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The use of masks was one of the points that Lipkin emphasised although he was concerned about the shortage. I think on of the main points was the use helps reduce the chance that someone with the virus spreading as well as preventing people getting it.

Interesting podcast. Although I'm not very far through yet, Lipkin says he thinks it is the most transmittable virus we have ever seen. He also commented that its not person to person transmission but person to commonly touched thing to person which is different. He talks about in China...

Isn't some of it about risk and the likelihood of getting it in a particular way. For example, even if handwashing doesn't completely remove the risk it would significantly reduce it. Equally I think the 2m and 15 mins is about there being a high risk with risk being reduced as time is shorter.

There is a Q&A from the Bateman center on Covid-19 and ME http://batemanhornecenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/COVID-19-FAQ-Public.pdf Also a collection of useful resources https://batemanhornecenter.org/covid19/

I believe air quality is poor in northern Italy as well. Smoking rates are higher in Italy. Its probably also worth looking at mortality rates rather than numbers of deaths. The number of people identified with Cov19 will indicate spread rates. There was also a paper looking at age ranges...

I wondered if there was some factor of family size or to be more accurate the number of people (and age range) living in a house where I think keeping distance and avoiding spread would be very hard. I get the impression in the UK we have low numbers in each house but don't know any real stats,

It could be due to the way the spread is happening and the demographics. Italy has an older population than the UK so this may have a big impact. I also wonder if in the UK older people were finding it easier to isolate and its often younger people going to the events and traveling on buses etc.

An article about measures in hongkong and Singapore posted earlier talked about their approach of looking for contacts for 15 mins for people to quarantine (if contact less than 6 feet). But on the shorter times they said...

I think there is a claim that a recession increases suicides and some seem to be claiming that a recession generally increases mortality rates.But there is a guardian article today criticizing this claim and pointing out mortality rates can decrease in a recession so its really not a clear...

Its not testing by itself that seems to be important but the test and tracking so that if someone has a positive test you can look at who they have come into contact with and isolate them as well. I guess if we don't have any form of social distancing then the numbers isolated due to a single...

Another modelling paper that looks interesting which addresses issues around symptoms within different age groups and how this may affect tramsission Age-dependent effects in the transmission and control of COVID-19 epidemics...

Really you should think of models as ways to animate a set of assumptions and see how they play out. The predictive power is often really poor and you need to look at the sensitivity of the model to the assumptions. The more sensitive to the assumptions the worse the predictive power. But...

The paper is here https://www.dropbox.com/s/oxmu2rwsnhi9j9c/Draft-COVID-19-Model%20%2813%29.pdf?dl=0

They are but when I was talking to someone there last week he was talking about traveling on crowded public transport still. Yet the infection rate seems very low and they are linking most of them to imported cases. So yesterday they reported 54 cases with 48 being imported. So I'm wondering...

There is another modelling paper that was released yesterday in the lancet looking at interventions in Singapore. I don't think its saying anything different from other modelling papers. One thing of interest though I'm not sure if it is in this paper is that from what I gather Singapore is not...

Yes I wonder if the model actually does what they think. I would have thought it would be easier to rewrite in a different language which supports the correct mathematical constructs.

Neil Ferguson is talking about making his modelling software available but looks like it may take time

I wonder if another value of a mask is stopping yourself touching your face or at least around your mouth.

Even a small change in the parameter of 2 to 2.05 changes the estimate by 1million. So if you are really going to believe in this formula you really need very highly accurate figures for the 'death number doubling time in days'. Rounding to an int will produce huge changes.

Not really the death rate will depend on how the spread is occurring. You are making an assumption of equal spread over the whole population but if the older and less healthy are doing more social distancing then this may not be the case. Equally death rate is a lagging indicator (I would have...