When is the Covid war over?

On Saturday, March 28, 2020 at 7:04:13 PM UTC-4, Clifford Heath wrote:
On 29/3/20 9:11 am, Rick C wrote:
I'm using the US daily data published by worldometers.info.

Don't make that mistake. Data from arbitrary sources collects it in different ways. worldometers.info updates their daily number once a day "Data as of 0:00 GMT+0". Consistency in timing is important if you are just looking at what is supposed to be a 24 hour number.


I guarantee you they still get the data "as it comes" - sporadic
reporting - and just tell you the figures at 0:00GMT+0. They're not
telling you what the trend line would be at 0:00GMT+0. So it's still
noisy data, depending on the noise in the reporting they receive.

We aren't talking about the same thing. I don't know how to make it any more clear, so I give up. I'll have new data in a couple more hours and I'll see what the result is.

--

Rick C.

+-+ Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
+-+ Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209
 
On 29/3/20 10:23 am, Rick C wrote:
On Saturday, March 28, 2020 at 7:00:54 PM UTC-4, Clifford Heath wrote:
On 28/3/20 7:45 pm, Jeff Layman wrote:
On 28/03/20 03:00, Bill Sloman wrote:

But the Covid-19 death numbers are growing exponentially. If James
Arthur's 1.24 increase per day persists for 23 days, there will be
have been as many Civd-19 deaths in those 23 days as 216k respiratory
disease deaths that the US has in a year.

I can understand the general public having little comprehension of what
"exponential" means, but I am surprised that it seems to have been
ignored or misunderstood by those who should know better.

Economists and politicians spend their entire lives managing and
worrying about systems that are mostly linear (or very low-order
polynomial). They have massive cognitive biases against any system being
driven by fundamentally non-linear behaviour - they just can't really
conceive of it.

Economists??? I had roommate in college pursuing a PhD in economics. He had to swat a ton of math. It's virtually all math.

Granted. And almost all of it is linear or low-order polynomial. It
produces an entrenched bias against even considering any exponential
behaviour (other than compound interest; I mean where the doubling time
isn't a long-term thing)

CH
 
On Sun, 29 Mar 2020 10:00:50 +1100, Clifford Heath
<no.spam@please.net> wrote:

On 28/3/20 7:45 pm, Jeff Layman wrote:
On 28/03/20 03:00, Bill Sloman wrote:

But the Covid-19 death numbers are growing exponentially. If James
Arthur's 1.24 increase per day persists for 23 days, there will be
have been as many Civd-19 deaths in those 23 days as 216k respiratory
disease deaths that the US has in a year.

I can understand the general public having little comprehension of what
"exponential" means, but I am surprised that it seems to have been
ignored or misunderstood by those who should know better.

Economists and politicians spend their entire lives managing and
worrying about systems that are mostly linear (or very low-order
polynomial). They have massive cognitive biases against any system being
driven by fundamentally non-linear behaviour - they just can't really
conceive of it.

CH

Even worse, they don't understand control theory, how time lags and
feedbacks affect things. They always react too much too late, add too
much lag, which makes things ring or oscillate. Economists are, if
anything, worse. Nobody understands damping.





--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

The cork popped merrily, and Lord Peter rose to his feet.
"Bunter", he said, "I give you a toast. The triumph of Instinct over Reason"
 
On Saturday, March 28, 2020 at 7:45:55 PM UTC-4, Clifford Heath wrote:
On 29/3/20 10:23 am, Rick C wrote:
On Saturday, March 28, 2020 at 7:00:54 PM UTC-4, Clifford Heath wrote:
On 28/3/20 7:45 pm, Jeff Layman wrote:
On 28/03/20 03:00, Bill Sloman wrote:

But the Covid-19 death numbers are growing exponentially. If James
Arthur's 1.24 increase per day persists for 23 days, there will be
have been as many Civd-19 deaths in those 23 days as 216k respiratory
disease deaths that the US has in a year.

I can understand the general public having little comprehension of what
"exponential" means, but I am surprised that it seems to have been
ignored or misunderstood by those who should know better.

Economists and politicians spend their entire lives managing and
worrying about systems that are mostly linear (or very low-order
polynomial). They have massive cognitive biases against any system being
driven by fundamentally non-linear behaviour - they just can't really
conceive of it.

Economists??? I had roommate in college pursuing a PhD in economics. He had to swat a ton of math. It's virtually all math.

Granted. And almost all of it is linear or low-order polynomial. It
produces an entrenched bias against even considering any exponential
behaviour (other than compound interest; I mean where the doubling time
isn't a long-term thing)

I don't know who you've been talking to but this guy was doing math I'd never seen before. Not linear, not "low order".

