7 ms·

Additionally, notice that the orange data points (actual hospitalizations) are significantly under the "With Intervention" plot. So why even include the slide?

Additionally, notice that the orange data points (actual hospitalizations) are significantly under the "With Intervention" plot. So why even include the slide? Clearly the assumptions behind the "With Intervention" plot do not match reality TODAY, let alone in a few weeks. Not a good sign if people are making actual decisions based on this.

mikekij 6y ago
My former physics professors would have not approved of a graph like this. D+ on the lab at best.
- dehrmann 6y ago
  https://i.imgur.com/dJ7kHch.png https://i.imgur.com/dJ7kHch.png It's pretty sloppy to show surge capacity on the same graph as total hospitalizations, not active active hospitalizations.
xienze 6y ago
> Clearly the assumptions behind the "With Intervention" plot do not match reality TODAY, let alone in a few weeks. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills with the way people are talking about this whole thing still being out of control, when data shows the situation is even better than the most optimistic models were predicting. And by that I mean, pretend I was on HN 3 weeks ago predicting 25K deaths in the USA by today. I’d have been downvoted into oblivion and told I was delusional. But here we are. Clearly NYC was hit far harder than the rest of the country, but it seems like every state and municipality is simply basing their models on NYC case numbers scaled by population. I don’t get it.
- throwaway237683 6y ago
  You're not crazy. It was very clear from the way the situation was handled even a month ago that CA and NY governors are not wasting time with this good crisis, and are using it for their political gain. The rampant fear mongering was used to overblow the severity of the situation and sell the idea of locking down hard before it's too late, completely disregarding the economy fallout, all the while projecting the image of Strong Leaders and Saviors of the Nation. A bit of too late for this election year (if elections are not postponed, that is!) but definitely will be useful for the next election cycle. The actual data did not support the apocalyptic prognoses then and it looks even more at contrast with what is going on now. But good luck explaining that to a bunch of people scared to death because of the constant hammering of ZOMG PEOPLE ARE DYING!!!!111 from the news. All in all it's a #FakeApocalypse. As it was obvious two months ago.
  - gdulli 6y ago
    I know it's folly but I'm trying to follow the logic here. Newsom and Cuomo, who won their offices fairly easily in their respective elections, seized on a plan to drastically hurt the economies of their respective states. Because, being the ones who took charge of the situation, that would gain some intangible leadership points that would increase their chances of winning their next elections despite the inevitable severe unemployment and budget shortfalls that would much more certainly sink their chances.
    - abakker 6y ago
      You knew it was folly...Some people want rationalize rather than observe. Our government's situation looks an awful lot like ignorance and error, not malice.
    - throwaway237683 6y ago
      Not sure if it is folly for me to try and answer here (no idea if my reply is going to be visible). Thank you for trying to listen anyway. There is no need to look for malice when there are simpler explanations. No, I do not think Newsom and Cuomo were actively trying to hurt their states' economies; what I said is that they are using the present crisis to advance their political goals _disregarding_ economic fallout. And you are telling it exactly: they are already seen as "taking charge of the situation" while the federal government was "doing nothing". I've seen Newsom being called the savior of the state (nation is the next step, yes) in press and here on HN. Contrast that with what WA state governor was/is doing - I don't even know his name! I wouldn't try to make projections regarding chances for winning elections; something tells me though that severe unemployment and budget shortfalls are going to be blamed on someone else like federal government failing to provide relief, etc etc. There are all kinds of ways to spin the situation, I would leave that to professionals. There is going to be plenty of them hurting for work. I live in California, in a smaller rural community way outside Bay Area. It hurts looking at the devastation this lockdown causes: boarded restaurant windows, closed businesses. It hurts listening to the local pediatrics calling us twice a day begging to schedule a virtual check-up "appointment" for kids basically so that they could bill our insurance and get paid _something_. It hurts when I stop by a grocery store and register clerk is happy just to see someone shopping so he could keep his job a little longer. I still have my cushy IT job but I don't have many illusions about keeping it for long if this goes on. And all this carnage is for what? The latest numbers on Wikipedia state 128,000 deaths worldwide; you know, that's not very impressive for a zombie apocalypse. 760 people died in California so far. In mid-March we were told that California is 10 days behind Italy, and it's going to be hell in here soon. A month later, where is it? Now take this "roadmap" that Newsom published yesterday. Literally the first bullet point talks about total Big Brother style tracing and monitoring as _necessity_ to even _think_ about lifting restrictions. You sincerely want me to believe all this is done for the sake of us plebe Joes?
- dehrmann 6y ago
  > I feel like I’m taking crazy pills with the way people are talking about this whole thing still being out of control A week ago, I remember reading how the Bay Area was bracing for a bracing for a surge and it was the calm before the storm. The Santa Clara county covid-19 dashboard told a different story: day-over-day, new cases were roughly the same for the past two weeks. 2+ weeks into the lockdown, there was obviously no surge coming. https://i.imgur.com/LrFZj3S.png https://i.imgur.com/LrFZj3S.png Looking at that chart on the April 7th, nothing pointed to a surge.
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    Isn't this just California being in the "3.6 roentgen, not great, not terrible" phase? I.e. number of new cases reported is limited by the number of tests that are able to be made?
    - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
