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Taking it to the Streets - Covid-19 #12


Fragile Bird

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With respect to the Swedish R0 values, shoudn't they be much higher than the numbers everyone else is using in order for the 1/3 of Stockholm being infected by May 1st?  I'd like to see the models they are using and the values of the parameters over time.  I think the assumption was that a bunch of cases were seeded in Stockholm when they returned from Italy from ski vacations.  When did that happen?  Shouldn't northern Italy already be at herd immunity then?  The numbers just don't seem to make sense to me right now.

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Donald Trump repeatedly mentions an unnamed country (‘I could name them but I won’t’) that is doing ‘really badly, so many deaths’ because they are trying ‘herd mentality’ (I think that’s the word he uses, he doesn’t use immunity) which the US thought about but if they did ‘there would have been a million, a million and a half, two million deaths!’

Doesn’t he mean Sweden?

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5 minutes ago, Fragile Bird said:

Donald Trump repeatedly mentions an unnamed country (‘I could name them but I won’t’) that is doing ‘really badly, so many deaths’ because they are trying ‘herd mentality’ (I think that’s the word he uses, he doesn’t use immunity) which the US thought about but if they did ‘there would have been a million, a million and a half, two million deaths!’

Doesn’t he mean Sweden?

Transylvania

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7 minutes ago, Fragile Bird said:

Donald Trump repeatedly mentions an unnamed country (‘I could name them but I won’t’) that is doing ‘really badly, so many deaths’ because they are trying ‘herd mentality’ (I think that’s the word he uses, he doesn’t use immunity) which the US thought about but if they did ‘there would have been a million, a million and a half, two million deaths!’

Doesn’t he mean Sweden?

Yes, definitely Sweden.  Soon he'll be arguing that we should be doing the same thing as Sweden, and pretend that he never criticized their approach.

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7 minutes ago, Fragile Bird said:

Can anyone explain why Belgium and The Netherlands have been hit so hard?

We will know one day but not today. There are few weird things I've been observing.

- Spain and Italy are not yet really over the curve as the number of active cases is still increasing (albeit at a lower rate), despite the heavy handed lockdown that they imposed more than a month ago. Their curves seem to extend forever.

- Germany and Austria are recovering at full steam despite comparatively relaxed quarantine rules.

- Chile in S. America is implementing localized and dynamic lockdowns plus a series or complementary measures. The curve is mostly flat with up and down depending on the day of the week

What is going on?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Las Vegas mayor wants to re-open the city.   But she says that casino owners should determine social distancing and safety measures themselves, that it's not her job. I may be nuts, but I think that sort of thing would be local government's job?

It would be some crazy-ass times if Vegas turned the neon back on, and some casinos advertised a wholly safe experience with every other slot machine covered up,, two people to a blackjack table, limited people in the buffet line. Then across the street, the other casino has a giant sign saying "Fuck it, come in and party everyone, masks are for pussies!"

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1 hour ago, Mudguard said:

 

I'd like to see the models they are using and the values of the parameters over time.  I think the assumption was that a bunch of cases were seeded in Stockholm when they returned from Italy from ski vacations. 

Yes, that's believed to have been a big factor.

1 hour ago, Mudguard said:

When did that happen? 

The winter vacation in Stockholm was week 9, so March 1st to March 7th. People started coming back after that. March 8th was the quarantine of all of Lombardy and a bunch of other northern provinces, and the day after that the entirety of Italy.

1 hour ago, Mudguard said:

Shouldn't northern Italy already be at herd immunity then?

Late February was when it was starting to blow up, and was full blown just as the Stockholmers were getting ready to get back from their skiing holiday. I don't think herd immunity would have been feasible by then no matter what R0 you have.  It's a lot of people to infect.
 

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5 hours ago, ljkeane said:

I mean we're speculating wildly at this point but San Francisco's a major city so obviously it's not uncrowded but my experience was that it's a lot less crowded than New York. I'd assume it's generally a lot warmer than New York in February/March too, temperature might not factor directly into how infectious the virus is but if people are spending more time outside rather than packed indoors in bars and restaurants etc that might help. I think New Orleans had Mardi Gras like normal which probably didn't help on that front. Maybe it's just luck and early cases didn't infect a lot of other people for whatever reason. :dunno:

I remember reading in the last couple of days a claim that there was a correlation between air pollution (I think they were looking at NO2 levels) and severity of outbreaks. I've never made it to San Francisco so I don't know how its air quality compares to cities like New York and London which have been hit hard.