I also met an economist in the late 80's who I later ran into on a plane. He told me about the theory that because of the limitations of resources in the world we would not live as well as our parents, our children would not live as well as us, etc. That theory seems to have missed out on the idea that science finds ways to do more with less. It's not all about what you can dig from the earth. I guess it's a bit of a green revolution of other resources.

--

Rick C.

++- Get 1,000 miles of free Supercharging
++- Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209
 
On Saturday, March 28, 2020 at 4:53:01 PM UTC-7, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Sun, 29 Mar 2020 10:00:50 +1100, Clifford Heath
no.spam@please.net> wrote:

Economists and politicians spend their entire lives managing and
worrying about systems that are mostly linear (or very low-order
polynomial). They have massive cognitive biases against any system being
driven by fundamentally non-linear behaviour...

Even worse, they don't understand control theory, how time lags and
feedbacks affect things. They always react too much too late, add too
much lag...

The control-theory problem with US politics includes hysteresis. The
'war on drugs' over-emphasis on long sentences has clogged prisons to
a shocking extent. We also see indications of a small constituency that
wants privacy to be eliminated (citing horror crimes with circa 1E3 participants
to lockdown 3E8 citizens' ability to use encryption).

To get rid of the 'too much too late' responses, someone has to admit
they overreacted. Trump has this reputation; it
took him years to recognize a birth certificate.
 
On Sat, 28 Mar 2020 06:49:41 -0700 (PDT),
bloggs.fredbloggs.fred@gmail.com wrote:

On Friday, March 27, 2020 at 3:44:03 PM UTC-4, Harry D wrote:

Trump is mainly concerned about reducing a possible humongous deficit that is on course to break $4T. FY20 budget was on course to break $1T as it was, then the $2T recovery package is pure deficit, bringing the total to $3T. Since the FY is only at the 50% mark, a loss of $1T in tax revenue by year end is very likely an underestimate given the looks of the economy. That totals to $4T. The morons are heading for default.

Anybody who can print money will never default.



--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

The cork popped merrily, and Lord Peter rose to his feet.
"Bunter", he said, "I give you a toast. The triumph of Instinct over Reason"
 
On Sunday, March 29, 2020 at 3:57:01 AM UTC+11, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Sat, 28 Mar 2020 08:45:11 +0000, Jeff Layman
jmlayman@invalid.invalid> wrote:

On 28/03/20 03:00, Bill Sloman wrote:

But the Covid-19 death numbers are growing exponentially. If James Arthur's 1.24 increase per day persists for 23 days, there will be have been as many Civd-19 deaths in those 23 days as 216k respiratory disease deaths that the US has in a year.

I can understand the general public having little comprehension of what
"exponential" means, but I am surprised that it seems to have been
ignored or misunderstood by those who should know better. Stating
figures about deaths from other causes misses the point entirely; they
are known causes, understood, and changes in the death rate - whether
up, down, or constant, is explicable, linear, and usually minor.

One other point is misunderstood. We talk about treatment by intensive
care and use of ventilators. The problem is those are finite sources,
maybe increasing slightly as time goes on, but the exponential growth of
coronavirus infections will drown those increases. If there are 10000
ventilators today, and 20000 next week, it won't help much if there are
10000 cases of Covid-19 today and 100000 next week.

I understand exponential growth. There would be 1 million the
following week, then 10 million the next week, and 100 billion cases a
month after that. The US will hit 100 billion cases around the end of
April.

John Larkin's attempt to be satirical makes it clear that he doesn't understand satire either.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney
 
On Sunday, March 29, 2020 at 12:21:47 PM UTC+11, Flyguy wrote:
On Saturday, March 28, 2020 at 4:00:54 PM UTC-7, Clifford Heath wrote:
On 28/3/20 7:45 pm, Jeff Layman wrote:
On 28/03/20 03:00, Bill Sloman wrote:

But the Covid-19 death numbers are growing exponentially. If James
Arthur's 1.24 increase per day persists for 23 days, there will be
have been as many Civd-19 deaths in those 23 days as 216k respiratory
disease deaths that the US has in a year.

I can understand the general public having little comprehension of what
"exponential" means, but I am surprised that it seems to have been
ignored or misunderstood by those who should know better.

Economists and politicians spend their entire lives managing and
worrying about systems that are mostly linear (or very low-order
polynomial). They have massive cognitive biases against any system being
driven by fundamentally non-linear behaviour - they just can't really
conceive of it.

It makes their neat mathematical models useless, but monetarist are the only group to reject reality in favour of a mathematically tractable model.

