The Wirus, the Wirus. the Wirus!
Update yo' bafflegab! Time for a wirus refresh.
"Wee used to believe we wear are masks in the shower, but 'new studies' and better experts have given us more nuanced understanding."
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>Doubling times and exponential growth go hand in hand, so it became clear to him that modeling based on past infections is impossible, because the rate changes unforeseeably from day to day due to social distancing and lockdown efforts. And the rate changes differ for each country based on the extent of their social distancing.
>In AIP Advances, McCauley explains how he combined math in the form of Tchebychev's inequality with a statistical ensemble to understand how macroscopic exponential growth with different daily rates arise from person-to-person disease infection.
>"Modelers tend to misapply the chemical kinetic equations as SIR (Susceptible, Infectious, or Recovered) or SEIR (Susceptible, Exposed, Infectious, or Recovered) models, because they are trying to generate future rates from past rates," McCauley said. "But the past doesn't allow you to use equations to predict the future in a pandemic, because social distancing changes the rates daily."
>McCauley discovered he could make a forecast within five seconds via hand calculator that is as good as any computer model by simply using infection rates for today and yesterday.
"Lockdowns and social distancing work," said McCauley. "Compare Austria, Germany, Taiwan, Denmark, Finland, and several other countries that peaked in early April, with the U.S., U.K., Sweden, and others with no lockdown or half-hearted lockdowns—they've never even plateaued, much less peaked."
https://phys.org/news/2020-11-rethink-pandemic-infection.htm