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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Secret_Agent_Man who wrote (156359)	4/11/2020 9:15:27 AM
From: sense	5 Recommendations Recommended By arun gera dvdw© pak73 Secret_Agent_Man THE ANT Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 218415

Politics is mostly bullshit... but "the prize" in the power, money and control aren't ? That the winners will gain some real ability to screw with your money and your life... reason enough to not leave it to chance, or to only others choice... And, of course, some have that as a purpose... to make people disgusted enough to get them walk away... leaving them greater degrees of freedom in doing what they're going to do... -------- My experience, discussing methods in the calculation of probable mortality rates early in the emergence of a new threat, here on SI... is that some people are inordinately challenged by simple math... more when it is required to be used in a frame of reference that requires understanding wide variables in time lagging functions. I don't expect it will be useful to rehash that effort now... but, I posted here about the "new" virus quite a lot from the 24th of January... and probably covered mostly that for about two or three weeks... until others gon on top of it well enough to not be screwing it up. Check it out if you care by looking at my old posts. The long and highly variable lag times in incubation of this virus led a lot of people to make errors in the math by orders of magnitude. If the virus is infectious enough to double infections every two days, before measures are taken to stop it... but it also doesn't kill anyone for 10 to 15 days or more after they're infected... ? That's what happened with this virus early on... doubling every two days without any efforts to prevent it... Then, when someone dies, in computing the mortality rate... you have to correlate that death to the number of infections that existed... 10 or 15 days before... not to that day's number of cases, which is a vastly larger number after doubling 7 times between the initial infection occurring and the patient's mortality ? Get that wrong and you underestimate mortality rates by a huge, huge percentage factor... as some people did. I did my own calculations and posted them here early on... I was saying the "natural" rate of mortality for this virus was 3 to 4%... and that it would rapidly become much higher than that when numbers of cases rose enough that they exceeded the number of ICU beds available... then rising to as much as 15 - 20%... Having bothered doing that... proved useful in enabling me to point out the obvious errors in the calculations that were made by the folks at the CDC and at Los Alamos... That's basically why one Friday the CDC was parroting the WHO's numbers saying... "this is not that big a deal"... and on the Monday following they came back with an "OMG... this is a real problem"... WHY did the CDC and Los Alamos get the math wrong... ? I think that's an excellent question. Put it as a math puzzle: Use an estimated lag time from initial infection to symptom onset of 5 days... then a known in symptoms with an illness for 5 days, followed by a known in a rapid progression to the ICU, with mortality after 5 days in the ICU, so 15 days total ? And use a virulence factor that has the virus double the number of infections every 2 days... Start on January 15th... Joe was fine yesterday, but he presents to the hospital as quite ill. Treat him and send him home. Five days later he comes back finding it hard to breathe... and he is admitted to the ICU, where he gets great care, but he dies on the 25th... There is incomplete testing being done, but the public health officials say they've tested the highest risks among cases presenting, and found that on January 25th there were 50,000 cases. Joe is not the only mortality, but one of only 6 in total. What's the mortality rate? The answer is... the factors that matter in computing the mortality are the doubling rate... and the time lag before mortality, including the time lag from infection until the case presents. If there are 50000 known cases... the actual number of infections on January 25 is larger by the number of new cases that haven't presented yet... the doubling factor and time lag to presentation meaning the actual number on January 25 is 2.5 doublings more... so closer to 300000. Great to know... but it doesn't really help us much in our rate computation ? Joe's death is one out of how many ? It is not one out of 300000... and it is not one out of 50000... it is one out of the total number of infections that would have existed on the day Joe got infected... Joe is one of the graduates of the classes that existed the day he became infected... not a graduate of one out of every other class that has come to exist since he became infected ? That day for Joe would be 5 days before the 15th when he presented... so the 10th... Joe was one of 50000 known cases on the 25th, when Joe died... He would be one of 25000 on the 23rd... one of 12500 on the 21st... one of 6250 on the 19th, about the time Joe made it into the ICU... one of 3120 on the 17th... one of 1560 on the 15th, the day Joe presented as ill... one of 780 on the 13th... one of 390 on the 11th... and one of around 292 on the 10th... Joe is one of only 6 people who died... but that's six people out of only 292 contemporaneous cases... So, the mortality rate is around 2%... even though it is only 6 people out of 300,000 cases existing on the 25th... the meaning of it is in that rate computation projecting that 2% of those 300,000 who are infected... are also going to die... Six doesn't seem like very many... but 6000 seems like quite a lot ? What did the CDC and the Los Alamos guys do ? The CDC pretty much accepted the numbers from the WHO... trusted them, and didn't check them carefully enough. The WHO took their numbers from China... and didn't check them. China, computed their own numbers... but did that without properly lagging the data...[perhaps as a part of a misguided effort in goal seeking the numbers] and that's in part why they so badly misjudged the risks and the effort required to contain the outbreak in Wuhan. They also failed to recognize that mildly ill people were also vectors of the spread... so they didn't isolate them... at all. Lots of other problems, too... but the big problem is in not understanding exponential math... so not seeing the giant wave coming at them until after it arrived... and when it arrived... things got even worse: As the density of the population of infected persons increases... the rate of spread also increases... as does the intensity of resulting illnesses... as the exposure increases ? The CDC and the WHO have ZERO excuses for getting that wrong... At Los Alamos... they used super computers to carefully model the transmissibility... They computed the population density on the trains, on the sidewalks, in the buildings, and the amount of time people spent at work, or coming and going, and what that meant in terms of exposure risks and spreading factors... But they also didn't lag their data... so they got a very precise answer that was very precisely wrong by orders of magnitude. So, I got it right... and they got it wrong... but at least they acknowledged the fact when it was pointed out... and they still had plenty of time to make the appropriate adjustments in planning... Time which they still mostly pissed away...