Tuesday assorted links and non-links
1. Some mask production is being deregulated.
4. Automated contact tracing without giving up privacy? And explanation.
5. What the SuperForecasters think.
6. A useful thread on mutation.
8. “People exhibit overconfidence in their ability to calculate exponential growth.”
9. The Spanish flu rebellion against masks. And how the Spanish flu shaped trust. And 1919 Science piece on the lessons of the Spanish flu.
10. From my email: “One major issue for SMBs is that many owners are on the hook *personally* for lines of credit and other business loans and also for business credit cards. For example, my business has a line of credit that I had to personally guarantee and it is with the same major bank that holds my mortgage. Bankruptcy would probably mean I discharge the line of credit AND lose my house at the same time. I suspect other SMB owners are in similar situations.”
11. Aurlus Mabele, coronavirus victim (NYT) obit), RIP (music video here). And Manu Dibango too.
12. “Based on the proposed methodological procedure, we estimated that the actual cumulative number of exposed cases in the total population in Lombardy on March 8 was of the order of 15 times the confirmed cumulative number of infected cases. According to this scenario, the DAY-ZERO for the outbreak in Lombardy was the 21st of January 2020. The effective per-day disease transmission rate for the period until March 8 was found to be 0.779 (90% CI: 0.777-0.781), while the “effective” per-day mortality rate was found to be 0.0173 (90% CI: 0.0154-0.0192). Based on these values, the basic reproduction rate R0 was found to be 4.04 (90% CI: 4.03-4.05). Importantly, by reducing the transmission rate by 90% on March 8 to reflect the suspension of almost all activities in Italy, we run the simulator to forecast the fade out of the epidemic. Simulations show that if the measures continue, the complete fade out of the outbreak in Lombardy is expected to occur by the end of May 2020.” Paper here.
13. Why Germany is not doing as well as you think. It is about the exponential function, yet again.