The Australian government has released modelling about the Covid19 pandemic and its possible impact on the health system (for some reason they have been quite reluctant to do so). I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, so I’ll be blogging about it tomorrow. But if anyone would like to comment on where I should be looking, I thought I would link it here.

Link

This fascinating article in the New York Times is by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz (author of Everybody Lies, which I reveiwed here) talks about how Google searches (if you pick the right ones) can genuinely be early warnings for outbreaks of Covid19 around the world:

Vasileios Lampos, a computer scientist at University College London, and other researchers have found that a bevy of symptom-related searches — loss of smell as well as fever and shortness of breath — have tracked outbreaks around the world.

Because these searches correlate so strongly with disease prevalence rates in parts of the world with reasonably good testing, we can use these searches to try to find places where many positive cases are likely to have been missed.

Consider Ecuador. The official data says that while Ecuador has among the highest rates of Covid-19 cases per capita in South America, it has a lower case rate than the United States, Canada, Australia, Iran and most of Europe.

At the same time, Ecuadoreans are now making more searches related to loss of smell than any other country in the world, once you adjust for total Google searches. Searches for “no puedo oler” (“I can’t smell”) are some 10 times higher per Google search in Ecuador than they are in Spain, even though Ecuador officially reports more than ten times fewer Covid-19 cases per capita than Spain does. Ecuadoreans are also right near the top in searches for fever, chills and diarrhea.

The search data, in other words, suggests that Ecuador may be even more of a Covid-19 epicenter than the official data says. That could help explain recent videos that have been shared on social media of bodies piled up on the street in Guayaquil, a port city in Ecuador.

Worth a read, and as Stephens-Davidowitz points out – the google search data is available for anyone who wants to try it out.

Life Glimpses

Someone from my local high school posted on our facebook group today that their student had gone back to school after two weeks at home because they were so bored at home without their friends.

While I understand how boring it is at home this approach may be missing the point that really we all should be staying at home unless we have to go out. To be fair to this parent, the communication on school “closures” has been beyond confusing, particularly if you are not reading every word the government puts out on this. The playgrounds, the gyms, the restaurants, the cafés are closed but it is OK to send your child to school is a fairly confusing message for anyone.

Bit of Beauty

Today’s bit of beauty comes from our lockdown cooking. My 17yo made some cupcakes of their own invention yesterday, in the quest for a crème brûlée cupcake. Delicious!

7 Comments

  1. The cognitive dissonance of getting the Vacation Care programme from our school’s out-of-hours care service blew me away – especially combined with what seem to be increased government support that they will attract.
    With an energetic 6 year at home, I have to say it starts to look attractive.

  3. I will skip the “link”, though people from the Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel,
    ask the public to complete simple forms, which help them to locate the new hot spots of the Corona.
    I did not listen very carefully. Life Glimpses. It is Passover tomorrow, and we are going to have for the next 3 days a curfew. Will find more about, as is we are very restricted here already.
    Bit of beauty, oh one can look and not put any weight, Love

  4. Today’s data point – have just received Google classroom login for my youngest for term 2 (NSW state primary school).
    So preparation for the medium term at least

  5. Hi Jennifer, great blog – I’ve only just discovered it! Read through all of your posts but forgive me if I’m stating the obvious. The main reason why our growth rates have been low in last few weeks is because we closed our borders on 15 March. It then took a couple of weeks for infected overseas travelers who were in Australia prior to 15 March to show symptoms and become diagnosed. Then the pool of these people ran out, hence our case numbers have been lower. Community transmissions have been growing, but at a lower rate than you would expect. Not sure if this is due to social distancing or selection bias in our testing criteria. The next week or so will reveal the answer! Cheers, Karen

  6. Hi Jennifer, great blog that im following every day. Im seeing the same thing at a few childcare centres I know. People are starting to send their kids back (50% attedance comparing to 20% before the free childcare announcement at my centre). Its either due to people don’t want to miss out free childcare (which doesn’t seem logical as less people sent their kids when they were paying the fees – im sure there’s some behavioural economics playing here), or they had enough keeping kids at home, or people are just getting complacent about the seem good numbers. Whichever way it makes me nervous..

  7. Hi Jennifer, I have been enjoying your posts. I came across some posts from an old contact in South Africa which may be interesting to you from an old actuarial connection Gary Scott. While his focus is on South Africa, there may be some take aways for us here in Australia. https://modellingcovid-19.blogspot.com/2020/04/lockdown-is-wrong-for-africa.html
    In his post there is also a link to an interesting paper discussing previous influenza pandemics: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3557974/
    Warm Regard, Steve

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