Keynes accepted non-linearity back in the 1930's, and neo-Keynsianism is the most widely accpeted theory around today.


> I believe that Pres. Trump recognized the threat of COVID early on, which is why he shut down travel to and from China at the major risk of being called a racist.

Not exactly right. He exploited it to justify a racist travel ban. He did absolutely squat about preparing the US to deal with the problem when infected people from other countries reached the US.

> He has taken bold actions proportional to the threat, including invoking the Defense Production Act. He is open to any reasonable idea on how to deal with this crisis.

He was eventually forced to take the situation seriously, but the fact that the first US test kits distributed to test for the virus didn't work does suggest a certain lack of comprehension.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney
 
On Saturday, March 28, 2020 at 6:03:36 PM UTC-7, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Sunday, March 29, 2020 at 6:35:50 AM UTC+11, Flyguy wrote:
On Saturday, March 28, 2020 at 11:36:41 AM UTC-7, Rick C wrote:
On Saturday, March 28, 2020 at 2:12:22 PM UTC-4, Jeff Layman wrote:
On 28/03/20 16:56, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:

I understand exponential growth. There would be 1 million the
following week, then 10 million the next week, and 100 billion cases a
month after that. The US will hit 100 billion cases around the end of
April.

And 5 weeks previously there would be 0.1 of a case, and the week before
that 0.01 of a case, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum

You do realize you won't make any difference in what he says, right? It's not like he is an unknown quantity around here.

Infection rates (cases ppm) vary widely from state-to-state. The lowest rate (Nebraska) is 52 times less than NY. Thus, imposing (and relaxing) lockdown edicts need to be made, not only on a state-by-state, but also a county-by-county basis.

Flyguy is too stupid to realise that the infection rate is merely the progress variable.

What matters is R0 - the number of people each newly infected person manages to infect before they become symptomatic and get whisked off into isolation.

If you aren't practicing some kind of isolation, that number is between 2..5 and 3 on average - go to a big family party and you can infect a lot more people.

If your area has got any infected people, it needs to be in lock-down.

The number of COVID cases in the US grew by 24% in just the last 24 hr (93,000 to 115,334). This was expected as testing became more widely available. The biggest jump was NJ, where the number jumped by 62%.

It was also expected because this is fairly infectious disease. If you aren't doing anything to slow down person to person infection, the number of people infected goes up rapidly, whether or not you are testing them.

Enough of them get seriously ill with viral pneumonia that you'll notice even if you are short of test kits.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

You, apparently, are TOO STUPID to understand what I calculated. It is EXACTLY your R0: a higher infection rate means that each infected person is infecting MORE people than a state with a lower rate. And the data gives you a better idea of which states are doing a better job (NE) and which ones are doing a horrible job (NY, NJ, LA).
 
On Sunday, March 29, 2020 at 6:50:41 AM UTC+11, jla...@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Sat, 28 Mar 2020 18:12:15 +0000, Jeff Layman
jmlayman@invalid.invalid> wrote:

On 28/03/20 16:56, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Sat, 28 Mar 2020 08:45:11 +0000, Jeff Layman
jmlayman@invalid.invalid> wrote:

On 28/03/20 03:00, Bill Sloman wrote:

<snip>

I'm halfway through re-reading Barry's great and terrible book The
Great Influenza. It's horrifying. H1N1 was insanely infectuous and
killed millions of healthy young people in ghastly ways.

The R0 for the Spanish flu was a little lower than for Covid-19 - 1.4 to 2.8, with a mean of 2. R0 for Covid-19 seems to be from 2.5 to 3.0, absent social distancing and lock-down

Some died 12 hours after first symptoms. In some towns 80% of the population got seriously sick. Estimated deaths are 20-100 million, in a smaller world. Anyone interested in the current pandemic should read his book.

If this C19 thing turns out to be a hyped seasonal cold, its benefit
may be that the world finally does some rational assessment of risk
and some serious research to prepare for it.

John Larkin persists in this silly idea that Covid-19 might be an over-hyped seasonal cold. It kills about an order of magnitude more people than seasonal flu and kills quite enough 20-to-30 year-olds to be obviously worse.

> Another 1918-type flu could be thousands of times worse than this corona thing.

How? If it killed 100% of the people it infected and was more infectious, it could kill everybody, which would be 8 billion deaths, or 260,000 times more than the number dead so far. We are going to see a lot more deaths from Covid-19, so there probably won't bee room for anything to be a thousand times worse.

> Or a comet strike, or a big earthquake.

I think he meant asteroid strike. Comets aren't all that massive.

Big earthquakes are local events.

