I have read your response and I will leave your words to justify your intention. — ArguingWAristotleTiff

Yes, I think that's how philosophy works: people argue their case.

However, I disagree with your implication that I am arguing "my intention was good" and so excuses an act that is "in fact harmful" according to some definition of harm that can be automatically assumed.

My intention is to make a true argument and persuade people on a personal level, not some abstract version of a person where nothing said is ever permitted to be discomforting to the real person the abstraction represents.

Debate is very personal, and as much an emotional struggle than a logical one.

My goal is to bring my A game to debate, not simply to completely demolish my opponents arguments, as construed in some neutral abstract language, but to crush their will to continue to present such arguments.

There can indeed be casualties in such an exchange, people who can't "take it" (finding out their world view isn't as solid as they thought), maybe Frank is such a person and maybe not, and so maybe he can learn and grow if I'm right (or then prove me wrong if I'm wrong, to give me the chance to learn and grow in that case), and I justify my intention on the grounds that finding the truth, not simply abstractly but in real terms that only exist in a personal way, is necessary for society to avoid the kinds of mistakes we are seeing play out in a very personal way for everyone impacted by the crisis.

To remove the personal, is, in my view, to abandon personal responsibility.

It is the Republicans that are the snowflakes according to their own definition, hiding behind what they believe are leftest standards of discussion whenever they don't have an answer for their beliefs, such as excusing Trump's actions.

It was uncalled for and unappreciated. — ArguingWAristotleTiff

Uncalled for by whom? Unnapreciated by whom?

The people I disagree with here and am in debate with?

An insult is an insult because it's factually incorrect, in basically every world view that can be credibly entertained. Pointing out people will live the consequences of believing wrong things (unless they have enough wealth to insulate themselves from the consequences of their actions) is not an insult. It's simply true, and serves the purpose of inviting people to reflect on how what's true and false impacts their personal lives. It's fun to play the denial game, send "serious analysis people" running in circles, until it's not fun anymore because the problem being denied has a personal impact.

And this is what's fairly unique about this crisis: it affects also affluent Westeners that respond well to denialist or "we can't be sure" argument, and impacts them on a massive scale; it's not even "just some Westerners" over there dealing with a forest fire or a hurricane or a job loss or medical bankruptcy (where people can say: "well, don't live there or don't work there! dummy dum, don't rely on the government for a competent response!!"), it's everywhere. The same propaganda tactics have been used to ignore plenty of other crisis in terms of human or other creatures suffering; those tactics work because the people who believe them don't suffer the consequences of those policies.

What's so interesting in this crisis, philosophically to me anyway, is that people are believing the same propaganda tactics yet it's clashing with the consequences appearing in their personal lives on the time span of days. There's no time to put a new face to the same lies or recruit new fools as old fools wise up.

People downplaying until a few days ago were basically saying "ha, Europe, snowflakes; Trump knows that it's not so bad and no reason to overreact and stop entire economies! It's hysteria whipped up by the left to try to damage Trump, don't believe it!".

Now those same people are saying "Trump took it super seriously, did everything he could!". It's wild. Even on this forum, not to mention conservative pundits and social media echo chambers.

The only good thing that can come out of this immense tragedy is excising this mental disease carefully nurtured by propaganda over decades, and not just Trump supporters but the general framework of neoliberalism that permeates academia, bureaucratic policy making circles and the rich and powerful.

This flu season 23,000 people in the US have died so far of the flu. https://www.fox8live.com/2020/03/20/us-flu-activity-up-death-toll-reaches-k/

275 US deaths from coronavirus.

Current % of US cases of coronavirus considered severe: 0.

It strikes me that all we need are more respirators, more hospital beds, and trained volunteers to help out. Surely that would cost less than are futile efforts to contain an airborne virus.

275 US deaths from coronavirus.

Current % of US cases of coronavirus considered severe: 0. — Hanover

You're saying the deaths weren't considered severe before they died?

Or that currently there are no severe cases because the severe cases died and no new ones have developed to severe yet or then data hasn't been updated yet?

You do realize the argument is deaths will double, and then keep doubling until it burns through the population or then is brought under control by social distancing measures?

