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Surprising to see some of the same “but hospitalisation rates low” comments on HN when we are literally supposed to be the world’s foremost users of complexity
by randomsearch 5y ago
Surprising to see some of the same “but hospitalisation rates low” comments on HN when we are literally supposed to be the world’s foremost users of complexity theory and big O notation.
Even if hospitalisation rates are a small constant factor lower, doesn’t everyone remember from CS101 that O(k^x) is bad news bears and that constant factor ain’t gonna save your assignment once the problem size grows just a little more.
- krona 5y agoThe average hospital stay is much shorter and so you're ignoring queue theory 101 and Little's law.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- dtech 5y agoWhen x trends to infinity, which is irrelevant in this case since you're limited by population numbers.
- toper-centage 5y agoNot just that, but after 2 years of pandemic you start having very few new people to infect effectively.
- DrScump 5y agoHaving been infected with one strain of SARS-CoV-2 doesn't protect you from all other variants. It's not even clear that it protects you from reinfection with the same variant indefinitely.
- Auracle 5y agoI was infected with Delta 9 months after one of the initial strains. I was more or less as sick as I was the first time for a full two weeks. That said, when I looked up studies on that the chances were about 1% for that to happen to me (at that time).
- igorkraw 5y agoFeel free to plug in population numbers into an exponential growth function and watch the medical system get overwhelmed. This isn't about it collapsing - once a few thousand people have died preventable deaths and a bunch of medical staff quits because of PTSD, we'll stabilize. But at least in the ethical framework dominant in my cultural sphere, that's not really an acceptable path.
- gus_massa 5y agoRemember that it's not an exponential. The total number of cases is very similar to a logistic curve that initially can be approximated by an exponential, but later it stabilizes and it looks like a step. The number of active cases / hospitalizations is similar to the derivative of the logistic curve that initially can be approximated by an exponential, after some time goes to zero. It looks like a bump. A smaller hospitalization rate means that hopefully the bump is low enough to not saturate the hospitals. More about some simple models: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compartmental_models_in_epidemiology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compartmental_models_in_epidem...
- tinus_hn 5y agoThe R value model is a doomsday sayers dream, because any increase automatically means exponential growth. Any growth, no matter how tiny, translates to scary graphs.
- dtech 5y agoOf course exponential growth goes quickly. OPs argument was that the constant factor of hospitalization doesn't matter at all, which is ridiculous in the real world. If you take an exponential growth of 1.5, quite a quickly spreading infection. And a hospitilization factor of 5% vs 0.05%: day 20: 3.3k cases, 165 vs 1 hospitilization day 25: 25k. 1.2k vs 13 day 30: 191k 9.5k vs 95 day 35: 1.5m 73k vs 728 day 40: 11m 550k vs 5528 So a 10M people country with ~5k. beds wouldn't have healthcare capacity due to the constant factor, while without they would be overwhelmed within a month.
- tinus_hn 5y agoWhat is your point? That any growth, no matter how tiny, translates to scary graphs?
- ramblerman 5y agoCould you expand on your actual argument beyond "exponential growth bad, we are all doomed"? Are you suggesting how lethal it is when someone gets it is of no consideration?
- gmueckl 5y agoA reduced rate of severe cases still is simply a mere constant factor that won't save us. Unless the rate goes down to approx. zero we're back to square one where there is almost no immunity and the number of simultaneous severe cases will easily and quickly rise far beyond the hospital capacity due to the very high rate of infections. On average, there are hospital beds (of any kind) available for about 0,3% of the population. If 5% of the cases are severe enough to require hospitalization, this means that hospitals get completely overwhelmed when 6% of the population are down with COVID simultaneously. And that's assuming that every hospital bed can be used, which is unrealistic.
- randomsearch 5y ago> A reduced rate of severe cases still is simply a mere constant factor that won't save us Yes. That this has to be explicitly stated here explains my surprise.
- sjg007 5y agoWe need R0 to be under 1.
- iso1210 5y agoLets imagine cases double every day, and 1 in 1000 go into hospital Day 1 - 1 cases Day 11 - 1000 cases, 1 hospitalisation Day 21 - 1 million cases, 1,000 hospitalisations Day 31 - 1 billion cases, 1 million hospitalisations Day 41 - 1 trillion cases, 1 billion hospitalisations That would be awful. It would be impossible too.
- blitzar 5y agoYou assume no reinfection. It is possible to get to 100% population death if you assume 0.0001% death rate where the 99.9999% reinfected over and over untill they die. That assumes reinfection.
- iso1210 5y agoReinfection in 41 days?
- mrath 5y agoBut we only have 7.8 billion people. Or we are Saying people get reinfected multiple times within 33 days.
- ostenning 5y agoPeople grasp onto hope, even pragmatic thinkers like the hn crowd
- tomjen3 5y agoYou are quite correct regarding the big picture. But as someone who is one of those data numbers, I care very much that I am a lot less likely to end up in hospital.
- dekhn 5y agothanks malthus