I guess the criterion would be to
optimize research spending scaled to the probable cost per life saved.
Imagine what we could have done with the money we wasted on failed
military projects, stupid wars, the space shuttle/ISS, the
Supercollider, or the several manufactured investment crises.

John Larkin has some funny ideas about what counts as wasted.

If the original virus were recovered from a frozen body or something,
would it start a similar epidemic now? Probably not. I wonder why.

The original Spanish flu virus has been recovered from frozen bodies, and sequenced. It hasn't started a similar epidemic because nobody has been silly enough to let it infect anybody. It is just one more variation on seasonal flu.

https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/qa/1918flupandemic.htm

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney
 
On Sunday, March 29, 2020 at 6:35:50 AM UTC+11, Flyguy wrote:
On Saturday, March 28, 2020 at 11:36:41 AM UTC-7, Rick C wrote:
On Saturday, March 28, 2020 at 2:12:22 PM UTC-4, Jeff Layman wrote:
On 28/03/20 16:56, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:

I understand exponential growth. There would be 1 million the
following week, then 10 million the next week, and 100 billion cases a
month after that. The US will hit 100 billion cases around the end of
April.

And 5 weeks previously there would be 0.1 of a case, and the week before
that 0.01 of a case, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum

You do realize you won't make any difference in what he says, right? It's not like he is an unknown quantity around here.

Infection rates (cases ppm) vary widely from state-to-state. The lowest rate (Nebraska) is 52 times less than NY. Thus, imposing (and relaxing) lockdown edicts need to be made, not only on a state-by-state, but also a county-by-county basis.

Flyguy is too stupid to realise that the infection rate is merely the progress variable.

What matters is R0 - the number of people each newly infected person manages to infect before they become symptomatic and get whisked off into isolation.

If you aren't practicing some kind of isolation, that number is between 2.5 and 3 on average - go to a big family party and you can infect a lot more people.

If your area has got any infected people, it needs to be in lock-down.

> The number of COVID cases in the US grew by 24% in just the last 24 hr (93,000 to 115,334). This was expected as testing became more widely available. The biggest jump was NJ, where the number jumped by 62%.

It was also expected because this is fairly infectious disease. If you aren't doing anything to slow down person to person infection, the number of people infected goes up rapidly, whether or not you are testing them.

Enough of them get seriously ill with viral pneumonia that you'll notice even if you are short of test kits.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney
 
On 28/03/20 23:52, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Sun, 29 Mar 2020 10:00:50 +1100, Clifford Heath
no.spam@please.net> wrote:

On 28/3/20 7:45 pm, Jeff Layman wrote:
On 28/03/20 03:00, Bill Sloman wrote:

But the Covid-19 death numbers are growing exponentially. If James
Arthur's 1.24 increase per day persists for 23 days, there will be
have been as many Civd-19 deaths in those 23 days as 216k respiratory
disease deaths that the US has in a year.

I can understand the general public having little comprehension of what
"exponential" means, but I am surprised that it seems to have been
ignored or misunderstood by those who should know better.

Economists and politicians spend their entire lives managing and
worrying about systems that are mostly linear (or very low-order
polynomial). They have massive cognitive biases against any system being
driven by fundamentally non-linear behaviour - they just can't really
conceive of it.

CH

Even worse, they don't understand control theory, how time lags and
feedbacks affect things. They always react too much too late, add too
much lag, which makes things ring or oscillate. Economists are, if
anything, worse. Nobody understands damping.

Not true.

A century ago economists described what became
known as the "Hog Cycle" or "Pork Cycle".

Feedback and time delay are inherent in the model.
 
On Saturday, March 28, 2020 at 4:00:54 PM UTC-7, Clifford Heath wrote:
On 28/3/20 7:45 pm, Jeff Layman wrote:
On 28/03/20 03:00, Bill Sloman wrote:

But the Covid-19 death numbers are growing exponentially. If James
Arthur's 1.24 increase per day persists for 23 days, there will be
have been as many Civd-19 deaths in those 23 days as 216k respiratory
disease deaths that the US has in a year.

I can understand the general public having little comprehension of what
"exponential" means, but I am surprised that it seems to have been
ignored or misunderstood by those who should know better.

Economists and politicians spend their entire lives managing and
worrying about systems that are mostly linear (or very low-order
polynomial). They have massive cognitive biases against any system being
driven by fundamentally non-linear behaviour - they just can't really
conceive of it.

CH

I believe that Pres. Trump recognized the threat of COVID early on, which is why he shut down travel to and from China at the major risk of being called a racist. He has taken bold actions proportional to the threat, including invoking the Defense Production Act. He is open to any reasonable idea on how to deal with this crisis.
 
