoAnd of course in the US there are not as many testing kits as in other countries, so the numbers are basically 3 months behind.
- standardUser 7y agoThe US is probably a much larger vector than we realize. The testing rate is the lowest in the world and Americans travel like mad. Who knows how many undiagnosed Americans have been globe trotting over the last couple weeks?
- anigbrowl 7y agoYou have no idea :-(
- Thlom 7y agoAnd you have millions without basic access to healthcare, meaning they will go around untreated passing the virus along to their fellow citizens.
- jdietrich 7y agoAlso no statutory entitlement to sick pay, so many people will drag themselves into work because they can't afford to take time off.
- mancerayder 7y agoAnd also unpredictable and variable (and delayed) medical bills for those who don't have great employer-provided healthcare (and even sometimes when they do). The stories abound of a hospital visit with a magical bill that appears months later with some unpaid sum that's in the 4 digits. Everyone knows someone who this happened to - I happened to know a couple who received a 5-digit bill for a baby who died many many months later. Now, as a rational person you're not going to go to an ER willy nilly, and sometimes an ER is what you get pointed to by smaller medical centers. The U.S. medical model doesn't work - for the group. It works - for the individual. I had superb eye surgery recently from a top world center and it was fully paid. But the viruses don't care if one of us can afford care, and the other can't, because the virus views us as a singular organism, and now we're all at risk. Which is exactly how the health system should begin viewing us.
- bluGill 7y agoWait, I thought the standard refrain is American's never travel - we don't even have a passport to get aboard.
- alasdair_ 7y agoI live in Seattle, so I’ve been following the WA outbreak with particular fervor. What is utterly batshit insane to me is that as of YESTERDAY, the nursing home with almost every death in the USA STILL didn’t have enough testing kits to test the 63 residents left, nevermind the dozens of staff. They received 45 test kits. Total. This is AFTER Mike Pence visited the state and assured everyone that “millions” of kits were available. I am extremely angry about the way Trump and his cronies have fucked up the most basic level of competency required here. People dying and people needing to be tested should not be a political issue. We should not have to worry if we make his “numbers look bad” to get basic help with a pandemic. Seattle is a fucking ghost town. Basic competency at governance would have mitigated this. I am enraged at the level of incompetence the current administration has displayed.
- pishpash 7y agoFreedom is not free, self rule requires some people to actually sacrifice their careers to be in the political process rather than handing it over to student body president level nincompoops, ass kissers and sociopaths. The local government is shit with the homeless problem. The Federal government is shit because the then candidate told you he could kill somebody on Fifth Avenue with no consequence. So it's well established that people are okay with some citizens dying for nothing. What's so surprising or worthy of anger here, today?
- Gibbon1 7y agoThis is America 40 years after the neoliberal revolution. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhYJS80MgYA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xhYJS80MgYA
- consp 7y agoYou sound correct about the hypocracy but as far as I can find out the normal tests are reported about 40-70% accurate (reports vary but my understanding is more near 40 than 70) in non-symptomatic people and around here they are thus only used and done twice if one has symptoms as even then they are not fool-proof. The test is thus pretty useless to perform on everybody as it gives too many false positives and too many false negatives to be useful to people with no symptoms. It would be a lot better though if they explained that. People here (Netherlands) are also complaining about not being tested before having symptoms or even after being admitted, as they assume the test will give them a yes/no answer which it won't.
- makomk 7y agoNot really. Even though the US media has focused on the raw number of tests carried out for domestic political reasons and left a lot of people with the belief that the number of confirmed cases is basically just a function of the number of tests, Italy has been visibly struggling to test people. If you look at the percentage of tests that came out positive rather than the absolute numbers, it's obvious that Italy was only testing people who were very likely to have the disease, especially during and after the big spike in cases that got everyone's attention. It was in the very high single digits for quite a while, compared to the 3% that the CDC's old, very restrictive policy of only testing a handful of people very likely to have it There's other evidence that Italy's numbers were off too. I'm particularly miffed about this because it seems to have spread to our shores and convinced a bunch of people that the reason the UK has lower numbers than Italy is because they're not testing people, to the point they're literally unable to believe that Italy has only tested twice as many patients for the coronavirus as the UK.
- cocoggu 7y agoIn my opinion, this is really the main reason why this virus is spreading globally. In fact, the average incubation period seems to be 5 days, which is already a lot. But apparently, some subjects had an incubation period up to 24 days, if correct, this is huge and the main reason why it suddenly raised in Italy. Imagine only one relatively social person in Italy, in 24 days he/she can probably meet at least 50 person directly and much much more if he/she goes to some public activities. Like SARS, it just need a few super-spreaders who aren't even aware of being sick, to start an epidemic.
