Federico Andres Lois Profile picture
Sep 22, 2020 16 tweets 4 min read Read on X
Say you have a completly harmless virus (IFR=0) that can spread at R0=3.3 and you can find via PCR for 19 days. How many deaths per million would you find if you test all deaths in an average european city? cc @LDjaparidze
So now that I got your attention. Let's narrow it down. Our harmless virus would be found during it's spread frenzy at a rate of
OK. It seems I have a few epidemiologists playing. Here is a curve ball. Would change the results if we "Do nothing" (let it spread unmitigated) or if we mitigate it ('lockdown, masks, etc')? I know it is harmless!! Play along.
So let's see. If we don't do anything, an R0=3.3 harmless virus would burn out pretty fast. And in doing so we sould be able to find positive deaths at a rate of roughly 589 deaths per million. Image
Now, if instead of "Do nothing" we pull a Madrid style mitigation for 180 days and the come back to normal life?
We mitigated, so instead of 1 very high spike now we have 2 of them. But interestingly it is lower at a rate of 530 deaths per million. Image
It wasn't going to be so easy. If instead of a Madrid we would have done a Stockholm?
Interestingly the height of the spike is not much different, BUT the second is much lower. The interesting thing is that we could detect our harmless virus at an outstanding rate of 353 death per million. Weird right? Image
So the question is: How?
I know right... The idea that the spread of a disease can be described linearly is wrong. Whatever you think you know about the behavior, is probably wrong (weird math). Even the smallest detail can change the outcome. Certainty it's always a trap. Principles of biology.
But still, it is an interesting exercise to understand how sensible are the parameters to disturbances. Because that gives you context. Let's assume now this was Madrid. And there is a second clearly not harmless virus around. Image
This is on our simulation how Madrid would look (given the parameter estimation we did) and how it would unfold following what has probably been happening in summer. Image
This is on our simulation how Madrid would have look (given the estimation we have for Stockholm) if it would have followed the Sweden Strategy Image
And this is how our simulation looks if Madrid continues mitigating as it would have done during the spring. Spike could start early because that would depend on our case on the seeding we do to the simulation. The overshooting could be big. Image
Weird math. I know.
And now the ultimate tests!! Didn't I say that the original virus was harmless? If the IFR is 0 where are all those deaths coming from?

If you need to refresh what the IFR is:

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More from @federicolois

Feb 10
1/ Alright, nerds buckle up. My read on todays news is @elonmusk playing 8D chess as usual. You have to hand it to him, he is smart as fuck. This isn’t just joking around trying to buy OpenAI. This is the AI industry’s version of Game of Thrones, and everyone’s got knives out.

Let’s break it down. 🧵👇
2/ First, OpenAI’s structure is a financial booby trap.

- There’s a nonprofit (OpenAI Inc.) that controls the for-profit OpenAI LP.
- That means you can’t just buy OpenAI outright—first, you gotta deal with the nonprofit board.
- It’s like saying, "I wanna buy Twitter," but the deal has to be approved by a secret society of monks.
3/ Musk’s move? Drop a $97.4 billion bid.

Now, did he actually wanna buy it? Probably not. This is a game theory 101 class onto adversarial games.

- If OpenAI rejects it, they must explain why, revealing their real motives.
- If they accept, Musk gets control and can shut down the Microsoft-aligned vision.
- If they try a legal loophole? He sues their pants off.

Either way, he wins.
Read 10 tweets
Apr 24, 2024
1/ After almost 1.5 years of studying cancer research for personal reasons, I arrived at a realization that prompted me to write this tweet. I will lay out the hypothesis in this thread.
2/ Disclaimer: I am not a formally trained health researcher. More like a very curious and tenacious guy with a 15+ year background in research, development, & reproducibility in computer science (computer science).
3/ I am putting the hypothesis out there because it may make sense to others doing field work. Feel free to dissect this hypothesis, find holes in it, and play devil's advocate. We will all come out smarter from it.
Read 33 tweets
Jan 3, 2024
1/ There is a very perverse dynamic on how Chavism (aka "the communist socialism") works. Let's use Argentina as the example. Over the first 20 years they initiate a process that we could call "Earnings Substitution" that will seal your fate over time.
2/ Your earnings/salary is going down and at the same time "subsidies" start to go up in order to fool people into think that nothing has changed. This works because the dirty job is done by inflation which is a much slower process.
3/ By the time people starts to realize that something is wrong, because some critical goods are not available (medicine, food, you name it) or inflation enters a death spiral; most people already depend on subsidies for spending.
Read 6 tweets
Aug 2, 2023
1/ Recently some interesting papers have been doing the rounds in the health community. To me the most interesting ones have been the GlyNAC paper and the more recent Taurine deficiency as a driver of aging papers.
2/ Disclaimer: While I have been researching this for a year and even executed an experimental protocol tailored for myself based on the GlyNAC paper, I am NOT a health professional, and I am just taking my health into my own hands. This is not advice of any kind.
3/ Disclaimers aside, why do I think these 2 papers are interesting? First because the claim (if true) is a game changer. And second because they may be related but I haven’t seen this relationship spotlighted by anyone.
Read 14 tweets
Apr 1, 2023
This just confirmed the weaponization of block lists. If enough people/bots block and mute you, they are essentially cancelling you. I find lots of people with I have never interacted with that has me blocked. Assuming there are third party block lists and block networks.
Normally that is an issue in general. Anyone that has done reinforcement learning had figure out (usually in the worst way) that you have to be incredible cautious with penalties. They are very prone to be gamed.
Read 4 tweets
Mar 20, 2023
1/ I asked #GPT4 to review our paper with @LDjaparidze. This is what happened and what I learned in the process. medrxiv.org/content/10.110…
2/ Since the general problem that practitioners find (in the worst way) is always training set tainting (guilty-as-charged). Habits die hard, the first thing I did is asking to do a review of the paper without any extra knowledge about what the paper says
3/ From the response alone I learned 2 things. First, our paper title was deadly accurate. I also learned that it has no information whatsoever on it, as the entire response can be generated from understanding the title itself.
Read 10 tweets

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