I think that reached this point is obvious that in our hyperconnected cities a containment is going to be very difficult if the R0 is 3+ and we don't shutdown commuting
PS: for those interested in real-time info from experts I recommended following:
Please don't follow Eric Ding. He's not particularly qualified, and his statements to date have betrayed that he's not actually all that good at infectious disease epidemiology.
I'd suggest, in place, Maia Majumder (@maiamajumder) and Tara Smith (@aetiology).
Could you please flesh out your comment on Ding's skill in regard to infectious disease epidemiology ? I don't doubt you, I just like to know why people say things.
First, note that Eric Feigl-Ding is a nutritional epidemiologist, not an infectious disease epidemiologist. Infectious diseases are weird for a lot of reasons, and require something of a different skillset.
For example, in a Tweet of his he has now deleted: "never seen an actual virality coefficient outside of Twitter in my entire career." about the estimate for R0 for this novel coronavirus.
Similar R0 estimates existed for SARS, and MERS. Measles, Rubella and a number of other diseases have vastly higher R0s.
He also messed up some things like conflating R0 with secondary attack rates, and was generally very sensationalistic. Basically, the things that boosted him to prominence in this epidemic built on fairly sloppy reasoning from someone outside the field.
He's calmed down now, but one might as well go to sources for people who are both good at science communication and actual outbreak scientists.
Thanks for the info, I have just followed all those twitter accounts. Should we be objective about the facts presented? Do not shoot the messenger. We may be doing injustice to him if we dismiss every thing that he said. I do not know him but it seems that he may a bit over "enthuastic" in this topic. However, it is not good idea to belittle someone.
For those not aware of the drama, he suggested that the virus was mixed with HIV and invented by ... ;-) He removed the tweets after that. We all know it' a touchy topic.
I wouldnt put infectious disease epidemiologists on a pedestal either, whilst they can use plain old Police-like detection methods to identify so called Super Spreaders, the egit's can not identify what makes someone a Super Spreader. Considering the medical profession are so limited in their ability to measure the content of every cell and condition of every cell, cell sensing, signalling, enzymatic activity and radical activity in-vivo, eg localised hydroxyl radical activity in the presence of pathogens, infectious disease epidemiologists are no better than social commentators if society is considered an organism, or economists who swear to an economic school of thought on a par with a religion of your choice.
All experts have a common trait, they espouse their virtues when they are right and slink into the shadows when they are wrong, sometimes, if they have the audacity they wait for the next opportunity before popping up like a jack in a box.
>But there is some evidence — and we’re working on quantifying it — that coronaviruses do transmit less efficiently in the warmer weather. So it’s possible that we will get some help from that, but I don’t think that will solve the problem, as evidenced by the fact that there’s transmission in Singapore, on the equator.
There have been several research about seasonal influenza and how it correlates with weather, like temperature but especially humidity
- Right now, there's some ongoing research about R0 relative to humidity, and it's not promising. This includes Singapore, but it should also be noted that Singapore has an amazing public health system that will confound using it as an example in both directions.
- Having written a review on the seasonality of influenza, the fact of the matter is we have very little notion of why it's seasonal, and a lot of "just so" stories.
A few years ago (circa 2010 or so) when I was seriously working on epidemic modeling, we tried to look for an effective seasonality model, based on temperature, humidity, etc that worked globally and failed miserably. What seemed to work in one country or area failed completely in others, and vice versa. I'm curious to see if things have improved since then
It's an older paper (circa 2006) but...to be honest, I revisit it occasionally, and the problems we point out are still there. https://jvi.asm.org/content/81/11/5429
Ahahahahah... HN really is a small world. I remember this paper. The section on “indoor heating and AC” stuck to my memory to this day. Back then we were hoping for a seasonality-based follow up to this paper: https://www.pnas.org/content/106/51/21484 but it was not meant to be.
"warm weather may have an effect on transmission" and "a warm city is dealing with infections" are not mutually exclusive statements.
