10 ms·

> With 39.26 deaths per 100,000, Sweden's mortality rate is not only higher than that of the U.S. (29.87 deaths per 100,000) but also exponentially higher than

• hammock 6y ago
  Order of magnitude higher implying exponential activity = "exponentially higher"
  • DC-3 6y ago
    Well, that would make sense when describing the relationship between two functions, but not between two datapoints, right? Since exponentially pertains to growth, not magnitude.
    • ModernMech 6y ago
      “Exponentially higher” can refer to magnitudes, not growth. If I have $1000 (10^3) today and $100 (10^2) some time ago, I have exponentially more dollars now than then even if that value grew linearly over that time period and continues to grow linearly. I won’t have exponentially more over the next time period, because it’s not growing exponentially, but it’s still correct to say at that point my bank account is exponentially higher.
      • DC-3 6y ago
        Well, that is referring to growth, just growth sampled in a discrete fashion.
        • ModernMech 6y ago
          Lines are infinite, so you can pick two points on any line with a nonzero slope where the second point is exponentially higher than the first. That doesn’t mean the line is an exponential. Both of these views only look at the magnitudes of the two points with respect to one another and not the trend of the growth of the curve from which they were sampled.
    • sitkack 6y ago
      I think we should call two points that are separated by more distance than the first point squared. For something to be exponentially away from something else, it would have to be at least itself squared. So 26 is exponentially far from 5 (5^2).
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• raziel2p 6y ago
  > If humanity's greatest weakness really is our failure to understand the exponential function If this is in regards to dismissing coronavirus concerns, I don't think that was the problem - more a case of people assuming the exponential growth would be magically stopped earlier by some governmental force or whatever. When the first case in the city I live in was announced, I remember thinking to myself, it's just one case, they're now quarantined and they've probably done proper contact tracing and the country is preventing people coming in from infected regions abroad. I was perfectly aware how quick exponential growth happens, but to some extent had faith that "the system" would prevent it from going out of hand.
  • Rerarom 6y ago
    Indeed, this was also one of my hypotheses. The problem is that there was much more asymptomatic transmission that it was initially assumed. Even later, when the exponential got out of control, I expected the states to step in with much more drastic measures than the lockdowns we have witnessed. I thought there will be tanks on the streets, I thought one day we will wake up and see the military everywhere à la 1968 Prague.
    • jupp0r 6y ago
      I think somebody - when making those plans - realized there isn’t a tank for every street - or even every town. edit: typo
    • giardini 6y ago
      Rearom said>"I thought there will be tanks on the streets, I thought one day we will wake up and see the military everywhere à la 1968 Prague."< Only in the states with Democratic governors!8-))
      • Rerarom 6y ago
        I live in Europe
        • 6y ago
• HugoDaniel 6y ago
  in literature "exponentially" can be used in a lot of ways that are appropriate but not mathematically correct. you can use it as a euphemism, as a metaphor, as an adjective, like a loose comparator, etc... everything is valid. the same applies to a lot of other mathematical concepts (i.e. the double negative, etc...)
  • DC-3 6y ago
    I don't think it's asking for an unreasonable amount of rigour to require that terms like 'exponentially' not be used to describe discrete differences in magnitude? I mean, you might as well say 'additively', since for any given (x, y) pair of positive numbers there is some n such that x+n=y, just as there is some n such that x^n=y.
    • HugoDaniel 6y ago
      yes, I feel the same way, especially in data/scientific oriented articles. Unfortunately, most data journalists are writers first and scientists second, which kind of biases the way things are presented in written form.
• dukoid 6y ago
  Take it as a synonym for "order of magnitude" and make your peace with the term? In scientific (aka exponential) representation, the exponent is actually higher in this case...
  • DC-3 6y ago
    I think it's worth trying to be prescriptivist here. Exponentiality is a specific, important phenomenon, and it frustrates me to see language diluted in this way. I wouldn't care in the context of a reddit post, but NPR should know better.
    • quickthrowman 6y ago
      NPR should know better and only use the rigorous mathematical definition of the term exponentiality? If they would’ve said “an order of magnitude higher”, you would be bitching that 8x higher isn’t even a single order of magnitude. You just want to complain. Words have flexible definitions outside of academics and science, let it go. It saddens me when pedantry is the top comment on an HN post.
      • DC-3 6y ago
        I refer you to my previous reply: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23311027 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23311027
      • caseysoftware 6y ago
        Considering this article is specifically about the math and numbers behind the situation, we need them to use the numbers and terminology correctly.