      Every region (and almost every country) is generally believed to be severely undercounting cases because of limited testing. There's not much reason to believe the problem is worse in California than elsewhere, and a severe surge would be evident in hospitalization and death rates no matter how bad testing is.
  - throwaway237683 6y ago
    In mid-March we were told that we are "10 days behind Italy" and shelter-in-place is not to stop the spread (already too late for that), but to give hospitals a bit of a breather before the surge of critical cases and the Death Wave that follows. That was the justification for such extraordinary measures as a state-wide lockdown. It's mid-April now. Where is the Death Wave? Either this virus is much less infectuous than it was touted, or much less deadly. Or both. Sweden never locked down. Denmark is opening up after a lockdown. Italy that was touted as the prime example of hell on earth, had ~21,000 people died by official count. Even if it was undercounted by 50%, that's roughly 40,000 people, mostly elders on their last breath, out of country of 60 mln. And that's the worst case so far, in the world of 7 billion people. Disregard all that, we're still being told daily that it's "war zone", the zombie apocalypse is just around the corner, etc. Only Big Brother like surveillance is going to save us. The lockdown is not an extraordinary measure anymore, it was an absolutely necessary first step, and now we have to take it further. Much further. I wonder what it felt like for people in 1932 Germany.
- ridaj 6y ago
  I don't understand what you're suggesting, that California should ease up faster? It seems to me that reality being better than models had predicted is more the result of everyone flying blind due to lack of testing... California has probably been lucky that it turned out its infection was lower than New York's turned out to be. It is just hard to make a model starting from extremely shitty and noisy base data about facts on the ground, but someone still has to make very difficult public health decisions based on the best models available.
- altcognito 6y ago
  I think there was genuine concern that the quarantine as implemented would not be enough. You can see lots of stories locally wherever you are about how people aren't obeying the order. Italy was still in a lot of trouble despite having had some quarantine measures in place. Hindsight shows the quarantine was effective enough to get numbers down. The US, despite reacting too late, did lockdown fully relatively quickly. I would agree that modeling after NYC seems like a bad idea given the lack of density and public transportation. On the other hand, Michigan looked pretty exponential, and as the lagging cases came in from other states, they also began to look fairly exponential as well. Despite cases staying elevated for now, the exponential growth has died down. The US missed the worst of hospitals being overrun and it running away in multiple cities.
  - Loughla 6y ago
    >The US missed the worst of hospitals being overrun and it running away in multiple cities. I want to add ", so far" to the end of that sentence. I do not hold hope that this will be true as we fight among ourselves to reopen various portions of the country/economy.
    - xienze 6y ago
      > I do not hold hope that this will be true as we fight among ourselves to reopen various portions of the country/economy. But things won’t be the same after reopening as they were before. People will be wearing masks (I see a lot of that already), keeping distance, etc. Couple that with common sense restrictions like “keep the elderly and sick at home”, “no big public events”, “no sporting events”, and “lots of restaurants have gone out of business”, it’s clear the opportunity for infection spread will be lower.
Retric 6y ago
The line is the average of high and low estimates. The issue we are dealing with exponential growth so 1/10th x to 10x makes it look like the estimate is wildly off even when it’s surprisingly accurate. Further, these estimates are much older than the data so showing their accuracy is useful.
ISL 6y ago
I think the point of the plot is to suggest that intervention efforts are being quite successful relative to expectations at the time the "With Intervention" model was generated. The brighter dashed line is there to show what happens if intervention is disabled completely. I really like that the milestones are placed as questions, rather than dates. It is the right way to message the unknown.
empath75 6y ago
This is ridiculous criticism. There are so many unknowns with this virus. We don’t know how many people have it, how fast it is spreading or what the mortality rate. Everything is a fairly rough estimate. It turns out that social distancing is working better than expected, or the virus isn’t as contagious as expected, or slightly less severe than expected. That doesn’t mean the lockdown was the wrong thing to do, or that it isn’t still necessary. What it does mean is that we’ll be able to start easing restrictions as the hospitalizations continue to drop — and perhaps we can stop it completely with testing and contact tracing.
glaugh 6y ago
Whenever I see the IHME charts[1] (which are great) I think “I wish I could see the what the model predicted before today’s date so I can assess it.” This shows laudable transparency, in my view. (Also the model was directionally correct, it’s not like it was entirely the wrong shape.) [1] https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america/california https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america/cali...
- wjossey 6y ago
  The IHME model is proving to be wildly inaccurate on the downslope due to bad data coming out China. Their projections will continue to creep up in terms of deaths over the next few weeks because the predicted drop offs won’t be happening, sad to say. If you want to see examples, check out their predictions on Italy. Their figures have been underestimating by over 50%, and the gaps will widen each day over the upcoming week. Heck, the ranges for the last few days have been outside their confidence interval.
  - altcognito 6y ago
    A significant portion of this probably is compliance, but I'm with you completely on "the numbers out of China, particularly at the tail end are farcical". There was a drop off a cliff in cases.
- jf22 6y ago
  Could you share how you would assess the model? Do you have a background in disease modeling or anything? I'm curious.

