COVID-19

Here are some resources that I have found useful to help improve my understanding of the pandemic:

  • This March 14 Washington Post article by Harry Stevens uses a simple but effective graphic simulation to show how an infection spreads and how “social distancing” can help to keep down the peak number of active cases
  • This March 10 Medium article by Tomas Pueyo (who has no specially relevant qualifications but is a great presenter with a good sense of what are high quality sources) gives more detail on some of the actual history of the pandemic and draws important attention to the lag between reported and actual numbers of cases
  • This March 16 report from a team at Imperial College in London apparently was instrumental in persuading the UK and US governments to adopt strong measures of social distancing
  • This March 19 follow-up article by Tomas Pueyo gives a somewhat more optimistic response to the ICL study
  • This March 19 Atlantic article by Aaron Carroll and Ashish Jha correctly emphasizes the need to “buy time” with an immediate suppression strategy and to use that time to prepare for a much longer war (Pueyo’s “dance”) – but it has an unfortunate and completely wrong sub-head (at this point “mitigation” will just be a disaster, and “suppression” won’t “get us where we need to be” but is just the least we need to do in order to “buy time”) .
  • And this Globe&Mail article tells the alarming story of Canada’s lack of preparedness.