On Sunday, March 29, 2020 at 12:33:01 PM UTC+11, Flyguy wrote:
On Saturday, March 28, 2020 at 6:03:36 PM UTC-7, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Sunday, March 29, 2020 at 6:35:50 AM UTC+11, Flyguy wrote:
On Saturday, March 28, 2020 at 11:36:41 AM UTC-7, Rick C wrote:
On Saturday, March 28, 2020 at 2:12:22 PM UTC-4, Jeff Layman wrote:
On 28/03/20 16:56, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:

I understand exponential growth. There would be 1 million the
following week, then 10 million the next week, and 100 billion cases a
month after that. The US will hit 100 billion cases around the end of
April.

And 5 weeks previously there would be 0.1 of a case, and the week before
that 0.01 of a case, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum

You do realize you won't make any difference in what he says, right? It's not like he is an unknown quantity around here.

Infection rates (cases ppm) vary widely from state-to-state. The lowest rate (Nebraska) is 52 times less than NY. Thus, imposing (and relaxing) lockdown edicts need to be made, not only on a state-by-state, but also a county-by-county basis.

Flyguy is too stupid to realise that the infection rate is merely the progress variable.

What matters is R0 - the number of people each newly infected person manages to infect before they become symptomatic and get whisked off into isolation.

If you aren't practicing some kind of isolation, that number is between 2.5 and 3 on average - go to a big family party and you can infect a lot more people.

If your area has got any infected people, it needs to be in lock-down.

The number of COVID cases in the US grew by 24% in just the last 24 hr (93,000 to 115,334). This was expected as testing became more widely available. The biggest jump was NJ, where the number jumped by 62%.

It was also expected because this is fairly infectious disease. If you aren't doing anything to slow down person to person infection, the number of people infected goes up rapidly, whether or not you are testing them.

Enough of them get seriously ill with viral pneumonia that you'll notice even if you are short of test kits.

You, apparently, are TOO STUPID to understand what I calculated. It is EXACTLY your R0: a higher infection rate means that each infected person is infecting MORE people than a state with a lower rate.

Wrong. The stupidity is all yours. The infection rate - number of people infected per 100,000 or million - reflects both the R0 and the length of time that the virus has been spreading in a state.

The R0 tends to be pretty stable until you start contact tracing or social distancing. The date of the first infection in a state has a much bigger effect on the proportion of people infected - until the authorities get serious about dealing with it.

>And the data gives you a better idea of which states are doing a better job (NE) and which ones are doing a horrible job (NY, NJ, LA).

New York and New Jersey got exposed to a lot of infected international travelers early.

Louisiana seems to have imported a lot of infected people for Mardi Gras and given them every chance to infect everybody else - the R0 in a densely packed crowd can be well above three.

New England is rather less visited.

Like I said, the stupidity is all yours, and you do go out of your way to remind us how terminally stupid you are.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney
 
On Sat, 28 Mar 2020 18:32:55 -0700 (PDT), Flyguy <tomseim2g@gmail.com>
wrote:

On Saturday, March 28, 2020 at 6:03:36 PM UTC-7, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Sunday, March 29, 2020 at 6:35:50 AM UTC+11, Flyguy wrote:
On Saturday, March 28, 2020 at 11:36:41 AM UTC-7, Rick C wrote:
On Saturday, March 28, 2020 at 2:12:22 PM UTC-4, Jeff Layman wrote:
On 28/03/20 16:56, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:

I understand exponential growth. There would be 1 million the
following week, then 10 million the next week, and 100 billion cases a
month after that. The US will hit 100 billion cases around the end of
April.

And 5 weeks previously there would be 0.1 of a case, and the week before
that 0.01 of a case, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum

You do realize you won't make any difference in what he says, right? It's not like he is an unknown quantity around here.

Infection rates (cases ppm) vary widely from state-to-state. The lowest rate (Nebraska) is 52 times less than NY. Thus, imposing (and relaxing) lockdown edicts need to be made, not only on a state-by-state, but also a county-by-county basis.

Flyguy is too stupid to realise that the infection rate is merely the progress variable.

What matters is R0 - the number of people each newly infected person manages to infect before they become symptomatic and get whisked off into isolation.

If you aren't practicing some kind of isolation, that number is between 2.5 and 3 on average - go to a big family party and you can infect a lot more people.

If your area has got any infected people, it needs to be in lock-down.

The number of COVID cases in the US grew by 24% in just the last 24 hr (93,000 to 115,334). This was expected as testing became more widely available. The biggest jump was NJ, where the number jumped by 62%.

It was also expected because this is fairly infectious disease. If you aren't doing anything to slow down person to person infection, the number of people infected goes up rapidly, whether or not you are testing them.