And for the record, as of a little over a week ago, there were only a dozen cases in Singapore according to the WHO. Even if they were mutually exclusive, Singapore isn't exactly the best example.
Exactly. The comparison with Indonesia is interesting, which has a similar climate, but isn't as rich or developed as Singapore.
Air conditioning is actually very conducive to colds and the like. When you go from outside to inside you're usually sweaty and the air conditioning tends to make you too cold until you dry out. I've caught way more sniffles in the tropics than in the freezing climates.
Anecdotally, I flew from Bali to Singapore today and there seemed to be a lot more sniffles and coughing in Singapore. In Bali the architecture is very open with lots of fresh air, scooters being popular for transport whereas in Singapore they tend more to sitting together in air conditioned boxes of various types (buildings, busses etc).
The real takeaway from the 74 Million piece is that information about HVAC in American schools is difficult to come by. It would certainly be interesting to look at COVID-19 in schools vis-a-vis A/C, but good luck prying information from the school districts about either infections or air conditioning. Perhaps it would be easier in a tropical country like SG where A/C is more of a necessity than a luxury.
Also the coronavirus doesn’t really seem present in countries in the Southern Hemisphere except for some imported cases in Australia. There’s nothing being heard of South America or Africa which could be because of their hot climate.
Despite that, I think it’s too late to rename this virus. People have called it “coronavirus” for weeks now and the name will likely stick, correct or not.
What's super-weird in all that coronaviruses are already an entire class of viruses that are the second most popular cause of the common cold, behind rhinoviruses:
> "The common cold is a viral infection of the upper respiratory tract. The most commonly implicated virus is a rhinovirus (30–80%), a type of picornavirus with 99 known serotypes. Other commonly implicated viruses include human coronavirus (≈ 15%), influenza viruses (10–15%), adenoviruses (5%)..." [1]
Someone you know probably has a coronavirus right now -- just not the one in the news.
But somehow this basic fact has barely been mentioned in the media.
Seriously, calling the new disease "coronavirus" is as silly as a chef calling their new very specific recipe "soup". Like... you've gotta come up with something more specific...
If a chef came up with a super delicious recipe that was taking the world by storm and happened to be soup... I could see people using the generic encompassing term to identify it. By nature of popularity people would know what you were referring to.
In fact, the only relationship that virus had with Spain is that the press was not censored as in the other European countries of that time (because of their involvement in the Great War).
great, now what happens if another coronavirus epidemic hits? do you still call it "novel coronavirus", because it's novel? do whoever's in charge of naming get their act together and allocate a number in hours rather than weeks?
Novel novel coronavirus. The next one after will be novel novel novel coronavirus. Reminds me of some people I've worked with who insist on long email threads with attached words docs as their "project management" methodology.
Yeah, but the WHO isn't naming things for "people".
Any more than the fact that "people" call things stomach flu when they're not at all influenza related changes that things are called "norovirus" and "rotavirus".
The name is correct but vague, we've had coronavirus spreads before (like SARS) and will have in the future, so it'll be confusing whether we're talking about this one or something else.
If you do find yourself or someone you love infected with corvids, I can, if nothing else, guarantee a very high karma HN post for you if nothing else. HN loves corvids.
Today the cdc had a press conference announcing the quarantine release of 195 people who flew into the US from Wuhan, based on the assumption that being asymptomatic for 14 days is good enough [0]. Last I heard, WHO is calling the upper limit on incubation 24 days. This release is being done without any actual testing.
Have you got a link for the 24 days? The best I could find is that we're totally guessing things at this point. CDC says:
> CDC believes at this time that symptoms of 2019-nCoV may appear in as few as 2 days or as long as 14 after exposure. This is based on what has been seen previously as the incubation period of MERS viruses.
Apologies, I'm not sure if I misremembered, misattributed, or if that was an actual previous estimate from WHO. Everything I can find now seems to be around 14 days, with the Japanese govt using 16 as a lower bound for the cruise ship. I swear WHO was publishing 24 in a sitrep last week, maybe I just haven't found it yet.