- gambiting 7y agoIt's still unclear whether you are spreading the virus for the entirety of the symptom-less period though.
- jopsen 7y agoRisk of infecting others when you're without symptoms is supposedly small.. I'm by no means an expert, but to me the problem seems to be lack of proactive social distancing; and lack of proactive testing of everyone with symptoms. Current guidelines seems statistically sound, it's just that we have little mitigation for the few that do slip through.
- notaki 7y ago"People who contract the novel coronavirus emit high amounts of virus very early on in their infection, according to a new study from Germany that helps to explain the rapid and efficient way in which the virus has spread around the world." "The researchers found very high levels of virus emitted from the throat of patients from the earliest point in their illness —when people are generally still going about their daily routines" https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/09/people-shed-high-levels-of-coronavirus-study-finds-but-most-are-likely-not-infectious-after-recovery-begins/ https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/09/people-shed-high-levels-...
- jonplackett 7y agoYou can add the testing delay on top of that too. Some countries it's still taking a few days to get a result.
- fragsworth 7y agoWe should be quarantining every city in the U.S. right now. You're 100% correct, and it's going to be just as bad here.
- ppg677 7y agoIt might not be. Lower population density and a lack of public transportation. I would worry about NYC though.
- adrianN 7y agoLots of workers who can't stay home when they're sick without losing their job though.
- briandear 7y agoWhen? I keep hearing that, but where is the evidence?
- dpau 7y agono tests, no evidence
- davidw 7y agoSomething we can all do as individuals is stop going out to unnecessary things. I'm avoiding restaurants, bars, gyms and large groups.
- victor106 7y ago3B1B to the rescue https://youtu.be/Kas0tIxDvrg https://youtu.be/Kas0tIxDvrg
- AnthonyMouse 7y ago"Exponential growth" in itself isn't really the issue. If every week you have 10,000% as many cases as last week, you're screwed. If every week you have 105% as many cases as last week (i.e. 5% more), that's exponential, but after a year there would be less than a 13X increase, by which point there could be a vaccine or other measures that cause the weekly number to go from 105% to 95%. You can also have non-exponential growth and still have many new cases, if people are getting over their infections faster than they're infecting new people. If a million people were currently infected and every week 500,000 new people were infected but 500,001 of the existing infected people recovered, that means the number of currently infected people declines over time, but you'd still have 500,000 new cases every week and just about everybody might eventually get infected before it dies out, even if it eventually does. (This is similar to what happens with the flu, except that it has exponential growth in winter and then below exponential growth in the other three seasons, so the actually dying out never really comes.) To really get rid of it you want to have something like 100,000 cases last week and 75,000 cases this week and so on. But even then you might have 25,000 fewer cases this week because 50,000 people recovered but 25,000 new people got infected. So whether it has exponential growth or not isn't really the issue. It's what the growth rate is. A small exponential growth rate isn't catastrophic -- the number of cases grows but not so fast that everybody is infected by the time they have a vaccine or other more effective countermeasures that get the growth rate back below exponential. Most importantly, the growth rate isn't immutable. It's affected by things like people washing their hands and having effective testing and quarantines. So will things be fine? They will if people do the right things. Maybe some of them have been and some of them haven't. Maybe they'll get better at it going forward, maybe they won't. As a result there is a significant amount of uncertainty. But panic is useless. Even if all they can do is reduce the growth rate from 150% to 130%, that still buys more time to respond. Even if everybody ultimately gets it, better that it happen over five years than five months. And if some people are doing it wrong, try to help them do better. Everybody likes to see the bad orange man look stupid on the television, but maybe this is a situation where we come out better off with everybody working together.
- pfdietz 7y agoCalls to not panic are worse that useless. They are dangerous, extremely dangerous now. They lead to complacency and they will lead to death.
- BurningFrog 7y ago> Politicians have no understanding of exponential growth To be fair, that is true of 95% of humanity. These politicians are representative of their voters, as democracy should be.
- chadcmulligan 7y ago> These politicians are representative of their voters, as democracy should be. Isn't it that they make decisions on behalf of the voters and should take the best professional advice on their behalf?
- zo1 7y agoProfessional advice is not necessarily the best political advise, unfortunately. It's a giant PR/social-media game and they have to play it otherwise the other side will get the upper hand. It's very unfortunate that we've turned "democracy" into such a game instead of a mechanism for societal-level decision making.
