Aatish Bhatia is a physicist and science writer who builds interactive explainers on math, physics, music, climate, and Covid-19 data.
HN links his Covid trends charts in pandemic debates and enjoys his interactive pattern tools, with a playful aside about his pizza-holding article.
> HIV is so fundamentally different
Coronaviruses are very different. We've rarely had any this deadly before. All vaccines are different; they're not one blanket thing. Smallpox vaccines are attenuated virus (a virus that has mutated to be benign in humans; in the case of Smallpox, the first vaccine by Jenner was injecting people with Horsepox).
Most Influenza vaccines are heat treated/inactivated virus.
In all cases, vaccines try to produce antibodies and force our immune systems to develop a memory for a virus we haven't actually been exposed to. As shown in the links above, this might not work at all for coronavirus.
To some extent, the actual interactions of vaccines, are somewhat opaque. This In A Nutshell video shows a very small part of the adaptive immune system, greatly simplified:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSypUV6QUNw
> The virus isn't just going to "burn out" anytime soon
Exponential growth doesn't go on forever. It has to hit an inflection point:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kas0tIxDvrg
The more deadly a virus is, the faster it does burn out. It runs out of hosts to infect or everyone develops an immunity. SARS/MERS may have had lower outbreaks because of how much more dangerous they were.
If you graph fatalities on a logarithmic scale, you'll see we're already well past the inflection point in the US:
https://aatishb.com/covidtrends/?data=deaths
The cases are going up, but the fatalities are not, indicating there may be a lot of…
A more complete set of COVID-19 informational resources†:
COVID-19 trends by region, country, state/province, U.S. metropolitan area, or U.S. county:
https://outbreak.info
COVID-19 projections:
https://covid19.healthdata.org/projections
Financial Times Covid-19 tracker:
https://ig.ft.com/coronavirus-chart/
CovidTrends; New cases (weekly average) vs. total cases, by country:
https://aatishb.com/covidtrends/
Worldometers Coronavirus live statistics:
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
US realtime state Rt estimates and tracker:
https://rt.live
The Economist excess mortality tracker:
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/04/16/tracking-covid-19-excess-deaths-across-countries
Covid19 projections:
https://covid19-projections.com/
Imperial College London Covid tracking 7 estimation model (US):
https://mrc-ide.github.io/covid19usa/
Our World in Data Coronavirus tracker:
https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus
Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus map (US):
https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/us-map
ArcGIS visualizer:
https://experience.arcgis.com/experience/7572b118dc3c48d885d1c643c195314e/
Rysiek's National comparison grapher:
https://rys.io/covid/
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Notes:
† Some duplicates w/ parent.
>South Korea is also contemplating murder charges against a church. They also did massive contact tracing when they were still under 100 cases. South Korea took this massively seriously.
>As did Taiwan after Wuhan. Taiwan also rationed emergency supplies. Here's what Taiwan did: https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/taiwan-covid-19-lessons-1.5...
But they didn't mass-close businesses. That's what causes the economic damage.
>the same economics as the other European countries (which are all benefiting from their social safety net
You sure about that?
https://www.dw.com/en/as-coronavirus-lockdown-eases-italians-fear-bleak-future/a-53313932 , https://www.euronews.com/2020/04/23/unrest-hunger-and-hardship-in-france-s-locked-down-suburbs .
> The problem is that if a country didn't react fast enough, it is then required that you react harder and longer.
Required by what? Sweden hasn't "reacted" harder and the spread of the virus is already slowing there: https://aatishb.com/covidtrends/?location=Brazil&location=Canada&location=France&location=Germany&location=India&location=Italy&location=Japan&location=Russia&location=South+Korea&location=Spain&location=Sweden&location=US&location=United+Kingdom
I don't really know what you're talking about.
NZ looks to me to have a lower death rate than Australia. See [0].
I haven't done a deep dive of the literature but from what I understand wearing face masks is pretty well established to correlate with lower infection rates. A Google search gives [1] which seems pretty reputable to me.
It sounds like you're picking a fight about your personal cause celebre? The original article is talking about trying to figure out how to build evidence. The underlying assumption is that once you have evidence, you use it to inform decisions. You're pushing a false narrative by not only ignoring evidence but also misinterpreting or lying about the evidence that's available.
[0] https://aatishb.com/covidtrends/?data=deaths&location=Australia&location=New+Zealand
[1] https://www.publichealthontario.ca/-/media/Documents/nCoV/COVID-WWKSF/2022/03/wwksf-mask-mandates-population-level-outcomes.pdf?sc_lang=en
What counts as science is results, and Sweden is flattening the curve just as well as the UK and Canada, so the system is working, whatever it is.
I mean, take a look: https://aatishb.com/covidtrends/?location=Canada&location=Denmark&location=Finland&location=Sweden&location=US&location=United+Kingdom
I'm not sure why people are having such a hard time accepting that what Sweden is doing is in fact working, in the face of a pretty clear graph. Just because it appears counter-intuitive or possibly not in line with their preexisting ideas of what should be done?
There's still 5 US states without any form of lockdown (the Dakotas, Nebraska, Iowa and Arkansas), too, so you could say they're "following the Swedish model." Wyoming, Utah and Oklahoma are only under regional partial lockdowns, too. Of course they only account for about 5% of the population but it remains notable.
> We looked at each country’s trajectory in “phase space” – where we looked at the evolution of the daily case growth rate as a function of the number of cases (rather than as a function of time). Each country has followed a very similar trajectory in this space, where the disease begins on a theoretical SIR curve but then veers off course and decelerates after government intervention.
This has also been done here: https://aatishb.com/covidtrends/
Accompanying minutephysics video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54XLXg4fYsc
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22715920
This page provides results by country rather than by US state.