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1 hour ago, Fragile Bird said:

Can anyone explain why Belgium and The Netherlands have been hit so hard?

I think the Netherlands wanted to go down the road with letting it rage and get the herd immunity up quick, at least initially.

I assume they have decided to switch over to social distancing at som point. Anyway, I guess our Neverlanders can answer that question more profoundly.

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The thing I'd be particularly concerned about with Sweden's approach is that the testing really isn't there yet.  According to Worldometer, their tests/capita is lower than the US (which is itself ridiculously low), and well behind countries like Norway, Germany, Spain, Denmark, etc. 

That being said, Sweden isn't seeing a disaster unfolding just yet.  It seems like their approach is keeping the R at right around 1.  Which is...not great, but hardly a catastrophe.  I'd still feel a lot better about their strategy if testing was more readily available. 

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35 minutes ago, Ran said:

Late February was when it was starting to blow up, and was full blown just as the Stockholmers were getting ready to get back from their skiing holiday. I don't think herd immunity would have been feasible by then no matter what R0 you have.  It's a lot of people to infect.
 

My use of the term "then" was confusing.  What I was trying to ask was: Shouldn't Italy be at or close to herd immunity now if they were so far ahead of Sweden at that time?  What percentage of Swedes and how many in total came back infected in the Swedish model?  From that estimate, you can roughly estimate the percentage of Italians in the area that were infected at the time, and then based on estimates of the doubling rate, estimate where Italy should be by now.  Do these numbers line up with the percentage of Italians that have been determined to be infected?

These are the types of numbers I'd like to see from the Swedish model.  The doubling rate in Sweden appears to be relatively slow, and the R0 appears to be at around 1 for some time now based on the reported numbers of new cases, so it's hard for me to see how 300,000 people in Stockholm would be infected by May 1st, unless there was a huge explosion of case numbers at the beginning.  The numbers don't make sense to me right now.

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6 minutes ago, A Horse Named Stranger said:

I think the Netherlands wanted to go down the road with letting it rage and get the herd immunity up quick, at least initially.

I assume they have decided to switch over to social distancing at som point. Anyway, I guess our Neverlanders can answer that question more profoundly.

Belgium seems harder to explain, they seem to be even worse hit and I got the impression they were taking a more conventional social distancing approach.

In better news, St Lucia have become the latest country to say they've got to zero active cases and I find it a bit more plausible for a small island nation than African countries like Mauritania.

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17 minutes ago, Mudguard said:

Shouldn't Italy be at or close to herd immunity now if they were so far ahead of Sweden at that time?

I've seen arguments that parts of northern Italy already are, but the other thing that has to be factored is how much the lockdown in Italy brought down Ro. I'm not sure if there's been any larger studies on this or not.

I've found some additional info on the model that was withdrawn, namely a copy of the paper itself. It's in Swedish but you can probably translate bits and pieces to understand the methodology and some of the inputs (like the effective reproduction rate used in the various scenarios). I'm not sure which variable was the problematic one that caused the problem with the model, though.

 

 

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3 minutes ago, Ran said:

I've seen arguments that parts of northern Italy already are, but the other thing that has to be factored is how much the lockdown in Italy brought down Ro. I'm not sure if there's been any larger studies on this or not.

I've found some additional info on the model that was withdrawn, namely a copy of the paper itself. It's in Swedish but you can probably translate bits and pieces to understand the methodology and some of the inputs (like the effective reproduction rate used in the various scenarios). I'm not sure which variable was the problematic one that caused the problem with the model, though.

 

 

I played around with numbers on a spreadsheet, and if you assume that the R0 is constant for a month, and you start with 100 infected, and you assume that transmission occurs in 5 days, the numbers of infected after 30 days varies hugely depending on the value you use for R0.  For example, if R0 is 2, you'd have about 73,000 infected after 30 days.  If R0 is 2.5, you'd have about 184,000 infected.  If R0 is 3, you'd have about 410,000 infected.  

So the 300k number seems possible, but it's also possible that it's way off, unless there is good testing data.  The 2.5% study is particularly interesting if well done, since it could be used to estimate some of these parameters.  People should be running these types of studies periodically to determine the numbers of active infections in the community.  It's a very good idea by Sweden.  That said, the R0 number, and how it is affected by the different social distancing measures, are huge unknowns right now, and differs for each country and community.  It's why I'm skeptical every time I hear people citing models.  Still way too much uncertainty around the numbers.

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