3 ms·
I have not had a chance to review these models yet. Since you have, I ask: How does the model account for isolation capacity constraints? In other words, hos
by robomartin 12y ago
I have not had a chance to review these models yet. Since you have, I ask:
How does the model account for isolation capacity constraints?
In other words, hospitals have a finite capacity to deal with these kinds of patients.
How does the model account for infection and mortality within the medical community?
How does the model account for handling and or procedural errors?
How does the model account for the threshold beyond which N percent of medical professionals will refuse to treat patients?
Does that model estimate this threshold? This is pure conjecture on my part, I am guessing that if four or five nurses and doctors fall ill, or worst, die, it could trigger a really difficult scenario to deal with.
Does the model account for some of the tens of thousands of afflicted in West Africa travelling outside of the hot zone while not showing symptoms and then infecting general populations during the initial phase of their sickness?
Does the model assume a tolerance range for various parameters due to mutation or other factors, for example rate of reproduction, ease of communication, etc.?
- throwaway_yy2Di 12y agoThe CDC spreadsheet is supposed to model a single West African country, and doesn't explicitly model any of those things. It doesn't account for finite medical capacity. It assumes a specified fraction of patients are isolated in hospitals at a given time, a fraction that increases, regardless of the size of the epidemic. I think the burden is on users to check if the results make any sense (it does give you the # of beds in use at a time, so you get that feedback).
- diydsp 12y agohaha i can save you some time. there are two models. the first is hypersimplistic, reciprocal of an decaying exponential with four parameters and zero inflection points (although there's one visible in the data so far)... it does not even come close to addressing your questions. the second model at least accounts for decay - gee - but is still essentially two terms with three parameters- the result is two competing decay terms. This is, essentially, a trivial joke. it has no delay parameters for incubation, etc. I've only skimmed the article, but I can't find an actual attribution of these numbers to the model (the model itself is from a journal). It seriously appears like an editor said, "Let's get some scary-mathy-lookin stuff up there on Ebola). if it bleeds...
- robomartin 12y ago"Let's get some scary-mathy-lookin stuff up there on Ebola" That was funny. Yup, math is scary to a lot of people. Sad statement.