• jressey 6y ago
  I'm a technologist but somehow have found that my friend group is mostly English professors, and they are not idiots. This conversation comes up every time we hang out, with them stating that "exponential just means a lot."
  • DC-3 6y ago
    Time to play hardball. From now on I'm referring to any two lines in a poem that rhyme as a 'couplet'. Let's see how they like that :p
  • sliken 6y ago
    Examples help quite a bit. Tell a story, a gamma ray causes a mutation in the very room you are in and causes a common virus to be virulent and deadly. It takes 2 days to make you sick enough to spread and is virulent enough for each person to spread it to 8 people on average. So 8^11 is about the people on the planet, so in 11*2 days everyone on the planet will have it. Sure one a noticeable fraction of the planet have it, the rate of spread will slow, that's called heard immunity. Then maybe discuss how with such quick growth that some countries drop the ball. What looks like a over reaction while it's happening looked like a under reaction in hind sight. Mention specifically Wuhan, NYC, and Italy as examples. Might also be worth mentioning that in the 1918 pandemic the first wave broke records, made the news, encourages changes like social distancing and masks. But it was the second wave that was worse, caused by opening up things to quickly.
• croon 6y ago
  An aside of your aside; While I have no problem criticizing some of their choices and (IMHO) lack of transparency, I do take some issue with the comparisons (not yours) in the text you quoted. It's true that the death rate is higher, but an often ignored factor is the (differing) chosen qualifier for covid deaths between countries [0]. Compared to UK/Italy/Spain/France/US/etc, Sweden doesn't have many "unaccounted" deaths during the pandemic [1]. [0] https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-care/trump-admin-won-t-require-nursing-homes-count-covid-19-n1213141 https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-care/trump-admin-won-t... [1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/21/world/coronavirus-missing-deaths.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/04/21/world/coronav...
  • DC-3 6y ago
    This is a fair point, although I tend to think (based on nothing other than intuition) that Sweden likely has reasonably similar metrics to its Nordic neighbours?
    • croon 6y ago
      My intuition is the same, but I have not found any substantive confirmation for it.
• brnt 6y ago
  That, but also a misunderstanding of the strategy: herd immunity works on the thesis that the total number of victims is independent of speed of spreading. So naturally, you'd expect more dead/hospitalized sooner under this (lack of) regime, but also a shorter active period. I.e.: a sharper peak, but roughly same area under the curve. The reason most countries chose not to do this, is because they expect the peak to be too sharp to handle all the hospitalizations.
  • chippy 6y ago
    We need to count these total after a couple of years to see which strategy worked.
    • brnt 6y ago
      Which is of course why choosing a strategy is and will always be an informed guess. We won't know which strategy works best, which assumptions turned out to be true of flawed, until after the show. Sweden provides us with an upper bound. I think they're showing it's perhaps not as bad as we once thought it might be. Which is why many countries are now relaxing or looking to relax rules to regimes more similar to Sweden.
      • shawnb576 6y ago
        It provides us with an upper bound in Scandinavian countries with populations that behave like Swedes. How does that generalize to other countries with different densities, distancing compliance, healthcare, etc? Another way to read this is that Sweden is quite a lot worse than it's neighbors, but people there still followed the rules so it's actually a lower bound?
• pacala 6y ago
  Nit pick. There is another imprecision lurking in the quoted statement. Epidemics are subject to power laws, making it misleading to take averages over large populations. US mortality rate may be 29.87/100k, but that is an average weighted by population between 50 states with different geographies, demographies and policies, for example NY's 120/100k vs. CA's 10/100k.
• jerf 6y ago
  In common English, I'm not sure "exponentially" has ever meant 2^x. I think it may have moved straight into English from mathematics already wrecked. I thin the majority of the time I see it, it's being used for x^2 or similar polynomials. You won't be able to "solve" this until the general population is aware of the differences between those two functions, which is probably pretty hopeless.
• duckmysick 6y ago
  > we don't help ourselves by using the term as a clumsy proxy for 'substantially bigger'. I thought about it too and I noticed more unfortunate conflicts in colloquial use. For example "weight" when we mean mass and "phenomenon" when we refer to remarkable events or people. I recognize languages evolve, so I'm not upset about it. I wonder how prevalent it is in other languages.
• jmcqk6 6y ago
  I took it as a clumsy way of saying "order of magnitude", which is accurate.
• jdkee 6y ago
  Not correcting OP, but the NPR quote. It is an order of magnitude higher, not exponentially. Exponential rates are change over time. A static comparison uses relative static factors.