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Another interesting question that emerged of late - how can it be that Germany saw a long period of low-level infection when opening up after the lockdown while Israel is seeing a strong second wave with numbers on track to reach pre-lockdown levels - while in both countries the rate of new...

I didn't miss that - they're on the graph in the lower right. Just not very many - about six of 4500 in a working age population get the severe form and need to be in an ICU. Your statement lacks any quantitative part by the way - any illness affects the working age population negatively. So...

Yes, that one.I cling to the notion that the progression of the disease in a patient once he contracted it (and hence the mortality) is quite independent of the political nature of the containment measures that tried to prevent him from contracting it in the first place. I'm not sure what...

It's been a while and I was busy with other stuff, but still... Here's a quick demo with gnuplot where you see a beautiful piecewise 'fit' of two exponentials to a power law (a quadratic function): Looking familiar? Here we know for a fact that the purple function has nothing to do with...

Okay, I'm still baffled - what media would I have to have read to learn about that 'current fear' ? I've never seen it expressed anywhere and I have no idea where it would come from - certainly the experts in Sweden, the UK, or the Netherlands did not think seriously that heard immunity might...

You sure that's the same group? The zombie apocalypse preppers usually appear wide-eyed and shaggy-haired, you'd think they've gone without a haircut for eight years...

Not from what I had read - according to a long Zeit dossier on Heinsberg the two weeks home isolation for most turned out to be a 'Okay, you're supposed to home-quarantine for two weeks after the event - the event is ten days in the past, so if you could please stay home the next four days?'...

Well, that's the point here - 60.000 isn't 250.000, it is quite a bit less precisely because not everyone was infected, and the Heinsberg study is one (of several) examples that argue that also this time not everyone will be infected either. Why did the Heinsberg outbreak stop? Desperate hard...

The 0.36% are actually the same level as a moderately severe influenza strain, falling below e.g. the Hongkong Flu (which has a mortality rate of 0.5%). In order to get 10 times the number of dead than for influenza with the same mortality rate as influenza, you need to assume that 10 times the...

A semi-log plot is an extremely tolerant thing for visual inspection... The US Coronavirus outbreak wiki page has that optical trick plotted. Here's the derivative of the same data (the daily number of new infections) from the same wiki page: That's a constant with statistical...

I know an exponential when I see one and I know a power law when I see one. An exponential has for instance a constant daily increase percentage, a power law has not. It's a very simple an testable criterion - and it says 'no exponential'.:) You can also try to get a good fit with an...

For those who are following our series - here's 'Beltaine King', part VI of the Cliodhna series, our best and most involved movie so far: Enjoy!

No, it's almost always a power law. The growth isn't scale-invariant, there's an intrinsic scale set by the number of potential social contacts of a person. People don't have a million friends, acquaintances, colleagues and shop-owners they visit, the true number is much lower. Which is why it...

My major insight today - we all know that opening up completely after a lockdown gets us necessarily back to exponential growth and a second wave of infections, right? Actually not. it's a possible outcome, but there's many scenarios in which the propagation of the infection is fundamentally...

Actually in the model R0 turns out to be a bad measure - what happens is that you try to fit an exponential to a function which is not an exponential (something we should have learned to avoid when making any fit) - you get something like a local slope of course, but it ceases to have the...

While we've currently being bombarded with arguments based on R0 and fear of exponential growth in the news media, I eventually got curious why we do not see exponential growth in any country. Could it really be that they're all equally effective in containment procedures such as to reduce R0 to...

Well, that is an argument based on economics rather than the infinite value of a single life. The point is that we don't do that - read the news of the past years, it's all about cutting healthcare costs, not about increasing the budget. There's no reason to believe that - the numbers don't...

Short answer, yes - since someone needs to pay for the health system and there will occur deaths from all sorts of causes without a healthcare system, eventually there is a point where an economic loss creates more death via that avenue, at which point we would probably conclude that it's a bad...

Unfortunately I can't find such graphs too helpful either because a) there is no 'flu' - there are very different strains of flu, ranging from the rather harmess but very contagious Swine Flu with a 0.03% mortality rate to the Avian Flu with a 60% (!) mortality rate in some strains (luckily it...

Well, look at South Korea - they're testing I think on the order of 12.000 people a day (not sure based on what criteria, but they're trying hard to get a good picture of who is infected). So they have by far the best data. The mortality rate you can estimate from their data is < 0.7 (or so -...