mikekij 6y ago

My former physics professors would have not approved of a graph like this. D+ on the lab at best.

dehrmann 6y ago
https://i.imgur.com/dJ7kHch.png https://i.imgur.com/dJ7kHch.png It's pretty sloppy to show surge capacity on the same graph as total hospitalizations, not active active hospitalizations.

xienze 6y ago

> Clearly the assumptions behind the "With Intervention" plot do not match reality TODAY, let alone in a few weeks. I feel like I’m taking crazy pills with the way people are talking about this whole thing still being out of control, when data shows the situation is even better than the most optimistic models were predicting. And by that I mean, pretend I was on HN 3 weeks ago predicting 25K deaths in the USA by today. I’d have been downvoted into oblivion and told I was delusional. But here we are. Clearly NYC was hit far harder than the rest of the country, but it seems like every state and municipality is simply basing their models on NYC case numbers scaled by population. I don’t get it.

throwaway237683 6y ago
You're not crazy. It was very clear from the way the situation was handled even a month ago that CA and NY governors are not wasting time with this good crisis, and are using it for their political gain. The rampant fear mongering was used to overblow the severity of the situation and sell the idea of locking down hard before it's too late, completely disregarding the economy fallout, all the while projecting the image of Strong Leaders and Saviors of the Nation. A bit of too late for this election year (if elections are not postponed, that is!) but definitely will be useful for the next election cycle. The actual data did not support the apocalyptic prognoses then and it looks even more at contrast with what is going on now. But good luck explaining that to a bunch of people scared to death because of the constant hammering of ZOMG PEOPLE ARE DYING!!!!111 from the news. All in all it's a #FakeApocalypse. As it was obvious two months ago.
- gdulli 6y ago
  I know it's folly but I'm trying to follow the logic here. Newsom and Cuomo, who won their offices fairly easily in their respective elections, seized on a plan to drastically hurt the economies of their respective states. Because, being the ones who took charge of the situation, that would gain some intangible leadership points that would increase their chances of winning their next elections despite the inevitable severe unemployment and budget shortfalls that would much more certainly sink their chances.
  - abakker 6y ago
    You knew it was folly...Some people want rationalize rather than observe. Our government's situation looks an awful lot like ignorance and error, not malice.
  - throwaway237683 6y ago
    Not sure if it is folly for me to try and answer here (no idea if my reply is going to be visible). Thank you for trying to listen anyway. There is no need to look for malice when there are simpler explanations. No, I do not think Newsom and Cuomo were actively trying to hurt their states' economies; what I said is that they are using the present crisis to advance their political goals _disregarding_ economic fallout. And you are telling it exactly: they are already seen as "taking charge of the situation" while the federal government was "doing nothing". I've seen Newsom being called the savior of the state (nation is the next step, yes) in press and here on HN. Contrast that with what WA state governor was/is doing - I don't even know his name! I wouldn't try to make projections regarding chances for winning elections; something tells me though that severe unemployment and budget shortfalls are going to be blamed on someone else like federal government failing to provide relief, etc etc. There are all kinds of ways to spin the situation, I would leave that to professionals. There is going to be plenty of them hurting for work. I live in California, in a smaller rural community way outside Bay Area. It hurts looking at the devastation this lockdown causes: boarded restaurant windows, closed businesses. It hurts listening to the local pediatrics calling us twice a day begging to schedule a virtual check-up "appointment" for kids basically so that they could bill our insurance and get paid _something_. It hurts when I stop by a grocery store and register clerk is happy just to see someone shopping so he could keep his job a little longer. I still have my cushy IT job but I don't have many illusions about keeping it for long if this goes on. And all this carnage is for what? The latest numbers on Wikipedia state 128,000 deaths worldwide; you know, that's not very impressive for a zombie apocalypse. 760 people died in California so far. In mid-March we were told that California is 10 days behind Italy, and it's going to be hell in here soon. A month later, where is it? Now take this "roadmap" that Newsom published yesterday. Literally the first bullet point talks about total Big Brother style tracing and monitoring as _necessity_ to even _think_ about lifting restrictions. You sincerely want me to believe all this is done for the sake of us plebe Joes?
