Lots of talk from politicians and others that, while not exactly triumphalist, is certainly very positive and enthusiastic about the prospect of vaccinating ourselves out of trouble. Here’s one of the earliest “light at the end of the tunnel” articles for example. And with the new Oxford/AZ vaccine there is renewed excitement. Sorry to pour…
Continuing from previously…I have done some upgrades to the method and now have some results that I think are quite acceptable. Most importantly, after thinking about (and getting half-way to implementing) appropriate covariance matrices for the overlapping fortnightly observational summaries, I decided that the most sensible thing to do was just to use a single…
I’ve grumbled for a while about the ONS analyses of their infection survey pilot (pilot? isn’t it a full-blown survey yet?) without doing anything about it. The purpose of this blog is to outline the issue, get me started on fixing it (or at least presenting my own approach to an analysis) and commit me…
Way back in the mists of time (ie, 2006), jules and I saw what was going on with people estimating climate sensitivity, and in particular how this literature was interpreted by the authors of the IPCC AR4. And we didn’t like it. We thought that any reasonable synthesis should consider the multiple lines of evidence…
Even odder than finding that our old EnKF approach for parameter estimation was particularly well suited to the epidemiological problem, was finding that someone else had independently invented the same approach more recently…and had started using it for COVID-19 too! In particular, this blogpost and the related paper, leads me to this 2013 paper wherein…
So, the fortnightly chunks in the last post were doing ok, but it’s still a bit clunky. I quickly found that the MCMC method I was using couldn’t really cope with shorter intervals (meaning more R values to estimate). So, after a bit of humming and hawing, I dusted off the iterative Ensemble Kalman Filter…
The 2 and now 3-segment piecewise constant approach seems to have worked fairly well but is a bit limited. I’m not really convinced that keeping R fixed for such long period and then allowing a sudden jump is really entirely justifiable, especially now we are talking about a more subtle and piecemeal relaxing of controls.…
Well.. that was a very different EGU! We were supposed to be in Vienna, but that was all cancelled a while back of course. I might have felt sorry for my AirBnB host but despite Austria banning everything they didn’t reply to my communication and refused a refund so when AirBnB eventually (after a lot…
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…
BlueSkiesResearch.org.uk 