From the WHO Q&A page,
> Current estimates of the incubation period range from 1-12.5 days with median estimates of 5-6 days. These estimates will be refined as more data become available. Based on information from other coronavirus diseases, such as MERS and SARS, the incubation period of 2019-nCoV could be up to 14 days. WHO recommends that the follow-up of contacts of confirmed cases is 14 days.
There was a paper that talked about 24 days but that was a single patient and the more likely scenario is that the person was wrong about the timing or got infected at a later time period.
What do you mean without actual testing? Those people have been under observation for two weeks.
Never heard of this 24 day incubation period. Every country is using 14 as a guideline.
Japan let some of their repatriates loose without quarantine because they had "important reasons". They went home, and while invited to stay home, who knows what they did in the two weeks since... Today it was announced that one of them was now positive for 2019-nCoV.
One of the quarantine workers on the Diamond Princess (the cruise ship stuck in quarantine in Yokohama) was found positive. Now they have to track his family too.
Depending on your strike and maturity, you may not lose anything. If the entire market sells off hard, correlation will go to 1 in the slide. Index options tend to price in some expectation of this (it's called "correlation skew") for downside options. So you'll make money on three things in a slide:
* delta, ie the slide itself,
* vega, ie the increased expectation of volatility for the remaining duration of the option contract,
* skew, which will increase more for index options than for single names due to implied correlation resetting higher.
I have noticed that the market seems to be in a "buy any dip" mentality, so be aware of that. If the market sells off, it may come right back the next day. Look at what happened already with the coronavirus outbreak, as well as Iran's missile launches before that.
I got out around 23rd Jan when I started hearing about Corona virus spread in China. Market went up and it looks like I left 10-15% of profit on the table. But as I live in Asia and I see what is happening economically in many countries now I still think it was a good decision. If the market doesn't drop in the next few weeks it will once the 1st quarter results come out
Can you recommend a good source to learn more about how options trading works in real life?
Id like to know how you guys generate trading ideas, come up with bet size, study market sentiments etc
Trading options is extremely risky and a lot of people teaching it, teach it because doing it is normally not profitable and they have already lost their money.
Unless you have some huge edge, which no one does, options are the last place to spend your time and blow your money.
There's an article I read a few years ago talking about the possible outcomes from startup equity, using the analogy of a 99 sided die.
It's something like:
1-50: nothing
51-70: a little
70-90: what you would get from a FAANG
90-99: millionaire
100: you're a billionaire
And then goes on to note that there is no 100 on a 99 sided die, seems like options are similar :) I have no belief in my ability to beat the market and treat them like a fun thing to spend some money on, not like an investment.
QE and monetary stimulus is primarily effective at counteracting demand shocks. For example productive capacity, like empty storefront or unemployed workers, sits unused because liquidity has dried up.
A worldwide pandemic would primarily exert its economic effect through supply shocks. The productive capacity of the economy genuinely shrinks. Stores can't open during a quarantine. Sick workers can't show up at the office.
A pandemic might have second-order demand shocks, particularly if panicking investors flee to quality. But there'd still be a genuine contraction in real and potential GDP, most of which would get absorbed by contracting corporate profits. Monetary stimulus can't route around those constraints.
If the OP really thinks this will be a worldwide pandemic, far dated put options are the best bet. Wall Street has definitely not priced that in. Everyone is assuming this will be over with in a few months.
We printed our way into this problem; we can print our way out! /s
Seriously, though; S&P puts yields are implicitly discounted by inflation — do we really think they won’t sacrifice the dollar on the alter of asset price nominal “stability”?
Gold calls get you a positive real yield on both stock market drop & inflationary response, no?
Metaculus is reputation based, not real money. They have a market for coronavirus, https://www.metaculus.com/questions/3529/how-many-human-infe...
