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> The only countries that appear to have handled it better are South Korea and Japan. How many better examples would it take before one concludes that it's pos

> The only countries that appear to have handled it better are South Korea and Japan. How many better examples would it take before one concludes that it's possible to have done better and there is a responsibility to do so? I'd say one is adequate. > If I mixed up the charts for the US and other nations except those and Italy (which is much worse), you wouldn't be able to tell which is which. Take off the labels and I'd absolutely be able to tell that the countries are divided among: * those that have a simple exponential curve that tells a story of no effective intervention * those that have a noisier exponential curve, which suggests a story of either partially effective interventions or some confounding factor * those that have peaks and valleys, suggesting a story of moving towards containment and then hitting setbacks * those that have apparently peaked, suggesting a story of effective containment efforts And we already know which category the US belongs in.

leereeves 7y ago
This is daily data. The effectiveness of interventions doesn't change every day. You're just assigning meaning to random noise. I agree it's possible to do better and we should learn from other nations, but I think it's unrealistic to expect that USA be #1 in everything. Sometimes other nations will do better.
- wwweston 7y ago
  > This is daily data. The effectiveness of interventions doesn't change every day. There's many endeavors in which the effectiveness of interventions can change daily, either with the conscientiousness of application, or in changing conditions that need response. On top of that, there's all kinds of systems where an intervention can introduce an oscillating contribution to the output. I can't see any reason why viral containment responses wouldn't have potential interventions in any of those categories, and there are several good reasons why it's likely, perhaps chief among them that effectiveness of control in any system relies heavily on good data feedback. > You're just assigning meaning to random noise. First and foremost I'm describing distinctions between characteristics that show up in the plots you brought to the discussion. Those distinctions aren't speculation, they're there. Your attribution of them to "random noise" is at best just as much speculation as my attribution to intervention differences is. And considering how smooth some of those exponentials are there is almost certainly something functional rather than noisy going on behind them, whether it's something I've already mentioned related to containment efforts, or something else like differences in how continuity of social contact works in parts of the world represented by noisier graphs.

leereeves 7y ago

This is daily data. The effectiveness of interventions doesn't change every day. You're just assigning meaning to random noise. I agree it's possible to do better and we should learn from other nations, but I think it's unrealistic to expect that USA be #1 in everything. Sometimes other nations will do better.

wwweston 7y ago
> This is daily data. The effectiveness of interventions doesn't change every day. There's many endeavors in which the effectiveness of interventions can change daily, either with the conscientiousness of application, or in changing conditions that need response. On top of that, there's all kinds of systems where an intervention can introduce an oscillating contribution to the output. I can't see any reason why viral containment responses wouldn't have potential interventions in any of those categories, and there are several good reasons why it's likely, perhaps chief among them that effectiveness of control in any system relies heavily on good data feedback. > You're just assigning meaning to random noise. First and foremost I'm describing distinctions between characteristics that show up in the plots you brought to the discussion. Those distinctions aren't speculation, they're there. Your attribution of them to "random noise" is at best just as much speculation as my attribution to intervention differences is. And considering how smooth some of those exponentials are there is almost certainly something functional rather than noisy going on behind them, whether it's something I've already mentioned related to containment efforts, or something else like differences in how continuity of social contact works in parts of the world represented by noisier graphs.