Monday, March 30, 2020

COVID-19 # 40 (Required Part Is Higlighted)

Taiwan responded to Dr. Aylward's actions (see the post from Sunday).
In their defense, staff of the WHO like Aylward do not make decisions about membership, member states do. Still, the decisions aren't about health, that's for sure.

TL recommended this page from KSL on the current state of the epidemic in Utah. Now that we have tests (14 K in Utah so far ... remember a couple of weeks ago when it was less than that for the whole country), we're finding a lot more that are infected. What I also notice is the same pattern we saw in Seattle a month ago: most tests are negative (because people have respiratory problems for lots of reasons), but the percentage is increasing. I saw something yesterday that the positive rate is up over 50% in NYC now.

TL also recommended this (8 minute) video by Grant Sanderson posted at Kottke (from the first week of March).  It's fantastic; and goes beyond some of the stuff we do in class. I like the way it emphasizes that growth is through compounding, and that lots of people have a hard time assessing how that growth will work out with the passage of time. He even shows how a logarithmic scale produces a line. Note that using this he projected on March 6th s a million cases by April 5th (we're currently at 741K worldwide, and we went up by over 70K yesterday, so I'd say we'll actually hit that mark earlier than predicted). Later on he talks about how all exponential growth of epidemics always ends up as a logistic curve; Italy is past their point of inflection, but the U.S. does not seem to be. The visual around the 7 minute mark is especially important if you think you'll be safe where you are: "If no one is worried, that's when you should worry".

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