Currently has a 3% chance of infecting more than 1 billion and 50% chance of infecting more than by 865k by 2021
Why not get with the times and give the face masks away for free and just collect the data and sell the data? Targeted nyquil and chicken soup ads could be a valuable commodity.
Good luck procuring them at any sort of scale right now. If you are in a position to do this (because you own a mask factory or you found 20 pallets of face masks in your garage or something) you probably didn’t wait for an HN comment telling you to do it :P
Not sure about betting markets, but I'd put the odds really really high. It has a near-perfect combination of traits that make it spread really effectively. A latency window long enough to let people get around the world, combined with asymptomatic spread is pretty hard to stop. I can't even figure out how you could detect it well enough to stop it.
Based on the article, it's not clear that the virus exhibits asymptomatic transmission.
> GAZETTE: Is that the most concerning new information, that it might be transmissible before symptoms are apparent? That would seem to make this a lot trickier.
> LIPSITCH: Yes. I think that’s the most concerning piece, but the evidence for that so far in the public domain is pretty limited. I’ve seen hints that aren’t published yet, but the evidence for that that’s been peer reviewed is quite limited.
I think what laypeople and experts mean by "asymptomatic" is different and contributes to talking past each other.
One of the first symptoms of this coronavirus is a dry cough. These people would not be considered asymptomatic in the technical sense because clearly they have a symptom.
However a cough is such a common thing that healthy people do all the time, in a practical sense a person who only has a cough is functionally asymptomatic and able to go about their daily lives. It is only when they develop a fever that they become sick enough to notice.
> At least one of every two instances of human-to-human transmission of the new coronavirus is believed to occur while the first patient is not yet showing symptoms, according to an estimate by a group of Japanese university researchers.
> Based on its determination, the team, headed by Hokkaido University professor Hiroshi Nishiura, has called for preventive measures as well as reinforcing the medical care system against a potential sharp rise in coronavirus patients, rather than focusing exclusively on isolation as a way to contain the disease.
>Is there any betting market that is taking bets and has good volume on whether there is going to be a novel coronavirus pandemic?
That would be the Housing Market.
However, the biggest impact may very well be the reaction in the public towards this and that in itself would cause more avenues of betting. Like facemask filters, only so many get made, so whatever companies make that will see a share price increase, if they are listed. Equally, the usual suspects in vaccines will be all hedged by the money market in trading from now until a winner (vaccine found) is made. Which will probably be around the time for winter 2020 flu vaccine from what I've read so far from best estimates.
That all said, if they said London would get 1" of snow, the amount of panic would be greater than what we are seeing so far.
But that may well change quickly, though at least we never had a flu riot that I'm aware of in history.
The problem with face mask filter stocks (like 3m) in this case seems to be that while demand has hugely increased, ability to deliver has actually gone down. The supply is constrained by just in time delivery/minimal stockpiling, and the fact that 99% of them are made in china which has basically shut down all nonessential factories. 3m also re-brands many chinese mfg's face masks/filters, and the local chinese demand is high enough these days that those mfgs are probably just selling the few they have domestically.
I just tried buying some today. It was tough to find any that didn’t seem like garbage. I found 2 cotton washable ones on amazon for way too much money. But I have a trip to Korea on Monday. So I figured it would be prudent.
My understanding is that masks offer only minor protection against getting it, but help a lot against spreading it. They don’t stop a virus but they catch the snots.
>My understanding is that masks offer only minor protection against getting it, but help a lot against spreading it. They don’t stop a virus but they catch the snots.
Everyone is terrible at predicting unlikely events. If you think you've got a better bead on it, it doesn't take all that much money to buy some options.
It appears US is better than Indonesia in reporting, but worse than Singapore, according to their preprint [1].
AFAIK, the coronavirus test is not being conducted for people who have no history of visiting China or traveling outside, and the virus can be transmitted before symptoms could appear. Based on the article, it is conceivable that the virus could soon be found from a person who has no travel history outside US, but only when the person gets dangerously sick.
In the US they also are not testing people who came from China even if they have mild symptoms.