That doubling something many times results in very big numbers. Yes, it's physically impossible that the virus keeps doubling until it outweighs the entire universe; Elon Musk is certainly good to criticize any doctor that was worrying about such a possibility in talking about exponential growth. However, it's not impossible the infection keeps doubling until it causes severe problems for the medical system; so severe that actions are needed because people don't accept just letting people die where actions can do something about it (some people don't mind this, but the fact is most people do mind and that's why government after government is taking actions to either contain or bring their outbreak under control).

That the argument is about what numbers we'll see in the future, and that the present numbers and how things have gone elsewhere is the basis for that argument about the future.

that currently there are no severe cases because the severe cases died and no new ones have developed to severe yet or then data hasn't been updated yet? — boethius

The data I posted in a post above showed 0% (rounded, it wasn't 0 in actual cases) of current cases were severe. That's the data.

That doubling something many times results in very big numbers. — boethius

Your math is wrong. The spread is exponential, not the death rate. The spread doesn't discriminate. The death rate does, based upon current medical condition.

Some interesting data from Iceland and their large-scale testing efforts..

Iceland health authorities and deCode Genetics have undertaken comprehensive screening for the virus that causes COVID-19 among the Icelandic population. The testing by deCode Genetics started Friday 13 March and the results of the first 5 490 diagnosed tests have yielded 47 positive samples.

To date a total of 3 699 samples have been diagnosed by the healthcare system. The healthcare system's testing has yielded 362 results indicating infection. About a third (36.4%) of cases can be traced to overseas travel, mostly to high-risk areas identified in the European Alps. More than a quarter (27.9%) of cases have been traced to domestic transmission. The rest (35.7%) have not been conclusively traced to a source of transmission.

Current efforts to estimate the prevalence of the SARS-CoV-2 virus within the general, largely non-symptomatic, non-quarantined, population in conjunctions with very expansive testing already performed on those who were symptomatic or were for other reasons considered to be at-risk for having contracted the virus, have resulted in a total of 9 189 individuals in Iceland being tested out of a population of 364 thousand. In terms of tests per one million inhabitants, Iceland has now tested 25 244, which is the highest proportion we are aware of in the world.

This leads to a higher confidence in our efforts to contain the spread of the COVID-19 disease in the country. The combined efforts also provide a very valuable insight into the spread of the virus. In the coming days more results from testing in the general population will continue to elicit a much clearer picture of the actual spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus in Iceland.

https://www.government.is/news/article/2020/03/15/Large-scale-testing-of-general-population-in-Iceland-underway/

coronavirus update:

coronavirus update: — frank

We'll see if this update, whatever it's supposed to mean, will stay accurate for long.

Your math is wrong. The spread is exponential, not the death rate. The spread doesn't discriminate. The death rate does, based upon current medical condition. — Hanover

No, your math is wrong.

The spread does discriminate, based on social distancing measures. It's exponential, during the first outbreak phase, if those measures aren't effective or not even tried.

The death rate is some percentage of the infection rate, without discrimination, not detached from it, for one part. Medical conditions, the discriminatory part, get worse as the system overloads, increasing the death rate.

There's a lag in the data. The same site says zero new cases in Ireland today but 126 have been reported. And mild is probably the default before cases are classified. You need to use your common sense when looking at different figures on different sites and cross-reference.

There is a food crisis in the UK today, the PM announced yesterday that all pubs, restaurants, cafes, etc must close Friday night. Also the schools closed the same day, resulting in panic buying. People who would have eaten out, had to go and buy food to cook and parents went out to buy more food to feed their children out of school. As the shops were already struggling, this resulted in panic buying, which is worst in towns and cities.

There is a food crisis in the UK today, the PM announced yesterday that all pubs, restaurants, cafes, etc must close Friday night. Also the schools closed the same day, resulting in panic buying. — Punshhh

Literally 5 days ago:

UK will do the same as ssu reports Finland is doing. These "changes in strategy" is simply propaganda to walk from "oh, crap, it is a problem I should have realized will hurt the stock market much more by downplaying it compared to being proactive" to the inevitable position of "all hands on deck! to prevent more spread and get this under control! for queen and country lads!" without admitting to any mistakes and pretending it was "people's loved ones" that were the center most priority all along, just a few understandable course corrections along the way — boethius

Just as predictably, the real world outcome of this "PR delay" is to make the situation that much worse.

