4 ms·
On the contrary, epidemics are reasonably easy to model (at least at a basic level), and modelling them has a long academic tradition. As with all modelling, it
by veddox 7y ago
On the contrary, epidemics are reasonably easy to model (at least at a basic level), and modelling them has a long academic tradition. As with all modelling, it all depends on what kind of detail you want to get out of your analysis/predictions.
If you‘re looking at a simple population infection model, lockdown efficacy is just a factor affecting the contact rate among uninfected actors. You run multiple scenarios for multiple levels of this factor, and see where that gets you.
Or did you mean something else?
(Source: I‘m not an epidemiologist, but as an ecological modeller I work with very similar tools.)
- puranjay 7y agoSo many of the models I've seen focus on the efficacy of lockdowns in controlling the spread of the disease. Most treat the length of the lockdown as a mathematical variable - X week lockdown leads to Y infection rate. My point is that we can't reasonably predict how people will behave in lockdown past a certain point. We've never had similar lockdowns in a world that was as globalized, as hyper connected as ours. You could go from 2 to 8 weeks of lockdowns if everyone was living in isolated villages a la 1918 Spanish Flu, but that's not our present world. How do you model a situation where after 4 weeks of lockdowns, a social media post about food shortages goes viral, causing mass panic and breaking of quarantine? We can't because we've never had a situation like this, or the tools for spreading (mis) information as we currently do.