Enough of them get seriously ill with viral pneumonia that you'll notice even if you are short of test kits.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

You, apparently, are TOO STUPID to understand what I calculated. It is EXACTLY your R0: a higher infection rate means that each infected person is infecting MORE people than a state with a lower rate. And the data gives you a better idea of which states are doing a better job (NE) and which ones are doing a horrible job (NY, NJ, LA).

There aren't many jam-packed subways in Nebraska. The virus doesn't
propagate between farmhouses like it does in high-rise apartments.





--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

The cork popped merrily, and Lord Peter rose to his feet.
"Bunter", he said, "I give you a toast. The triumph of Instinct over Reason"
 
On Sun, 29 Mar 2020 02:10:31 +0100, Tom Gardner
<spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:

On 28/03/20 23:52, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Sun, 29 Mar 2020 10:00:50 +1100, Clifford Heath
no.spam@please.net> wrote:

On 28/3/20 7:45 pm, Jeff Layman wrote:
On 28/03/20 03:00, Bill Sloman wrote:

But the Covid-19 death numbers are growing exponentially. If James
Arthur's 1.24 increase per day persists for 23 days, there will be
have been as many Civd-19 deaths in those 23 days as 216k respiratory
disease deaths that the US has in a year.

I can understand the general public having little comprehension of what
"exponential" means, but I am surprised that it seems to have been
ignored or misunderstood by those who should know better.

Economists and politicians spend their entire lives managing and
worrying about systems that are mostly linear (or very low-order
polynomial). They have massive cognitive biases against any system being
driven by fundamentally non-linear behaviour - they just can't really
conceive of it.

CH

Even worse, they don't understand control theory, how time lags and
feedbacks affect things. They always react too much too late, add too
much lag, which makes things ring or oscillate. Economists are, if
anything, worse. Nobody understands damping.

Not true.

A century ago economists described what became
known as the "Hog Cycle" or "Pork Cycle".

Feedback and time delay are inherent in the model.

Some simple policies would damp a lot of unhealthy cyclic stuff, but
public policy usually makes them unstable.

Wait and see.



--

John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc

The cork popped merrily, and Lord Peter rose to his feet.
"Bunter", he said, "I give you a toast. The triumph of Instinct over Reason"
 
On Saturday, March 28, 2020 at 9:21:47 PM UTC-4, Flyguy wrote:
On Saturday, March 28, 2020 at 4:00:54 PM UTC-7, Clifford Heath wrote:
On 28/3/20 7:45 pm, Jeff Layman wrote:
On 28/03/20 03:00, Bill Sloman wrote:

But the Covid-19 death numbers are growing exponentially. If James
Arthur's 1.24 increase per day persists for 23 days, there will be
have been as many Civd-19 deaths in those 23 days as 216k respiratory
disease deaths that the US has in a year.

I can understand the general public having little comprehension of what
"exponential" means, but I am surprised that it seems to have been
ignored or misunderstood by those who should know better.

Economists and politicians spend their entire lives managing and
worrying about systems that are mostly linear (or very low-order
polynomial). They have massive cognitive biases against any system being
driven by fundamentally non-linear behaviour - they just can't really
conceive of it.

CH

I believe that Pres. Trump recognized the threat of COVID early on, which is why he shut down travel to and from China at the major risk of being called a racist. He has taken bold actions proportional to the threat, including invoking the Defense Production Act. He is open to any reasonable idea on how to deal with this crisis.

If Trump recognized the threat why didn't he do anything useful? People keep citing that one act which mostly was done to appeal to the xenophobes in his base group of supporters. There was no risk in him being called a racist. He's been called that many times because of his actions. Many of his supporters love it.

What the fuck else has he done usefully? Why do you believe he "understood" the threat??? Oh, was it when he said,

“We have it totally under control.”

“It will all work out well.”

“We think we have it very well under control. We have very little problem in this country at this moment — five."

"...as the weather starts to warm & the virus hopefully becomes weaker, and then gone.”

“I think the virus is going to be — it’s going to be fine.”

“We have a very small number of people in the country, right now, with it. It’s like around 12. Many of them are getting better. Some are fully recovered already. So we’re in very good shape.”

“I think it’s going to work out fine. I think when we get into April, in the warmer weather, that has a very negative effect on that and that type of a virus. So let’s see what happens, but I think it’s going to work out fine.”

“The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA. … Stock Market starting to look very good to me!”

“Because of all we’ve done, the risk to the American people remains very low. … When you have 15 people, and the 15 within a couple of days is going to be down to close to zero. That’s a pretty good job we’ve done."