I figure there'll be flattening as more stringent measures are imposed, so my figure involves a continued fall-off in the log curve along recent Italian lines.



https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/italy/

To me that looks like it'll peak before 100,000 cases. Scale up to America and they should slow down and peak before 1 million (I'm guessing in a couple of months) presuming increasingly strict measures (short of "hammer"-like moves, which still seem unlikely on a national level).

Surely that would cost less than are futile efforts to contain an airborne virus. — Hanover

No, it wouldn't because these efforts are not futile. It's been done. You need to go read.

To me that looks like it'll peak before 100,000 cases. Scale up to America and they should slow down and peak before 1 million (I'm guessing in a couple of months) presuming increasingly strict measures (short of "hammer"-like moves, which still seem unlikely on a national level). — Baden

You are just looking at the mathematics but forget that massive ressources are being thrown at developing treatment for this. I think you will be surprised how soon some treatment is available, and then the statistics will look completely different.

Nobody knows when a treatment or vaccine will become available. If it does happen very soon, yes, it will change things and you can then work that into the maths. You can't work it in when it doesn't exist.

Just as predictably, the real world outcome of this "PR delay" is to make the situation that much worse. — boethius

That is just your TDS speaking here. Trumps initial over-optimistic public statements were bad PR, but at the same time he acted fast and correctly. There is nothing concrete to critiziise here, you are just parrotting the Trump-hating "mainstream" media.

The death rate is some percentage of the infection rate, without discrimination, not detached from it, for one part. Medical conditions, the discriminatory part, get worse as the system overloads, increasing the death rate. — boethius

That is why flattening the curve is important... to avoid overloading the system.

To me that looks like it'll peak before 100,000 cases.

Hopefully the number of people recovering will out number the number of new cases, but I doubt the number of new cases will stop. It would require everyone to isolate against everyone else, which is impossible. Also there is the risk that the virus will exist dormant in carriers and emerge randomly in the future. So as soon as isolation is relaxed it will peak again.

Perhaps these stop and start episodes will reduce in intensity over time until some longer term strategies are developed. In the meantime, such things as economy's will be a thing of the past.

That is just your TDS speaking here. Trumps initial over-optimistic public statements were bad PR, but at the same time he acted fast and correctly. There is nothing concrete to critiziise here, you are just parrotting the Trump-hating "mainstream" media.

We were discussing the situation in the UK, not the US.

Get a grip.

Nobody knows when a treatment or vaccine will become available. If it does happen very soon, yes, it will change things and you can then work that into the maths. You can't work it in when it doesn't exist. — Baden

Nobody knows for sure when, but humankind has a long history of solving problems in an emergency situation, and here we have to unique case that almost the whole world is up against one common enemy. Never bet against our species when it comes to inventing new weapons to win a war, and we are in war against this virus.

We were discussing the situation in the UK, not the US.
Get a grip. — Punshhh

LOL, sorry, with TDS being rampant as it is, I reflexively think somebody is ranting against orangeman agan. Then again, poor Boris is getting almost the same treatment from the media.

Yes, like Boris's idea to shut the schools and restaurants on the same day, when the shops already had empty shelves. Such a stable genius.

The growth of coronavirus isn't exponential in Italy. The acceleration of the number of new positive cases has steadily been declining since the quarantines were imposed in Italy, and has now levelled off to around 0. China reported no new cases 2 days ago too (but I haven't found their raw data in a neat form yet). If it were exponential in actuality, you'd expect the opposite trend; it would be accelerating more and more as time goes on.

All of this drop in rate of new cases can't be attributed to the quarantine measures; people would have probably isolated themselves regardless. But the effect of cutting off as many transmission vectors as possible should not be underestimated.

The growth of coronavirus isn't exponential in Italy. The acceleration of the number of new positive cases has steadily been declining since the quarantines were imposed in Italy, and has now levelled off to around 0. — fdrake

This is still exponential, in a local region of time, just that the doubling time is getting steadily longer according to official diagnosis[/].

Since the system is starting to collapse, the growth of cases could be limited by testing.

Of course, hopefully the exponential growth rate, on a local time scale, is slowing towards inflection in a larger logistics functions (sometime soon).

