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2020-05-06 Science & Technology

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Posted by Bobby 2020-05-06 00:00|| || Front Page|| [4 views ] Top

#1 See if you can duplicate the IHME model, or the Neil Ferguson model (2.2 million deaths in the US) or whatever model you prefer! Then comment on your parameters.

Posted by Bobby 2020-05-06 00:15|| 2020-05-06 00:15|| Front Page Top

#2 I wonder if Fauci stays up all night playing with this version of Tinker-Toys.

Posted by Clem 2020-05-06 00:18|| 2020-05-06 00:18|| Front Page Top

#3 Russia suffers 10,633 new Covid cases in 24 hours giving it fastest-growing rate in Europe
Russia recorded a new record rise in coronavirus infections today with 10,633 cases in the past 24 hours, taking the total to 134,687.

Deaths rose by 58 to 1,280, official figures show, as Russia is now recording more new infections than any European country.

Front-line medical workers have been hit hard with the Moscow mayor Sergei Sobyanin admitting around 2,000 suffering from coronavirus in the capital city.

Moscow has emerged as a hotspot for the virus in Russia, with the mayor earlier estimating from screening results that 2 per cent of the population has been hit - more than a quarter of a million people.

Posted by Woodrow 2020-05-06 02:13|| 2020-05-06 02:13|| Front Page Top

#4 Nice. Except the death rate should have density term - the famous "don't overwhelm medical services". Ditto for med intervention in stages I1 & I2.
And, I guess, E can be eliminated by assuming quasi-steady state (the time one spends in E state very short compared to the times in the three infective states).

On a positive side, if all the idjits bothering us with their "holy [fragile] economy" were forced to play with it a bit ...
Well, I guess, you can lead a Libertarian to water ...

Thanks Robert.

Posted by g(r)omgoru 2020-05-06 02:23|| 2020-05-06 02:23|| Front Page Top

#5 Israeli woman possibly reinfected with coronavirus post-recovery

Posted by g(r)omgoru 2020-05-06 02:53|| 2020-05-06 02:53|| Front Page Top

#6 They missed a few important variables:
- number of politicians who encourage citizens to go to Chinatown or Mardi Gras
- open boarder policy (y/n)
- number of flights daily from China

Posted by Airandee 2020-05-06 05:03|| 2020-05-06 05:03|| Front Page Top

#7 Exclusive: Government scientist Neil Ferguson resigns after breaking lockdown rules to meet his married lover

It was a con from day one.

Posted by Bright Pebbles 2020-05-06 05:45|| 2020-05-06 05:45|| Front Page Top

#8 Neil Ferguson, the scientist who convinced Boris Johnson of UK coronavirus lockdown, criticised in past for flawed research

Posted by Bright Pebbles 2020-05-06 05:49|| 2020-05-06 05:49|| Front Page Top

#9 Let me see if I got the story straight?
Ferguson predicted 1/2 million UK dead without lockdown. There was a lockdown, and the actual numbers are way lower than 1/2M. That proves, what does it prove?

Posted by g(r)omgoru 2020-05-06 06:11|| 2020-05-06 06:11|| Front Page Top

#10 Ferguson's model was a joke. There was no lockdown at all for the first three months of the spread of the virus.

And still, the area that should have had thousands of deaths, according to the joker's typically ridiculous doomsday model, has about the same deaths per population as areas like Germany and Israel that are far less exposed and that imposed lockdowns.

San Francisco did not have a lockdown before March 19, 2020 - long after Chinese New Year celebrations in the city, whose Chinese and Chinese-American population is about 180,000 or ca. 21% of the total.

Of these, at least 20,000 were traveling back and forth to Wuhan and other Chinese cities on direct flights to SFO airport during the height of the virus's spread in December and January. Note that Trump's travel ban imposed at the end of January dies not apply to US citizens.

San Francisco's fatality to population rate is almost identical to that seen in Texas, only marginally above those observed in less dense areas of coastal California, and similar to Israel's: 29:880,000, or about 1:30,000.

Posted by Lex 2020-05-06 07:01|| 2020-05-06 07:01|| Front Page Top

#11 It may be the case, as some Oxford researchers contend, that Europe was hit by a different strain of COVID from the strain that hit California. They label the three strains 'A' 'B' and 'C,' with 'A' being the original Wuhan virus which hit California and 'B' the strain that has duress through Asia. 'C' is what hit Italy and the rest of Europe. Their summary:

...we find three central variants distinguished by amino acid changes, which we have named A, B, and C, with A being the ancestral type according to the bat outgroup coronavirus.

The A and C types are found in significant proportions outside East Asia, that is, in Europeans and Americans. In contrast, the B type is the most common type in East Asia, and its ancestral genome appears not to have spread outside East Asia without first mutating into derived B types, pointing to founder effects or immunological or environmental resistance against this type outside Asia.