dehrmann 6y ago
> I feel like I’m taking crazy pills with the way people are talking about this whole thing still being out of control A week ago, I remember reading how the Bay Area was bracing for a bracing for a surge and it was the calm before the storm. The Santa Clara county covid-19 dashboard told a different story: day-over-day, new cases were roughly the same for the past two weeks. 2+ weeks into the lockdown, there was obviously no surge coming. https://i.imgur.com/LrFZj3S.png https://i.imgur.com/LrFZj3S.png Looking at that chart on the April 7th, nothing pointed to a surge.
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  Isn't this just California being in the "3.6 roentgen, not great, not terrible" phase? I.e. number of new cases reported is limited by the number of tests that are able to be made?
  - SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
    Every region (and almost every country) is generally believed to be severely undercounting cases because of limited testing. There's not much reason to believe the problem is worse in California than elsewhere, and a severe surge would be evident in hospitalization and death rates no matter how bad testing is.
- throwaway237683 6y ago
  In mid-March we were told that we are "10 days behind Italy" and shelter-in-place is not to stop the spread (already too late for that), but to give hospitals a bit of a breather before the surge of critical cases and the Death Wave that follows. That was the justification for such extraordinary measures as a state-wide lockdown. It's mid-April now. Where is the Death Wave? Either this virus is much less infectuous than it was touted, or much less deadly. Or both. Sweden never locked down. Denmark is opening up after a lockdown. Italy that was touted as the prime example of hell on earth, had ~21,000 people died by official count. Even if it was undercounted by 50%, that's roughly 40,000 people, mostly elders on their last breath, out of country of 60 mln. And that's the worst case so far, in the world of 7 billion people. Disregard all that, we're still being told daily that it's "war zone", the zombie apocalypse is just around the corner, etc. Only Big Brother like surveillance is going to save us. The lockdown is not an extraordinary measure anymore, it was an absolutely necessary first step, and now we have to take it further. Much further. I wonder what it felt like for people in 1932 Germany.
ridaj 6y ago
I don't understand what you're suggesting, that California should ease up faster? It seems to me that reality being better than models had predicted is more the result of everyone flying blind due to lack of testing... California has probably been lucky that it turned out its infection was lower than New York's turned out to be. It is just hard to make a model starting from extremely shitty and noisy base data about facts on the ground, but someone still has to make very difficult public health decisions based on the best models available.
altcognito 6y ago
I think there was genuine concern that the quarantine as implemented would not be enough. You can see lots of stories locally wherever you are about how people aren't obeying the order. Italy was still in a lot of trouble despite having had some quarantine measures in place. Hindsight shows the quarantine was effective enough to get numbers down. The US, despite reacting too late, did lockdown fully relatively quickly. I would agree that modeling after NYC seems like a bad idea given the lack of density and public transportation. On the other hand, Michigan looked pretty exponential, and as the lagging cases came in from other states, they also began to look fairly exponential as well. Despite cases staying elevated for now, the exponential growth has died down. The US missed the worst of hospitals being overrun and it running away in multiple cities.
- Loughla 6y ago
  >The US missed the worst of hospitals being overrun and it running away in multiple cities. I want to add ", so far" to the end of that sentence. I do not hold hope that this will be true as we fight among ourselves to reopen various portions of the country/economy.
  - xienze 6y ago
    > I do not hold hope that this will be true as we fight among ourselves to reopen various portions of the country/economy. But things won’t be the same after reopening as they were before. People will be wearing masks (I see a lot of that already), keeping distance, etc. Couple that with common sense restrictions like “keep the elderly and sick at home”, “no big public events”, “no sporting events”, and “lots of restaurants have gone out of business”, it’s clear the opportunity for infection spread will be lower.