- ben_w 7y agoDemocracy is just as vulnerable to Goodhart's law as everything else. I don’t have any well-thought-out solutions, but I am tickled by the idea of frequently anarchically randomising the way power gets donated from the people to the government.
- majewsky 7y agoI somewhat like the idea of having a democracy without parliament or elections. Instead, whenever a law needs to be made (either because the administration identifies the need or because something akin to a ballot initiative gets enough signatures) 100 people are drawn from the population at random and tasked with writing that law. They are allowed to summon/subpoena as many experts as they like to help them with drafting the law. The idea is that every citizen would be involved in one, maybe two laws in their entire lifetime, therefore giving them the sense that this is the one time they can contribute to politics in a meaningful way. Also their names are tied to that particular law forever, meaning that fear of social pressure could be more effective than for a politician who votes for 1000s of things in their political career.
- anticensor 7y agoThey do, but only when they want so, like they want endless exponential growth of economy but not energy consumption.
- FartyMcFarter 7y agoMost people don't think of 2% annual growth as exponential.
- alasdair_ 7y ago“Most people” could not accurately define the word “exponential” even if they were offered an exponential amount of money every year to do so.
- croon 7y agoTo be fair they'd be incentiviced not to... assuming they understand the exponential nature of the money, which I guess they don't. But as soon as they do learn they won't want to explain.
- TeMPOraL 7y agoAlso, growth narrative is always about adding/subtracting percent points - which makes most people think this is a linear phenomenon, because they don't make the connection that the quantity discussed is a multiplier, and charts they see are on log scale.
- littlestymaar 7y agoAs long as you stay with low percentages, the linear approximation works pretty well: two times 1% lead to a 2.01% increase. But it starts breaking down as soon as you reach 10%. Little trick to know (with some good approximation) the doubling time of some low-percentage growing system: count it linearly up to 10% and then multiply by 7 (which is roughly the doubling time for 10% growth). Example: 2% => 5*7=35 years to double.
- atemerev 7y agoBecause at the beginning, a logistic curve is often confused with exponential growth. There are very few truly exponential processes in the nature. All things come to an end. Epidemics, population growth, economic growth... no such thing as exponential growth with limited resources.
- joking 7y agothe logistic curve is what happens to the initial exponential grow when there's no more way to grow, because there is no more population to infect or when severe social exclusion is set, but the initial grow is still exponential.
- drclau 7y agoThey don’t need an understanding of exponential growth, they only need to look at examples: China, extreme measures and barely contained it; Italy delayed measures, turning fast into a disaster. How many examples do we need?
- bryanrasmussen 7y agoIn Denmark yesterday a couple of kids in the same class in a school were tested positive, they closed the classroom - not even the school. I would certainly like to see the example of a country able to learn from the mistakes of others.
- voqv 7y agoIn Germany a friend of mine refused to go to a meeting at a client's office where someone tested positive and HR threatened him because he was violating his employment contract.
- rorykoehler 7y agoAm in Germany. Everyone is acting like nothing is happening. It's infuriating.
- hef19898 7y agoWell, in Bavaria at least, people are forced to self-quarantine for two weeks if they had contact to people from o where in high risk areas. Same goes for children in schools and kindergardens. Some schools are closed already. Corporate travel came more or less to a halt and soccer games are most likely taking place without spectators. So yes, just business as usual.
- rorykoehler 7y agoI'm in Berlin and people are making zero effort to alter their usual patterns.
- remus 7y agoTrump providing a shining example of this! https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1237027356314869761 https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/12370273563148697...
- tomp 7y agoI don't get the criticism for Trump. He's just basically saying "don't panic" in his own way. That also seems to be consensus among the experts and on HN, judging by yesterday's "don't hoard" threads... (I disagree, but it seems I'm the minority.)
- licebmi__at__ 7y agoI think the POTUS should be held to a higher standard than this meme tier tweets. But hey, it have been almost 4 years, I guess we should be used to.
- tomp 7y agoSure, but what higher standard is that? The standard of "don't panic", currently followed by WHO and pretty much all heads of state (with possible exceptions being Putin and possibly Italy & Austria), or the standard of "panic", universally shunned by experts and wanna-be experts alike?
- remus 7y agoYou can say "don't panic" without misleading people by using numbers completely out of context. By comparing the number of Corona virus cases and deaths to the annual flu deaths he is implying that the number of deaths from Corona virus in the US is low and the risk is negligible, and while it is currently low this completely misses the point that in other countries it has proven to be extremely contagious and has a much higher mortality rate than flu. In other words, there is a significant risk if adequate steps aren't taken to reduce the risk of transmission. See: Italy, China.
- 7y ago