"No, because we’re ready for it. It is what it is. We’re ready for it. We’re really prepared. ... We hope it doesn’t spread. There’s a chance that it won’t spread"

“Only a very small number in U.S., & China numbers look to be going down."

“It’s going to disappear. One day, it’s like a miracle, it will disappear.”

“We did an interview on Fox last night, a town hall. I think it was very good. And I said, ‘Calm. You have to be calm. It’ll go away.' ”

“It came out of China, and we heard about it. And made a good move: We closed it down; we stopped it."

“So last year 37,000 Americans died from the common Flu. It averages between 27,000 and 70,000 per year. Nothing is shut down, life & the economy go on. At this moment there are 546 confirmed cases of CoronaVirus, with 22 deaths. Think about that!”

“As you know, it’s about 600 cases, it’s about 26 deaths, within our country. And had we not acted quickly, that number would have been substantially more.”

“And it hit the world. And we’re prepared, and we’re doing a great job with it. And it will go away. Just stay calm. It will go away.”

Says Food and Drug Administration “will bring, additionally, 1.4 million tests on board next week and 5 million within a month. I doubt we’ll need anywhere near that.”

“This is a very contagious virus. It’s incredible. But it’s something that we have tremendous control over.”

“If you’re talking about the virus, no, that’s not under control for any place in the world. ... I was talking about what we’re doing is under control, but I’m not talking about the virus.”

I'm sure you haven't read all of these quotes. They are most of the posts quoted at

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/03/12/trump-coronavirus-timeline/

But it only goes up to March 17. He continues to make statements that show how out of touch he is and how focused he is on things other than the health and well being of this nation. All while the infection rate and death rate climb higher and higher. We are now headed for twice the number of infected and dead than China, a country with some four times our population. While China is ready to open up some of the lock down areas we are just now headed for quarantines on entire cities.

Trump has botched this so badly, I don't think the family Labrador would have done a worse job.

--

Rick C.

+++ Get 2,000 miles of free Supercharging
+++ Tesla referral code - https://ts.la/richard11209
 
On 29/03/20 04:21, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Sun, 29 Mar 2020 02:10:31 +0100, Tom Gardner
spamjunk@blueyonder.co.uk> wrote:

On 28/03/20 23:52, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Sun, 29 Mar 2020 10:00:50 +1100, Clifford Heath
no.spam@please.net> wrote:

On 28/3/20 7:45 pm, Jeff Layman wrote:
On 28/03/20 03:00, Bill Sloman wrote:

But the Covid-19 death numbers are growing exponentially. If James
Arthur's 1.24 increase per day persists for 23 days, there will be
have been as many Civd-19 deaths in those 23 days as 216k respiratory
disease deaths that the US has in a year.

I can understand the general public having little comprehension of what
"exponential" means, but I am surprised that it seems to have been
ignored or misunderstood by those who should know better.

Economists and politicians spend their entire lives managing and
worrying about systems that are mostly linear (or very low-order
polynomial). They have massive cognitive biases against any system being
driven by fundamentally non-linear behaviour - they just can't really
conceive of it.

CH

Even worse, they don't understand control theory, how time lags and
feedbacks affect things. They always react too much too late, add too
much lag, which makes things ring or oscillate. Economists are, if
anything, worse. Nobody understands damping.

Not true.

A century ago economists described what became
known as the "Hog Cycle" or "Pork Cycle".

Feedback and time delay are inherent in the model.

Some simple policies would damp a lot of unhealthy cyclic stuff, but
public policy usually makes them unstable.

Wait and see.

A lot of economic stuff *is* damped by various regulatory
mechanisms and government interventions.

Key issues are
- unknown time constants and other parameters
- human mentality, in various forms from groupthink
to hostile countermeasures
- you can't repeat the experience; no experimental
trial runs

Any of those would make an engineer's life difficult :)
 
On 2020-03-28 23:16, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Sat, 28 Mar 2020 18:32:55 -0700 (PDT), Flyguy <tomseim2g@gmail.com
wrote:

On Saturday, March 28, 2020 at 6:03:36 PM UTC-7, Bill Sloman wrote:
On Sunday, March 29, 2020 at 6:35:50 AM UTC+11, Flyguy wrote:
On Saturday, March 28, 2020 at 11:36:41 AM UTC-7, Rick C wrote:
On Saturday, March 28, 2020 at 2:12:22 PM UTC-4, Jeff Layman wrote:
On 28/03/20 16:56, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:

I understand exponential growth. There would be 1 million the
following week, then 10 million the next week, and 100 billion cases a
month after that. The US will hit 100 billion cases around the end of
April.

