[conspire] (forw) Not quite getting it

[Rick Moen]

Further reference (published three days ago, hence not quite current
on the unfolding catastrophe NYC faces):
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-coming-coronavirus-critical-care-emergency

There's a famous puzzle:  'Algae starts growing on a pond surface.
Growth will then double the surface area covered each day, achieving
100% coverage after 30 days.  On which day will the pond be half
covered?'  The governors of NY, CT, and IL (as per below) seem likely to
give the typical (and very wrong) answer:  'day 15'.  The correct
answer: day 29.   

This is a mental aberration caused by how much more common are _linear_
trend lines:  Even when you stress 'exponential growth', most people
still won't get it.  Bad planning ensues.


----- Forwarded message from Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> -----

Date: Fri, 20 Mar 2020 22:31:51 -0700
From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
To: skeptic at linuxmafia.com
Subject: Not quite getting it
Organization: If you lived here, you'd be $HOME already.

A friend who's spent the last few years living in Cambodia asked me in
e-mail how preparations for SARS-CoV-2 are going here in the USA.  
I knew about California's steps, and had only a vague idea about 
several other states' protective orders -- so I looked up details, 
and one particular aspect of those orders gave me a severe WTF reaction:

  California is now in a strangely quiet state of siege, for obvious
  reasons.  As you may have heard, the six Bay Area counties were the
  first place in the United States to implement _truly_ effective[1] public
  health measures to halt community spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, via a
  'shelter-in-place' order issued last Monday afternoon (four days ago).  
  Because of the threat of exponential growth in the pandemic's 'community spread', 
  it's widely estimated that the Bay Area took this drastic step (barely) 
  in time to prevent overwhelming of the local hospitals from COVID-19 cases.

  On Thursday afternoon (yesterday), California's Gov. Newsom ordered an
  essentially identical shelter-in-place order for all 40 million people
  in the state, effective immediately.  This _may_ avert megadeaths in the
  rest of California, though we don't know yet.

  Belatedly, Illinois's governor issued a similar order today, except he
  made a clueless provision delaying the order from taking effect for
  24 hours until 5pm Saturday, which makes no sense at all and is probably
  going to cause avoidable deaths.  The same day, New York's Gov. Cuomo
  made the same blunder in worse form, issuing an order that won't take
  effect until Sunday evening.  Connecticut's Gov. Lamont then out-did
  that with an order that won't take effect until _8 pm Monday_.  New
  Jersey's Gov. Murphy announced today that he'll do something maybe 
  similiar within 24 hours, but didn't actually do anything.

  All of these places really are still acting like they cannot understand
  the concept of exponential spread.  By contrast, Gov. Newsom may have
  been three days late compared to the Bay Area, but at least he had the basic
  intelligence to say 'This takes effect right now.'

This morning, I heard that all hospitals serving the Borough of The Bronx, 
NYC, were already overwhelmed with serious COVID-19 cases in the sense
of 'we're just about out of ventilators'[1] -- which is exactly what
measures like the six Bay Area counties' order on March 16th and
California's order on March 19th was designed to avert _here_.

The lackadaisical weak-sauce orders from Illinois, New York, and
Connecticut -- with their 'Oh, take a few more days to get serious'
provisos -- are so far the _only_ US states that have followed
California's lead, and even they turn out to be doing a terrible job of
it.  Which is going to kill people.


[1] https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/sph/ide/gida-fellowships/Imperial-College-COVID19-NPI-modelling-16-03-2020.pdf
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/20/nyregion/ny-coronavirus-hospitals.html

----- End forwarded message -----