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(The Lobby)-- In something out of a ' 50's B-rated sci-fi cult movie, Erin Allday of the SF Chronicle reports 10 hours ago;
" 'Most of the public wants to know: Just tell me what happens at the end of the movie,' said Nicholas Jewell, a UC Berkeley biostatistician. He appreciates that desire, especially in a time of so much uncertainty. But that’s not what models are for."
The Chronicle article then gives a breakdown of all of the predictions since China first shut its Wuhan doors and the disease swept across Italy and Spain. With numbers spiking in southern Europe and the California governor calling for a complete shutdown of the state's economy, the plot began to focus on the White House response. It came in the form of a new cast of characters led by the Vice-President and members of the disease control division of Health and Human Services.
It wasn't long before the true scope of the epidemic began to sweep across America with New York City taking the lead in cases testing positive. That was only the medical aspect of the crisis. Depletion of the Strategic National Stockpile (SNS) didn't take long as there was little there to curb the daily rise in victims, especially the mortality rate. In spite of daily White House briefings, which many times ended in hostile accusations by the media and insulting responses from the podium, little was being done to give an effective answer to when the pandemic would pass. Certainly social restrictions were stabilizing the graphs and Congressional stimulus funding was working, but still the so-called apex hadn't been reached.
In fact, the initial reports called for millions, then reduced to hundreds of thousands, and now down to tens of thousands. The graph was, incredibly, shrinking. In southern Europe the mortality numbers were dropping off even as some nations to the north didn't bother to order social restrictions at all. China reopened the Wuhan doors and so many tourists flooded the Great Wall, it was immediately closed again for fear of not reigniting the disease but just a basic mob stampede.
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The prediction business is full of components related to hard data to trends to percentages to exponents. To what degree each plays a role may be confusing but one doesn't have to be an economic adviser to understand the basics. If a given number are tested positive and a given number of those die, then that ratio is a good starting point. If that rate declines it means simply the curve is "flattening." An effort to complicate that trend can only lead to inaccurate predictions. If the CDC bases its model on what happened in Italy and Spain and the data doesn't hold up, there's a reason for it hidden somewhere in the population demographics and racial distribution.
That accounts for the sudden announcement that more African-Americans in the United States were falling victim. The percentage of African-Americans in southern Europe might differ radically than locally. Even though the data from Europe didn't align with the U.S., still it became skewed according to an ethnic variable. Another spike is attributed to nursing home deaths.
In addition, a coefficient in place to account for social distancing might have been considered a constant when in fact, it may change i.e., (dc/dt), so that the equation reads;
F(M/P)= (dc/dt)[(dx1/dt)(dx2/dt)….(dxn/dt)]... (+/-)exp(whatever)...
Where (dxn/dt) in its simplest form represents all the factors taken into account that would change the ratio (M/P) where M=mortality and P=tested Positive. If "c," mitigation, was taken as constant (c=1) it would need to be dampened (0.00<c<1.00) to adjust for the falloff of the social measures taken, distancing and sheltering-in-place. In fact, exponents may not be the best way to look at the data even though they are useful for large data sets.
As irony goes, the author of the novel that was made into the film, The Incredible Shrinking Man, Richard Matheson, also wrote the story behind The Last Man on Earth (1964), which has been redone several times and in its most compelling version, the Omega Man (1971) starring Charlton Heston.
The Ωmega Man (1971) - IMDb
Directed by Boris Sagal. With Charlton Heston, Anthony Zerbe, Rosalind Cash, Paul Koslo. Lone survivor, doctor Robert Neville, struggles to create a cure for the plague that wiped out most of the human race while fighting The Family, a savage luddite death cult formed by the zombie-like infected to erase the past.
W/RF2--
Allday, E., California coronavirus deaths will peak Wednesday, https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/one-model-projects-california-coronavirus-deaths-will-peak-wednesday-but-its-more-complex/ar-BB12vX4G?ocid=spartanntp
The Incredible Shrinking Man, (1957) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0050539/https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0050539/
Nursing Home Deaths, https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/nursing-home-deaths-soar-past-3300-in-alarming-surge/ar-BB12weay?ocid=spartanntp
"Fact-Instinct"--https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/11/trump-facts-and-instincts-decision-on-when-country-safe-to-reopen-180000
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