Posted by Lex 2020-05-06 07:14|| 2020-05-06 07:14|| Front Page Top

#12 This whole "catastrophe" comes under the heading:

Lies, damn lies and statistics.

Posted by AlanC 2020-05-06 07:18|| 2020-05-06 07:18|| Front Page Top

#13 The A and C types are found in significant proportions outside East Asia, that is, in Europeans and Americans. In contrast, the B type is the most common type in East Asia, and its ancestral genome appears not to have spread outside East Asia without first mutating into derived B types, pointing to founder effects or immunological or environmental resistance against this type outside Asia.

Variant testing ?

Posted by Besoeker 2020-05-06 07:19|| 2020-05-06 07:19|| Front Page Top

#14 Study Claims European Strain Of Coronavirus Is More Infectious Than The Original (But Is It?) (Update: Virologist Says This Looks Shoddy)

It's based on this pre-print, which is strictly a computational analysis of virus sequences. They found a mutation that became dominant over time but didn't do anything to show its functional significance in transmission

Spike D614G may well have functional importance. It may even increase transmissibility. But we won't know until this is tested experimentally. There's no basis for the breathless OMG #SARSCoV2 HAS MUTATED TO BE MORE TRANSMISSIBLE WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE tone in the LA Times piece.

Posted by g(r)omgoru 2020-05-06 07:27|| 2020-05-06 07:27|| Front Page Top

#15 Bright Pebbles' linked Telegraph article above is behind the paywall. Here's another summary of the track record over the last several decades of not only Ferguson's but other epidemic researchers' ridiculous doomsday hypotheticals. Excerpt:

... avian flu strain A/H5N1, “even in the best-case scenarios” was to “cause 2 (million) to 7 million deaths” worldwide. A British professor named Neil Ferguson scaled that up to 200 million. It killed 440.

This same Ferguson in 2002 had projected 50-50,000 deaths from so-called “Mad Cow Disease.” On its face, what possible good is a spread that large? (We shall return to this.) But the final toll was slightly over 200.

Posted by Lex 2020-05-06 07:31|| 2020-05-06 07:31|| Front Page Top

#16 ^ and this proven incompetent, whose previous projections were, repeatedly, off by not one or two orders but off by literally FOUR orders of magnitude (avian flu projection) and SIX orders of magnitude (Mad Cow) -- this loon's BS model was the basis for policy-making.

Posted by Lex 2020-05-06 07:35|| 2020-05-06 07:35|| Front Page Top

#17 * Off by six orders for Mad Cow, two orders for avian flu.

Posted by Lex 2020-05-06 07:40|| 2020-05-06 07:40|| Front Page Top

#18 #12 This whole "catastrophe" comes under the heading:
Lies, damn lies and ~~statistics~~ Fergusons.

Posted by Lex 2020-05-06 07:41|| 2020-05-06 07:41|| Front Page Top

#19 Like the media, "experts" have lost credibility they will never recoup. And they will bitterly blame that result on us ungrateful rubes.

Posted by M. Murcek 2020-05-06 08:02|| 2020-05-06 08:02|| Front Page Top

#20 Reminds me a bit of that nuclear explosion dealywopper a few years back where you could choose lat and long, kilos, and altitude and it would kick a number back at you.

Interesting, but not remotely accurate, useful for games like DEFCOM.

Posted by swksvolFF 2020-05-06 10:51|| 2020-05-06 10:51|| Front Page Top

#21 /\ Would you like to model an [Marvin the Martian voice] "Earth shattering Kaboom"? Earth Impacts Effects Program

Posted by magpie 2020-05-06 12:06|| 2020-05-06 12:06|| Front Page Top

#22 Game of Life

Posted by Skidmark 2020-05-06 13:12|| 2020-05-06 13:12|| Front Page Top

#23 Models are crystal balls. Don't like what you see? Change the variables.

Posted by Bobby 2020-05-06 13:39|| 2020-05-06 13:39|| Front Page Top

#24 Anyone who has drummed up a spread sheet to play games with their pay and savings and expenditures has created a model.

Now increase your pay or increase your spending and see what happens to your savings or life.

This is all these bozos are doing just using more complicated formulae with more variables.

Unless they're willing to make all the code visible, along with the variables and data it's just another lie.

Posted by AlanC 2020-05-06 15:12|| 2020-05-06 15:12|| Front Page Top

23:52 Bobby
23:41 Bobby
23:37 Lex
22:19 Zhang Fei
22:18 Anomalous Sources
21:55 trailing wife
21:04 Clem
20:44 Procopius2k
20:44 KBK
20:32 KBK
20:28 Lex
20:20 Clem
20:18 KBK
20:16 Lex
20:07 Phusotle Dingle5823
19:57 KBK
19:53 KBK
19:35 Procopius2k
19:31 Whiskey Mike
18:13 KBK
18:11 KBK
18:10 Frank G
18:03 Frank G
17:52 jpal