Although it seems reasonable to assume the measures "are surely working", cause they seem pretty extreme, to get to linear or even exponential-decaying growth rate soon, it is possible the social distancing measures are still maintaining exponential growth, certainly slower than everyone going to restaurants and work and so on, but still exponential.

Effective measures, in a numerical sense, could still mean extending the doubling time, such as to weeks instead of days is still effective. However, doubling the cases in a month rather than 3 days is still pretty effective, numerically speaking; a lot of effort could be needed simply to go from 3 day doubling time to 3 week doubling time, and we don't know if that effort is above or below what Italy has done.

They are having their doubts too, why they have now called in the army to enforce the quarantine better (rather than just help with logistics, such as taking away dead bodies, as they've been doing up until now).

For instance, in China there was observed cases that seem to have spread through pipes. It could spread through vents too, or perhaps even balcony to balcony when the wind is right. There's also just the spread due to movement that is still happening: essential services, going to grocers, etc.

Where exponential growth has been stopped, we saw either earlier measures (such as with South Korea with a classic containment strategy implemented by competent individuals before it was too late to do), or then more extreme (such as China barricading people into neighborhoods and doing a "gate hand-doff" for delivering supplies, and that's assuming their numbers are some basis of what's been going on, which I don't want to just assume because I trust China but experts seem to agree they could not hide continued exponential growth, just hide a lot of the cases and deaths that did happen; such as just letting whoever dies in barricaded neighborhoods and not counting those in the statistics and then passing "no negative opinion about the government" laws to cover it up). Italy was neither early like South Korea nor as extreme as Wuhan, so we cannot conclude Italy measures are "enough" until they actually work.

I definitely hope they are enough, because all of Europe seems passed the "South Korea uses initiative and foresight to get on-top of the problem strategy". Europe has lot's of apartment blocks with old pipes and air ventilation systems. Oh, and still no one's bothered to check if you can get the virus in the mail.

All of this drop in rate of new cases can't be attributed to the quarantine measures; people would have probably isolated themselves regardless. But the effect of cutting off as many transmission vectors as possible should not be underestimated. — fdrake

I don't understand this. For me "quarantine measures" are basically being used to refer to all measures to cut off transmission vectors.

Though technically, quarantine is isolation a potential cases to see if they become cases, whereas all things that cut down transmission vectors is called social distancing. However, in this technical sense, quarantine is the most effective social distancing measure we have.

Are you trying to say something different?

date Diagnosed Deaths
2020-03-14-----------21,157(+20%)-----------1,441(+175 +14%)
2020-03-15-----------24,747(+17%)-----------1,809(+368 +26%)
2020-03-16-----------27,980(+13%)-----------2,158(+349 +19%)
2020-03-17-----------31,506(+13%)-----------2,503(+345 +16%)
2020-03-18-----------35,713(+13%)-----------2,978(+475 +19%)
2020-03-19-----------41,035(+15%)-----------3,405(+427 +14%)
2020-03-20-----------47,021(+15%)-----------4,032(+627 +18%)
2020-03-21-----------53,578(+14%)-----------4,825(+793 +20%) — wikipedia - coronavirus pandemic in Italy

Although this week has reduced the growth rate compared to the week previous which was consistently above 20%, this could represent testing decoupling from new infections, or just a new growth rate that would be sustained until the critical 60-70% of the population is infected (and inflection would occur just because the virus is running out of hosts).

Maybe measures are working and we'd be below 10% next week, and then start to get towards linear growth the week after and then decay the week after that.

Or maybe more measures are needed to get it under control, such as marshal law to enforce the quarantine, as happened today.

No one's calling it marshal law, but that's what it is:

Martial law is the imposition of direct military control of normal civilian functions by a government, especially in response to a temporary emergency such as invasion or major disaster, or in an occupied territory. — Wikipedia - Marshal Law

The Italy case is not cause for too much optimism.

Exactly 1 month ago, there were 21 cases diagnosed in Italy. Now there is marshal law.

Did Gates get it right?

