Henry Baker <hbaker1@pipeline.com> wrote:
Reading between the lines, I'm coming to the conclusion that the concept of "R_e" ("effective" R), may be fatally flawed, as it tries to capture some sort of "mean" or "average" R in an inherently exponential setting.
A geometric mean is meaningful in an exponential setting.
Thus, if one person has an R_e of 0.9 and another person has an R_e of 40.0, there isn't a good way to average the two R_e's to compute a composite R_e.
Are you sure none of the power means will do it? The higher power means give larger numbers more weight than smaller numbers.
For example, in Massachusetts in the early going, almost 100% of the confirmed cases stemmed from a single meeting of a single company in a single downtown Boston hotel.
No smooth model will work for tiny numbers. Fortunately for modelers, and unfortunately for everyone else, the numbers are no longer tiny.
So if it is true that there are "super spreaders", both in terms of individual people and/or individual events, there must be a better way to quickly identify and isolate these people and events other than putting the entire world on lockdown.
Unfortunately, there's no way to know who those people are until far too late. Ideally we would have plentiful, inexpensive, reliable tests for both the virus and antibodies to it, so that everyone could be tested once a week. Those who are negative for the virus would be free to associate with each other, but not with those who are positive for the virus. Those who are positive for the virus would be free to associate with each other, but not with those who are negative for the virus. Those who are positive for antibodies but negative for the virus would be free to associate with everyone. Unfortunately, current antibody tests are not only scarce, but have such a high error rate that, if given to everyone, the majority of positives would be false positives.
Perhaps fractures in glass or metal may have relevance, as it may only take a single flaw in a crystal structure to destroy the entire structure.
It's quick, easy, inexpensive, and reliable to detect fractures, e.g. with ultrasound. Unfortunately, it's not yet easy, inexpensive, or reliable to detect either viruses or antibodies. Another approach would be to find a way to mass-produce inexpensive, reliable, and self-contained biohazard suits, which would allow everyone to freely associate, though people would need to eat alone. The suits would need power, but for stationary jobs and social events that could be done from an ordinary power outlet.