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How much longer will the Berlin Wall stand? This is what went through J. Richard Gott’s head when he visited Germany in 1969.
If you think about it, this is a tough question, as there is not much data available about lifetimes of walls in Germany (in fact, the Berlin Wall is a single datapoint). How then to approach a question like that, where we are almost completely in the dark?
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https://towardsdatascience.com/how-to-be-less-wrong-5d6632a08f
Parts of the table in the article are excerpted below, focussing on the area around New Haven & the Shoreline.
Comparatively few deaths in New Haven itself relative to the number of cases – in contrast to Branford & Hamden.
https://patch.com/connecticut/across-ct/town-town-deaths-ct-coronavirus-cases-saturday-may-16
| Town | Deaths | Cases |
| Branford | 38 | 295 |
| Essex | 1 | 17 |
| Fairfield | 92 | 513 |
| Greenwich | 43 | 747 |
| Guilford | 8 | 89 |
| Hamden | 81 | 835 |
| Madison | 17 | 119 |
| New Haven | 83 | 2,126 |
| North Haven | 19 | 211 |
| Westport | 20 | 266 |
| Woodbridge | 27 | 108 |
QT:{{”
Fitbit wearers can also opt in to be part of the PROTECT Study at Stanford University. There, researchers are using data collected from users of Fitbit, three other smartwatches — including Apple Watch — and one smart ring. Specifically, Dr. Michael Snyder’s laboratory at Stanford is studying data from smartwatch users who have a confirmed or suspected case of coronavirus, have been exposed to someone who has a confirmed or suspected case, or are at a higher risk of exposure, such as health care or grocery store employees.
One of the metrics Snyder and his team are focusing on is how a smartwatch can measure heart rate and body temperature.
Heart rate is the number of times a heart beats in one minute. Though it can vary greatly from person to person, the normal resting heart rate for an adult is between 60 and 100. A lower rate means a person is in peak cardiovascular shape. Unusual numbers on the high or low scale could indicate an underlying illness. The challenge is that a heart rate can spike because of various factors including age, smoking, high cholesterol, diabetes, activity, weight and medications.
When you’re sick, “your heart rate goes up before you’re congested. … So, worst-case scenario, it goes up around the time you’re feeling yucky, but it probably goes up before that, we think,” Snyder explained.
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Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes Lents, Nathan H.
Citation (APA): Lents, N. H. (2018). Human Errors: A Panorama of Our Glitches, from Pointless Bones to Broken Genes
QT:{{”
“I spent seven years at the World Bank. So, I’m a finance guy…the thing that will stop the financial crisis is getting the virus under control.”
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https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1220283-in-this-chautauqua-i-would-like-not-to-cut-any
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“In this Chautauqua I would like not to cut any new channels of consciousness but simply dig deeper into old ones that have become silted in with the debris of thoughts grown stale and platitudes too often repeated. “What’s new?” is an interesting and broadening eternal question, but one which, if pursued exclusively, results only in an endless parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow. I would like, instead, to be concerned with the question “What is best?,” a question which cuts deeply rather than broadly, a question whose answers tend to move the silt downstream. There are eras of human history in which the channels of thought have been too deeply cut and no change was possible, and nothing new ever happened, and “best” was a matter of dogma, but that is not the situation now.
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QT:{{”
“Long lockdowns to slow a disease can also have catastrophic economic impacts that may themselves affect public health. “It’s a three-way tussle,” Leung says, “between protecting health, protecting the economy, and protecting people’s well-being and emotional health.”
The economic fallout isn’t something epidemic models address, Longini says—but that may have to change. “We should probably hook up with some economic modelers and try to factor that in,” he says.” “}}
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Exit strategy
For now, the most likely scenario is one of easing social distancing measures when it’s possible, then clamping down again when infections climb back up, a “suppress and lift” strategy that both Singapore and Hong Kong are pursuing. Whether that approach can strike the right balance between keeping the virus at bay and easing discontent and economic damage remains to be seen.
…
Jeremy Farrar, head of the Wellcome Trust, says a path out of the dilemma now facing the world will come from research. It might take the form of an effective treatment for severely ill patients, or a drug that can prevent infections in health care workers,
or—ultimately—a vaccine. “Science is the exit strategy,” Farrar says. “}}
QT:{{”
“Medical staff, at particular risk of contracting and spreading the virus, are regularly tested. To streamline the procedure, some hospitals have started doing block tests, using the swabs of 10 employees, and following up with individual tests only if there is a positive result.”
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https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/04/world/europe/germany-coronavirus-death-rate.html
QT:{{”
According to the Tracking Project’s figures, nearly one in five people who get tested for the coronavirus in the United States is found to have it. In other words, the country has what is called a
“test-positivity rate” of nearly 20 percent.
That is “very high,” Jason Andrews, an infectious-disease professor at Stanford, told us. Such a high test-positivity rate almost certainly means that the U.S. is not testing everyone who has been infected with the pathogen, because it implies that doctors are testing only people with a very high probability of having the infection.
…
The positivity rate is not the same as the proportion of COVID-19 cases in the American population at large, a metric called
“prevalence.”* …
Prevalence is a crucial number for epidemiologists, in part because it lets them calculate a pathogen’s true infection-fatality rate: the number of people who die after becoming infected.
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