Search results

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...

I wonder about the key worker thing. There are key workers such as people working in health who seem at high risk. But there are those whose risk would be much lower such as those working in food production or power plans (depending on who they meet in the factory). Keeping all the children...

One concern is that the funders will be pushing money into pandemic research rather than into things like ME. However, one argument for increasing ME research is that a pandemic could trigger many more cases (based on studies that report a percent of cases after an infection). Which could put ME...

One of the things they did was a test and track process where people were tracked by their phones and if they walked near someone who was later tested to have the virus they would be tested and quarantined. I think south Korea also had a massive test program which helped them get things under...

I think that is a very simplistic view. The spread rate will depend on what mitigations are in place to prevent spread and the death rate depends both on demographics and the ability of the hospital system to cope. For example, people are saying Italy has an aging population hence the high...

Yes but people are also largely confined to their homes. To me that was an argument that was falling back to having a cordon and claiming people inside would be stigmatized rather that the lock down that seems to be happening where people are largely confined to their houses and in large...

This one from Wessely is very poor and certainly not evidence just opinion. He seems to think quarantining happens to a whole area rather than house by house in a lock down. Also talks of stress of being quarantined but no concept of the stress of government inaction...

I assume fatality rates will vary hugely with population health and demographics. Given the death rate with older people is worse then if you have an ageing population then you would expect a higher fatality rate.