Unless you have a fever and a cough they won't test you. According to the latest research out of China there are many people who when admitted to the hospital had no fever but tested positive.
Frankly a lot of cases are likely not being caught in the US and elsewhere.
It's interesting that chloroquine, an old anti malarial drug is "highly effective in the control of 2019-nCoV infection in vitro". I wonder if anyone's doing a study to see if that stops it spreading in the real world? I almost thought I could do a double blind study myself with a website and a bunch of chloroquine pills and aspirins and randomly post volunteers one or the other. Dunno if the post works in Wuhan though. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41422-020-0282-0.pdf
Chloroquine can have serious long-term side effects. This is not something you should attempt lightly or without a substantial fund for compensating the volunteers for the damage to their health.
Chloroquine is over-the-counter in England and other places. Hypothetically, anyone have an idea where to find someone willing to send a chloroquine care-package to the USA?
Yeah though chloroquine is fairly mild stuff - they used to give it to all travellers going to malarial places but have mostly stopped because malaria mostly became resistant. I'm not a medic but reading the letter to nature I'd put the odds of it protecting you in real life at say 50/50 so if you're getting exposed it could be a reasonable risk reward. Even if it didn't stop infection it could make the illness less severe.
I avoid touching my face, stay away from crowds (not that I didn't before, hah!), cough / sneeze into tissue / handkerchiefs, wash my hands properly and have a bottle of sanitizer at all times.
I might need more measures if I was in the middle of Wuhan (or even just feeling ill, I guess) but frankly where I am it feels like any additional steps would be done out of fear, not reason.
When a building is burning, often, people's first reaction is to ignore the alarm and carry on with what they were doing. The first people to leave look like worry-warts. Those who make it out, though, are the ones who think for themselves and realize there is a problem, before the herd stampedes. Insurance is cheap before there's a problem, but impossible to get after. What is my "cost" and "risk" from having chloroquine? I'll probably never take it, so almost nothing. What is my upside? Maybe nothing, maybe everything.
I hear a lot of "it is just the flu." Maybe. The Spanish Flu was horrific, though. And when was the last time a city the size of london was quarantined for the flu?
I believe in data-driven fear. Care to go over the data?
You would have to drink about two liters of tonic water a day to consume a day’s dose of quinine in pill form. Which is doable, but exposes you to quinine side effects.
Antimalarial compounds quinine, chloroquine and mefloquine affect the electrophysiological properties of Cys-loop receptors and have structural similarities to 5-HT3 receptor antagonists. So they might act at 5-HT3 receptors.
In 2006, the FDA banned sale of unapproved drugs containing quinine because of the risk of serious side effects or death.
Connections was- and probably still is- my favorite show I've ever seen. I watched it when I was very young and it really shaped my view on the world and helped me learn to love history and the stories in it.
Also made me realize that originality and ownership of ideas is way more complicated than i'd thought.
> Since these
compounds have been used in human patients with a safety track
record and shown to be effective against various ailments, we
suggest that they should be assessed in human patients suffering
from the novel coronavirus disease.
“worst flu season in modern times” — would that be when
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_flu killed one out of every 15 to 30 people then living, mostly within a period of two months? That sounds pretty bad.
Really? Early modern Britain is roughly the 16th to 18th century. Postmodernism and Other Essays was published in 1926. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_era is 1500 CE and later. If they intended to refer to such a nonstandard definition, don't you think they'd have been explicit about it rather than leaving readers to argue about it? Either they meant specifically that pandemic or they were just bullshitting with no concern for the truth-value of their utterance.
Note that the mortality figures they're bandying about do intersect with the 1918 flu pandemic mortality rates at the high end.
"Postmodernism" may have been in 1926, and it was post-modern... from the viewpoint of 1926. 94 years later, or boundaries have shifted somewhat...
(Even that article that you linked says, 'The definitions of both terms, "modern history" and "contemporary history", have changed over time, as more history has occurred, and so have their start dates.')
