nbnoll
nbnoll on Hacker News
Not enough that I would feel confident publically stating. I think our best hope for accurate calibration would be to fit the data as it comes out (hence why we are focusing our efforts here) or to do a post-hoc analysis of a few examples, e.g. Wuhan vs South Korea. I'll note that mitigation effects will be best measured as a reduction in exponential growth.
Yes I agree. We are working on this - albeit slowly. I think realistically we have an import parameters feature (obtained from the export) sooner.
This is the next push for our modeling. We are trying to integrate live case count data to provide more accurate scenarios for people. Once we have that data we can try to fit a few parameters to improve predictions. I should note we are actively looking for people to help us curate data sources if you are interested!
I think the most intuitive explanation to your second question is a reduction of number of contacts you have per day - i.e. .6 corresponds to 60% reduction in social contacts in a given day. This is not exact but should provide you rough handrails for the mitigation numbers.
Yes I agree. However, I don't think we're close to the inflection point where this is relevant yet.
It's all coded in typescript and javascript. I've been toying around with a more in-depth model in web assembly, but as I alluded to elsewhere in this thread, the coding is slow going.
Yes, under the hood its a coupled set of ODEs with the ability to be stochastically sampled. But this means the entire susceptible population can interact with the entire infected population every time step w/ some small probability -- hence no structure. And no worries, not offense taken!
I agree that having a more "realistic" model that simulates people's social interactions is important, especially as we look to predicting longer term effects. This is something that is on the long-term roadmap for our model here, although as of now its on the back-burner while we deal with more immediate concerns like hospital allocation.
No worries. I think it's also important to note that the Imperial College study that's gotten a lot of attention recently is an agent-based model - i.e. they simulate actual individuals - which allow them to look at specific quarantine measures like school closures. You can accomplish an approximate version of this with our model by controlling the isolation column of this table. This allows one to selectively quarantine age groups quantitatively.
All numbers in the table should be editable by the user -- apart from the fatality percentages which are computed from the values given. We've been working on the design to make this more obvious at a glance.
In theory, the exponential growth rate of the virus doesn't depend on the population size. It more strongly depends on the population structure - i.e. the average number of social contacts made in a day.
I just wanted to reply that the finite ICU capacity was merged last night and is now on the main webpage.
Hi everyone, My name is Nicholas Noll, a computational biologist and co-developer of the above tool. As of now there are two other people actively working on this project: Richard Neher, Ivan Aksamentov, and I. Richard and I have a background in theoretical physics but we have been working on quantitative biology and epidemiology. Richard is also one of the founders of nextstrain.org which leverages phylogenetic analyses to track the global spread of many pathogens -- including SARS-CoV-2. The other person, Ivan, is a super talented software engineer who just recently joined our group.
We started working on this a few weeks ago, in collaboration with Jan Albert and Roberk Dyrdak, as a helpful model for public health officials and hospitals to help predict the usage of local community hospitals, and explore the utility and immediate need for quarantine measures.
We are very much still actively developing the tool, now with an eye to help global communities at large. If anyone is interested to help, we are trying to organize a road map and put it together on our Github page. I'll be around to answer questions and listen to feedback.
We are working on this! It originally started out just as a visual representation however now it factors into the model. Check out branch feat/hospital-bed-model
Posted by
nbnoll on Wednesday March 18, 2020 @09:34AM
from the show-hn dept.