Topic: Coronavirus simulators (Read 144 times)

I think that any simulations can’t calculate human stupidity and crowd panic

There is government, and there is the real government.

The formal government isn't the real government. It's the tip of the iceberg. The real government is the banking system.

The banking system is based in the Federal Reserve Bank, the people who control it, and the money system. It reaches around the world. And it works very well.

But...
The Fed is a Ponzi system. Fiat is a Ponzi fiat. All Ponzis fail after a while.

How is the Fed a Ponzi? All money they loan is never really loaned. Rather, it is created, even though it says that it is loaned. Since it is created, the loans (not being loans) can't be repaid. In addition, they reduce the value of all money in existence.

Big business is realizing this. And so far, they have accepted the QE (Quantitative Easing) bribes the big banks are paying out. But the  nature of a Ponzi is to ultimately fail.

When you have a world of 7.4 billion people behind fiat, the failure might take a long while... IF the people never find out. But the people are finding out, and the money system is failing.

So, the point is, the banking system needs CV, and they need the focus of people to be on CV. This way there is less chance of people understanding that they have been played by the money system.

Used to be the robber said, "Your money or your life." Now the banking people are saying it about themselves with a big fat question mark... like are they going to be able to pull this one off.

The Patriot Act bit is a valid point, but I'm sure that was the government exploiting the situation rather than engineering it.
The CV bailouts is again a reaction, they are responding to the pandemic with desperate measures to keep the national and global economy afloat. It's not a deliberately engineered situation.

There are a lot of conspiracy theories, and you can of course believe what you want, but if you think the current situation is deliberately engineered, then you are putting a lot of faith in the government, you are saying that they are capable not only of implementing this whole thing, but also of keeping it secret. I would suggest that the government is slow, conservative, reactive rather than proactive, and incapable of keeping a secret on this sort of scale. More than this: that if it's deliberately engineered then they are working against their own best interests.

The status quo works so well for the elites already; they siphon off all the profit whilst socialising risk. That's how society is set up, that's how it's been for centuries, and no government is going to jeopardise that money train by creating a virus and letting it wreak havoc (or creating the illusion of a virus and letting it do the same).

Also the help/hurt Trump idea is too insular. This is not all about the US; people are dying all over the world. More than quarter of a million infected now, and rising rapidly. The idea that 50 vs 8000, flu is 160 times more deadly is not just factually incorrect, it's either moronically stupid or else morally abhorrent. See the links in this thread for an understanding of how COVID-19 spread compares to flu. Also see the comparison to how measles would spread in an unvaccinated population for a visual demonstration of how anti-vaxxers are idiots.

There are so many different maladies, that anybody can get sick and not know what he is sick from. What if a sick person tests positive for CV? This doesn't mean that CV is the thing that is making him sick. In most cases, the idea that it is Coronavirus, is simply speculation. Government is simply jumping in so that this good CV scare won't go to waste.


The Sport of Speculation

Yes, good point. This is of course modelling over a population, so it's impossible really to factor in the huge number of different personal choices that can be made.

Here in the UK, testing - or rather lack of - has been a problem. There is anecdotal evidence of people coming down sick with COVID-19 symptoms, but they are only entitled to sick pay once they have been medically diagnosed with the virus. As the government policy is not to do wide-scale testing, this means in practice that a lot of ill people aren't being tested, so don't qualify for sick pay, and so are staying at work rather than self-isolating just in order to get money to live... and as a result they are spreading the virus.

I understand it is difficult for governments to cover everything, but this specifically is a big problem with current policy in this country. Having said that, policy is changing almost by the hour, so who knows, we may soon see implementation of testing after all.


The 14-day quarantine policy that China are implementing now for people entering the country seems the best way to fight this. In fact the Chinese response from the Wuhan lockdown onwards has been good (although was shockingly poor prior to this as they tried to suppress whistleblowers). Difficult for countries that don't have that level of central control to follow suit with lockdowns and new entrant quarantines etc, but other SE Asian countries have responded well, and provide examples to follow.
The problem here is the 5 day incubation period, and the fact that governments are notoriously reactive rather than pro-active, meaning that quarantines etc tend to be implemented later than is optimal.

Yeah i've been following these stats as well.
I'm not sure how "human" factor is calculated in, as free will is the most dangerous tool when it comes to pandemic like this.

For instance, that Chineese lady that drugged herself up with pain killers just to hide the side effects of Corona, so she can go to France. She basically (and by she, i don't mean that lady, but people like her) made France a second ground zero.

For those who haven't seen it, there's a great simulator here that demonstrates how quarantining and social distancing work.

And another one here showing how epidemics spread, the examples covering varieties of R₀ values (how many cases an infected person will go on to cause directly) and R_e values (similar to R₀ but takes into account that some people will be immune). Comparisons are made between COVID-19 and something that is more contagious (measles), and something that is less contagious but has higher fatality percentage (ebola). There are also examples of how various precautionary and preventative measures can have an effect: masks/gloves, and then quarantines.

Have a look. It's not just dry numbers, these are highly visual simulators that can provide some real understanding of how and why viruses spread, and some insight into what can be done to stop them or at least manage them, and why these strategies work. Results will be different every time you run through these, but the overall patterns remain largely consistent.

Finally, a little more involved is this virus trajectory modeller, where you can move sliders to control R₀, R_e and other variables.