And 5 weeks previously there would be 0.1 of a case, and the week before
that 0.01 of a case, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum

You do realize you won't make any difference in what he says, right? It's not like he is an unknown quantity around here.

Infection rates (cases ppm) vary widely from state-to-state. The lowest rate (Nebraska) is 52 times less than NY. Thus, imposing (and relaxing) lockdown edicts need to be made, not only on a state-by-state, but also a county-by-county basis.

Flyguy is too stupid to realise that the infection rate is merely the progress variable.

What matters is R0 - the number of people each newly infected person manages to infect before they become symptomatic and get whisked off into isolation.

If you aren't practicing some kind of isolation, that number is between 2.5 and 3 on average - go to a big family party and you can infect a lot more people.

If your area has got any infected people, it needs to be in lock-down.

The number of COVID cases in the US grew by 24% in just the last 24 hr (93,000 to 115,334). This was expected as testing became more widely available. The biggest jump was NJ, where the number jumped by 62%.

It was also expected because this is fairly infectious disease. If you aren't doing anything to slow down person to person infection, the number of people infected goes up rapidly, whether or not you are testing them.

Enough of them get seriously ill with viral pneumonia that you'll notice even if you are short of test kits.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

You, apparently, are TOO STUPID to understand what I calculated. It is EXACTLY your R0: a higher infection rate means that each infected person is infecting MORE people than a state with a lower rate. And the data gives you a better idea of which states are doing a better job (NE) and which ones are doing a horrible job (NY, NJ, LA).

There aren't many jam-packed subways in Nebraska. The virus doesn't
propagate between farmhouses like it does in high-rise apartments.

And idiotic local officials there don't tell people to go out on the
town during a pandemic. (Of course there's no town to go out on,
either.) ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC / Hobbs ElectroOptics
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510

http://electrooptical.net
http://hobbs-eo.com
 
On 2020-03-28 15:50, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Sat, 28 Mar 2020 18:12:15 +0000, Jeff Layman
jmlayman@invalid.invalid> wrote:

On 28/03/20 16:56, jlarkin@highlandsniptechnology.com wrote:
On Sat, 28 Mar 2020 08:45:11 +0000, Jeff Layman
jmlayman@invalid.invalid> wrote:

On 28/03/20 03:00, Bill Sloman wrote:

But the Covid-19 death numbers are growing exponentially. If James Arthur's 1.24 increase per day persists for 23 days, there will be have been as many Civd-19 deaths in those 23 days as 216k respiratory disease deaths that the US has in a year.

I can understand the general public having little comprehension of what
"exponential" means, but I am surprised that it seems to have been
ignored or misunderstood by those who should know better. Stating
figures about deaths from other causes misses the point entirely; they
are known causes, understood, and changes in the death rate - whether
up, down, or constant, is explicable, linear, and usually minor.

One other point is misunderstood. We talk about treatment by intensive
care and use of ventilators. The problem is those are finite sources,
maybe increasing slightly as time goes on, but the exponential growth of
coronavirus infections will drown those increases. If there are 10000
ventilators today, and 20000 next week, it won't help much if there are
10000 cases of Covid-19 today and 100000 next week.

I understand exponential growth. There would be 1 million the
following week, then 10 million the next week, and 100 billion cases a
month after that. The US will hit 100 billion cases around the end of
April.

And 5 weeks previously there would be 0.1 of a case, and the week before
that 0.01 of a case, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum


I'm halfway through re-reading Barry's great and terrible book The
Great Influenza. It's horrifying. H1N1 was insanely infectuous and
killed millions of healthy young people in ghastly ways. Some died 12
hours after first symptoms. In some towns 80% of the population got
seriously sick. Estimated deaths are 20-100 million, in a smaller
world. Anyone interested in the current pandemic should read his book.

If this C19 thing turns out to be a hyped seasonal cold, its benefit
may be that the world finally does some rational assessment of risk
and some serious research to prepare for it. Another 1918-type flu
could be thousands of times worse than this corona thing. Or a comet
strike, or a big earthquake. I guess the criterion would be to
optimize research spending scaled to the probable cost per life saved.
Imagine what we could have done with the money we wasted on failed
military projects, stupid wars, the space shuttle/ISS, the
Supercollider, or the several manufactured investment crisies.

If the original virus were recovered from a frozen body or something,
would it start a similar epidemic now? Probably not. I wonder why.



Apparently all modern swine flu viruses are descended from the 1918 virus.

The 1918 virus was reconstructed after being sequenced, so it's still
around in freezers.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs
Principal Consultant
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC / Hobbs ElectroOptics
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510

http://electrooptical.net
http://hobbs-eo.com
 

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