? I guess the source data could be fudged but surely China realizes by now that faking things is only going to make them look worse in the long run? Maybe I'm too optimistic.
The headline refers to the global outlook. Even if cases in China peak in the near future, there may well be new outbreaks in other countries soon.
Quoting the relevant section:
> GAZETTE: Is it significant that there are so few cases internationally compared with the number in China? Is that an indication that control measures are working or is it just gathering steam internationally?
> LIPSITCH: Unfortunately, I think it’s more likely to be that it’s gathering steam. We’ve released a preprint that we’ve been discussing publicly — and trying to get peer reviewed in the meantime — that looks at the numbers internationally, based on how many cases you would expect from normal travel volumes. And a couple of things are striking. One is that there are countries that really should be finding cases and haven’t yet, like Indonesia and maybe Cambodia. They are outside the range of uncertainty you would expect even given variability between countries. So our best guess is that there are undetected cases in those countries. Indonesia said a couple of days ago that it had done 50 tests, but it has a lot of air travel with Wuhan, let alone the rest of China. So 50 tests is not enough to be confident you’re catching all the cases. That’s one bit of evidence that to me was really striking. Second, I was reading The Wall Street Journal that Singapore had three cases so far that were not traced to any other case. Singapore is the opposite of Indonesia, in that they have more cases than you would expect based on their travel volume, probably because they’re better at detection. And even they are finding cases that they don’t have a source for. That makes me think that many other places do as well. Of course, we’re making guesses from limited information, but I think they’re pretty likely to be correct guesses, given the totality of information.
This is the data for mainland China, and it looks to be of an order with the data you cite. I think the main risk is whether the China data is accurate. I read the article subsequent to my comment and I realized that this interview accounts for the downward second derivative. The answer is: perhaps controls are working, or perhaps China is unable to test so many new cases. I'm inclined to believe the first hypothesis because apparently they were able to test 4.5k new cases in a day a few weeks ago. It doesn't really make sense to me that they would subsequently be able to test only 2.5k.
> In a notice issued by China's National Health Commission (NHC) on Feb. 6, it wrote that the classification of new Wuhan virus infections will be divided into four categories: "suspected cases," "clinically diagnosed cases," "confirmed cases," and "positive tests." Among these, "positive tests" refers to "asymptomatic infected patients" who test positive for the disease but have no symptoms.
> There is also a clear stipulation in the official document stating that "If the reported 'asymptomatic infected patient' has clinical manifestations, their status shall be revised to 'confirmed case' in a timely manner" (highlighted text in Tweet below). This indicates that even if a person tests positive for the disease but does not exhibit any symptoms, they will no longer be included in the daily infection reports.
The last I heard from Reuter, China was trumpeting an April date for this to end. I don’t know why they would pin a date when you are just extrapolating a graph that was in itself wildly inaccurate due to testing limits
China is looking at major economic damage from the quarantines. I think their concern is about people staying in, cancelling travel and other economic activity far past the end of the epidemic. I can see a logic to it, but I share your disapproval.
>But there is some evidence — and we’re working on quantifying it — that coronaviruses do transmit less efficiently in the warmer weather. So it’s possible that we will get some help from that, but I don’t think that will solve the problem, as evidenced by the fact that there’s transmission in Singapore, on the equator.
The temperature of a human body is 37ºC it's odd a virus would be incapacitated or slowed by "warmer" weather. I know to kill viruses a fever is what our bodies use along with the immune system. And I know this is referring to it outside a body but it seems odd. I would have expected warm, moist weather to make transmission easier like an incubator.
Viruses don't survive at all in open air due to uv. They need some protection, usually in the form of a water droplet. If that evaporates sunlight will kill it.
https://towardsdatascience.com/modelling-the-coronavirus-epi...
I think that reached this point is obvious that in our hyperconnected cities a containment is going to be very difficult if the R0 is 3+ and we don't shutdown commuting
PS: for those interested in real-time info from experts I recommended following: