And now for the previous post, in reverse. Germany locked down at about the same time as the UK. Actually probably a couple of days earlier, according to Wikipedia and Flaxman et al. Picking a single date is a bit subjective really, but for the purposes of this post I’ll choose the 21st March. So…
A while ago, I mentioned that the cost of delaying lockdown by a week was to increase illness and death by a factor of 5, based on the doubling time of 3 days that the virus seemed to have at the start. Human cost of delayed action – a short thread prompted by a tweet…
Guayas is a region in Ecuador that has had a particularly tough time with COVID-19. Prompted by this Twitter post from Karsten Haustein I have done a bit of modelling… Spot on. (Un)fortunately, we have a real-world example. Corresponds to ~300.000 deaths in 6 weeks in the UK. pic.twitter.com/Ruei6U0w1c — Karsten Haustein 🌍 (@khaustein) May…
Has just been published! It wasn’t really my intention, but somehow we never came up with a proper title so now we’re stuck with it! This paper was born out of our long visit to Hamburg a few years ago, from some discussions relating to estimates of climate sensitivity. It was observed that there were…
(Small edit made 21 Apr to add a corollary at the bottom of the post.) I’ve said bits of this in various places and at various times to various people, but I don’t think I have written it down in a complete and coherent form. Actually, bits and pieces of the story have come to…
New manuscript! Now up on github too. Title as post. Yes, this is us dipping our toes into epidemiology. Turns out that calibrating a simple model with observational data is much the same whether it’s paleoclimate or epidemics. The maths and the methods are much the same. In fact this one is a particularly easy one…
A week ago, I blogged the graph on the left. Last night, one of the epidemiological modelling teams advising the Govt published the graph on the right. Billed as “new research”, it has formed the basis of the new Govt guidelines on social distancing to deal with the coronavirus pandemic. Apart from the choice of colours,…
Here are a few numbers that I’ve been bouncing around my head. The govt’s strategy is clear: they want the disease to spread widely, in order that we as a population may achieve “Herd Imunity”. A simple relationship that has some importance to this blogpost: if the basic reproductive rate is R0, then herd immunity…
I was so excited by learning how to embed R code in my blogpost on Monday that I didn’t explain the motivation behind my post very well 🙂 Recently a lot of “flatten the curve” graphics have been doing the rounds recently on Twitter. This is a typical example which is presented and explained in…
This is mostly an excuse to publish a blogpost using Rmarkdown. This is a system for combining R code in a “markdown” text document which can be readily compiled into html or pdf etc and also automatically published on WordPress which hosts the Blueskiesresearch blog. One slight problem I’ve not been able to solve is…