Here's what Bill Gates once said we needed do to prevent a crisis like the coronavirus, and what we need to do to stop the next pandemic (Sinéad Baker, Business Insider, Mar 2020)

This is what Bill Gates had to say about epidemics, back in 2015 (Samantha Sault, World Economic Forum, Mar 2020)

Bill Gates warned us of a COVID-19-like pandemic — watch his TED Talk from 2015 (Taylor Soper, GeekWire, Mar 2020)

Although this week has reduced the growth rate compared to the week previous which was consistently above 20%, this could represent a new growth rate that would be sustained until the critical 60-70% of the population is infected. — boethius

There was an uptick in growth today and yesterday in Italy, it doesn't swamp the downward trend in new case number acceleration when averaging. What I wrote is a summary of the past trend, not an attempt at extrapolation. What has happened: number of new cases per day's rate of increase has been trending toward 0. You simply don't get that behaviour from an exponential function applied to the entire case number trajectory.

This is still exponential, in a local region of time, just that the doubling time is getting steadily longer according to official diagnosis[/]. — boethius

"Exponential in a local region of time" is a lot different from "exponential". The initial burst of growth in new cases you get in epidemics is rightly thought of as exponential, even in an uncontrolled environment the rest of it is sub-exponential growth (due to behavioural changes or saturation effects).

If something is exponential, the doubling time doesn't change. (edit, well, if you have exponential growth and observe a population at time $t_1$, the population will be doubled at $(ln(2)/B)+t_1$ where B is the growth rate, there won't be any "local changes in doubling rate" between the two time points, editedit: well, there will be changes in the derivatives of the curve between the two time points, but no changes in growth parameter).

There was an uptick in growth today and yesterday in Italy, it doesn't swamp the downward trend in new case number acceleration when averaging. — fdrake

That's what I explain: it maybe going towards linear growth, but right now it's still exponential growth, some percentage of the population is growing each iteration.

We cannot "know" which case it is. I'm not arguing against the hypothesis that it's downward trending.

I'm just presenting the fact that we cannot assume it's downward trending, it could be a new local (in terms of time) equilibrium of a new growth rate.

What has happened: number of new cases per day's rate of increase has been trending toward 0. You simply don't get that behaviour from an exponential function applied to the entire case number trajectory. — fdrake

No, I get it. That's why I peppered my statements with "local in time", and I've explained multiple times that exponential growth in this context is short hand for acceleration phase of a logistics function which itself maybe only part of a bigger function on a longer time scale (such as several mass quarantine, relaxing mass-quarantine and peak phases).

However, insofar as the growth is best described as some percentage of the population, then we are still in the exponential growth regime (locally in time).

The quibble that it will eventually stop growing exponentially and be part of another curve is really ridiculous.

It's like saying orbits are not ellipses because eventually a black whole might come through the solar system and make the planets all go in a different curve. Or saying "exponential interest on loans" isn't a real thing because eventually the computer disk space to represent the loan would be heavier than the universe.

All curves describing some real phenomena have a explicit or implied time domain where the observation is valid and some argument why over-fitting the data with a "better curve" would be worse than the proposed curve.

Exponential growth describes how it's "growing now on a timescale we care about".

If we just want to quibble about terminology, I could say "axxuuually, individual viruses and individual infections are discrete events and not described by any curve at all, and anyone not talking discrete mathematics is misrepresenting the situation!" See, it's true, but no productive because the people with the knowledge to understand a mathematical description of what's going on should have the knowledge to put things in context. No one has ever claimed viruses would outweigh the universe (as Elon Musk has pointed out won't happen, or do you think that's like "totally valid criticism of the talk around epidemiology right now"?).

Maybe it's A. decaying towards zero shortly, but maybe not, it might be just representing B. testing no longer keeping up with the growth rate (that testing cannot scale as fast as infections due to logistics problems), or then C. a new steady growth rate for "a while" that requires more policy measures to reduce during that "while" we care about.

Once this situation is created, it becomes very difficult to know what's actually happening, so eventually policy makers just "do everything" when they realize what a single doubling period actually means to the system. Was it needed to barricade people into neighborhoods in Wuhan? Maybe not, or maybe it's essential to get out of the exponential regime. We don't really know.

However, insofar as the growth is best described as some percentage of the population, then we are still in the exponential growth regime (locally time). — boethius

I can't really be bothered continuing this.