Retric 6y ago

The line is the average of high and low estimates. The issue we are dealing with exponential growth so 1/10th x to 10x makes it look like the estimate is wildly off even when it’s surprisingly accurate. Further, these estimates are much older than the data so showing their accuracy is useful.

ISL 6y ago

I think the point of the plot is to suggest that intervention efforts are being quite successful relative to expectations at the time the "With Intervention" model was generated. The brighter dashed line is there to show what happens if intervention is disabled completely. I really like that the milestones are placed as questions, rather than dates. It is the right way to message the unknown.

empath75 6y ago

This is ridiculous criticism. There are so many unknowns with this virus. We don’t know how many people have it, how fast it is spreading or what the mortality rate. Everything is a fairly rough estimate. It turns out that social distancing is working better than expected, or the virus isn’t as contagious as expected, or slightly less severe than expected. That doesn’t mean the lockdown was the wrong thing to do, or that it isn’t still necessary. What it does mean is that we’ll be able to start easing restrictions as the hospitalizations continue to drop — and perhaps we can stop it completely with testing and contact tracing.

glaugh 6y ago

Whenever I see the IHME charts[1] (which are great) I think “I wish I could see the what the model predicted before today’s date so I can assess it.” This shows laudable transparency, in my view. (Also the model was directionally correct, it’s not like it was entirely the wrong shape.) [1] https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america/california https://covid19.healthdata.org/united-states-of-america/cali...

wjossey 6y ago
The IHME model is proving to be wildly inaccurate on the downslope due to bad data coming out China. Their projections will continue to creep up in terms of deaths over the next few weeks because the predicted drop offs won’t be happening, sad to say. If you want to see examples, check out their predictions on Italy. Their figures have been underestimating by over 50%, and the gaps will widen each day over the upcoming week. Heck, the ranges for the last few days have been outside their confidence interval.
- altcognito 6y ago
  A significant portion of this probably is compliance, but I'm with you completely on "the numbers out of China, particularly at the tail end are farcical". There was a drop off a cliff in cases.
jf22 6y ago
Could you share how you would assess the model? Do you have a background in disease modeling or anything? I'm curious.