Skip to main content

Coronavirus notes 1

2020-02-28 -- Update: China continues to maintain control of the outbreak. No new deaths were reported in China today and only eight new cases. Unfortunately, at least some countries appear unable to cope with the outbreak. If the numbers increase as they have for the top six growing fastest, cases could number in the millions by the end of March. The World Health Organization have increased the risk assessment of the coronavirus to 'very high' globally.



2020-02-24 -- Update: Data is still a bit murky, so it is hard to rely on the accuracy of predicted numbers. It is not possible to assign reliable error bars. However, the fact that the spread is slowing is clearly there in the data and it is unlikely in the extreme that misreporting would look like that. Here is a graph from the World Health Organization.  It is pretty obvious that the big spike there is out of whack. That is an artifact from one example of Chinese misreporting. Despite the clear problem there, the shape of the graph is unmistakable. It was getting worse and then it started getting better. If the Chinese had been more forthcoming in reporting accurate numbers, someone like me could predict with greater precision how things would unfold. You can also see, though, the projections based on their numbers were less accurate than they should have been. Had we better numbers we would be much better able to say what the rate of spreading was and what the expected mortality rate would be. I estimated 2% morbidity for my analysis, which was more accurate than I might have expected. It appears to be in that ballpark, but the exact figures for how it spreads and what percentage of people die may be impossible to determine from the data we (I, anyway) currently have.

2020-02-21 -- Update: China continues to fudge numbers making analysis pointlessly difficult. However, China does appear to have gotten the epidemic under control. Confirmed cases are at much less than half the number projected originally (77,798 actual vs 189,607) and only slightly more than half the last projection (77,798 actual vs 143,781). Unfortunately, it seems as if other jurisdictions are not bearing down hard like the Chinese. Numbers are small now, but could get totally out of control in ten weeks or less. Other jurisdictions do not have nearly the social control China does. Once things go beyond a certain point, they may not be controllable by any means. You would think that given the clear evidence that

this is deadly and difficult to contain that countries would not be so sloppy about containment efforts.
2020-02-12 -- Update: China suddenly spiked the numbers up by changing the way they report them. Even so, the numbers are below those projected and thus far seem on track to stop their rapid increase. I updated the curves to more closely match what was reported with a shallower curve. That will report even lower numbers than originally, but the reported numbers are still lower than projected. This indicates to me that at least in China the worst is likely over. It is still too early to tell if the rest of the world has taken the lesson and been similarly effective in containment, but if I had to call it, I would say they likely have.

The curves are based on a doubling of cases in about eight days, with patient zero identified November 1 and a death rate of two percent of confirmed cases. The death rate is sure to be an underestimate going forward. This is a crude analysis, but currently the data does not seem reliable enough for a more sophisticated analysis to provide significantly better confidence. If I have the time and things still look dire a week from now I will attempt to do a more robust analysis.

Lessons learned:
  1. We are not prepared to respond timely to emergencies of this type
  2. Politically manipulated data is directly harmful and needs to be stopped. 
  3. We need a more sophisticated system of analysis of potential outbreaks.
  4. Systems in place are inadequate to deal with a serious outbreak. 
  5. Before the next outbreak, we should:
    • Create better management protocols, particularly for escalation
    • Enforce proper reporting
    • Build out infrastructure such as isolated military hospitals
    • Ensure supplies can be delivered in a timely fashion
    • Create responsive anti-virus development


As of this writing (2020-02-12), it would appear that the Coronavirus outbreak has finally been brought under control in China.

There are some large caveats here, but it still looks good right now. The biggest caveat is that the data that is available is missing crucial bits because reporting was initially suppressed and then misreported before (what looks like) reliable figures started coming.

If the rest of the world clamps down as it appears to have done, the outbreak should be over and with luck the virus itself will not end up taking permanent hold.

The table below (a projection created at the end of January) is roughly consistent with the numbers reported up until the 9th or 10th this month. As of the 10th, the growth in cases began to stall. The deaths were still consistent as would be expected because deaths lag behind reported cases. As of this writing, though, even the deaths are lower which would indicate to me that at least in China the outbreak has been sharply contained.


The (admittedly awkward) image below shows the state of things as of the 10th of February, two days ago. Projected Cases outnumbered actual cases 50K to 43K. Deaths were effectively equal at roughly 1K to 1K. As of today, Projected Cases outnumbered actual cases 64,202 to 45,211. Projected deaths outnumbered actual deaths 1,284 to 1,118. Percent actual cases went from 85% of the projected cases down to 70%. Percent actual deaths went from roughly 100% the projected deaths to  87%. 






Comments

Popular posts from this blog

The system cannot execute the specified program

It always annoys me no end when I get messages like the following: "The system cannot execute the specified program." I got the above error from Windows XP when I tried to execute a program I use all the time. The message is hugely aggravating because it says the obvious without giving any actionable information. If you have such a problem and you are executing from a deep directory structure that may be your problem. It was in my case. Looking on the web with that phrase brought up a bunch of arcane stuff that did not apply to me. It mostly brought up long threads (as these things tend to do) which follow this pattern: 'Q' is the guy with the problem asking for help 'A' can be any number of people who jump in to 'help'. Q: I got this error "The system cannot execute the specified program." when I tried to ... [long list of things tried] A: What program were you running, what operating system, where is the program? What type of

Crucial SSD BIOS update

Executive summary: If Crucial Storage Executive can't see your Crucial drive, you may be able to fix that by re-running as Administrator.  Windows 10 continues to be a nightmare. The latest update has caused my machine to go wonky and it was suggested that, for reasons unknown, my SSD boot drive needed a BIOS update.  The drive in question is a Crucial MX500 CT500MX500 S SD1 and the BIOS update is from M3CR020 to M3CR023.  I initially attempted to burn and boot from a DVD ROM, but that came back with an error:  "could not find kernel image boot/vmlinuz64" You would think that something whose sole purpose is to boot into one program could get that right. That is, you would think that this very basic thing would have been tested prior to release. Sigh. No doubt there is a tortured route to get that thing to boot, but for me there was an easier way. You would think that Crucial would have offered that up first rather than the burnable image, but not in my case.  I then insta

When code writes code, what do developers do?

When code writes code, what do developers do? As we head further into a future where things are automated, people’s last refuge will be curation in a bright future or serving others in a dark future. Curation devolves into saying what you want and iterating through a few rounds of “not that.” As a programmer, I always found automated programming tools laughable. We are still mostly there, but ML/AI is changing that. At one point, many people sagely nodded their heads and said computers would *never* beat a human at chess. Never. I disagreed. I thought that it was ***inevitable*** that they ***would*** beat humans ‘hands down.’ That is well behind us now. It is only a matter of time until all human ‘jobs’ will be doable by machines. Each one, including being a companion. As of now, the bottleneck is energy and knowledge. I think we will crack fusion, but if we do not, we can still harvest billions of times what we use now from the sun in space. The knowledge is increasing rapidly.