We've pulled 13yo out of school today to hide from the virus, which means he is going to be subjected to a morning of me helping him build.... a spreadsheet model of the spread of the virus.😀
A very basic discrete time version of the SIR model explained simply enough for your kid to program it up into a spreadsheet: mathinsight.org/discrete_sir_i…
Kids [code my] homework is going to be to modify it so we can chart the number of dead people.
Help. 13yo has been conning me pretending to listen to a @holland_tom history podcast but while actually playing chess on the internet. What do I do next?
Got there eventually. Experience was quite realistic as there was some swearing at the computer.
Ok today is half day. 13yo putting deaths in the model, break, watching the Cummings interview. Hope the morning does not depress the f*** out of him.
Mmmm kid put in 8% mortality. And despite colossal deaths the population has not fallen.
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The government strategy is to try to infect everyone that is not going to get a vaccine, but at a pace that doesn't generate too many hospital admissions, so that there is no triaging of covid patients and not too much displacement of non covid care.
I wonder how much we can tell in advance about how the effectiveness of what restrictions remain, through the test/trace/isolate system, evolves as the daily case load increases.
It must decrease. The system has a given capacity that can't be flexed quickly. But one imagines that the sweet spot of the pace of infections relies on some suppression through test/trace/isolate.
Two unoriginal reflections on the DC/LK interview...
1. the real manifestation of dysfunction that DC talks about is that someone like him can ascend to have outsized and unchecked influence on anything.
2. one of ways in which he was able to exercise this influence was through KL/RP mouthpieceing his anonymous government talking points. Odd that one of the faciliators ends up doing this interview.
A quick thread on climbing's first appearance in the Olympics at Tokyo 2020/1 with apols to regular followers.
It's climbing's first appearance in the Olympics!
The format is: 3 sub competitions. Bouldering. Lead. Speed climbing. Competitors have to do all three, and the single medal awarded is to the person with the lowest b*l*s where b=rank in bouldering, l= etc.
Go clubbing. Don't go clubbing. Clubbing is great we missed it. But it's concerning. So go. Don't go. Dance! Stay at home. Go to work. Don't go to work. We are free. We are not yet done. This is over. Not over. Go to work. Don't go to work. Stay at home.
You're going to need vaccines. You don't need vaccines. Wear a mask. We don't need to wear masks. Go on holiday. Stay in the UK. Work from home. Get back to the office. I'm working from home.
Not many dying. But cases are rising fast. But it's great not many dying. I'm afraid that more are going to die. This is a deadly virus, we are doing our best. You need to do your best, this is a deadly virus. Go clubbing. The NHS are going to need our help again.
Some of the commentary about the pings - let's turn them off, or down, seems to willfully misunderstand what is going on. The pings are there to prompt self-isolation, and help regulate the flow of new infections and cases.
This is a vital part of the lockdown release experiment, which it's hoped will generate a flow of cases large enough to achieve herd immunity quickly, but not too fast to lead to triaging of covid patients in the NHS or displace too much non-covid care.
If you turn off the pings or delete the app or whatever, you lose that lid on the flow of new cases and presumably greatly increase the risk that the flow of new covid cases is so larg that you get that triaging or displacement of other serious and urgen care, and excess deaths.
Go back to the idea of the budget for risky contacts. If you can trim contacts to the amount you want by blocking one country, that's what you do. You don't block all countries with a similar epidemiological characteristic.
Of course the real reason they are picking one country and not another may be political, or just incompetence. But there is a logic to be imposed on it ex post if you want to impose one.