What a difference a week makes

[billvon 3,131]

For my own edification I built a very simple model of disease propagation to try to understand the variables.  First I built a model making some basic assumptions (Ro=2, time to new infection 5 days) then I added dates for the beginnings of NPI's based on news stories (i.e when California shut down schools, when New York started reopening) and then tweaked the NPI effectiveness (which is the big unknown) until I saw a curve that matched reality.  I assumed that NPI effectiveness started out as zero (no one doing a thing) and went as high as 55% during the height of the shutdown (i.e. a little over half the opportunities to infect removed.)

Some things popped out.  First off is that you don't need to get everyone wearing masks or staying home to beat this - just most people.  Which means that you could have a limited reopening of the economy (shopping, restaraunts etc) if everyone would just take it seriously.  Going from 45% to 55% NPI effectiveness means that the disease dies out on its own, without a vaccine.  Unfortunately people are not willing to do this.

Second is that very small changes in start dates have huge results.  Starting mitigation just five days earlier would have cut peak infections in half, and deaths by more than half (because you'd have half the people who get deathly ill AND you'd have more hospital resources to care for them.)  Graph below shows the result of starting five days earlier.

[gowlerk 2,283]

8 minutes ago, billvon said:

First off is that you don't need to get everyone wearing masks or staying home to beat this - just most people.

Correct. It is not nearly as hard to make a large reduction in the problem as many people think. Unfortunately it seems that those same people can only see shutdown or open economy. Black or white, no grey is possible.

[kallend 2,174]

1 hour ago, billvon said:

First off is that you don't need to get everyone wearing masks or staying home to beat this - just most people.  Which means that you could have a limited reopening of the economy (shopping, restaraunts etc) if everyone would just take it seriously.  Going from 45% to 55% NPI effectiveness means that the disease dies out on its own, without a vaccine.  Unfortunately people are not willing to do this.
 

Sure, but if you let it be known that some people don't have to wear masks or refrain from partying, the 38% will  take this as license to carry on as before.

[wolfriverjoe 1,523]

22 minutes ago, kallend said:

Sure, but if you let it be known that some people don't have to wear masks or refrain from partying, the 38% will  take this as license to carry on as before.

Nahh. They don't need that 'license'.

Their selfishness, immaturity and stupidity are all they need to 'carry on as before'.