Root Privileges

Tag: epidemiology

  • The constructionist hypothesis and expertise during the pandemic

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    Now that COVID-19 cases are rising again in the country, the trash talk against journalists has been rising in tandem. The Indian government was unprepared and hapless last year, and it is this year as well, if only in different ways. In this environment, journalists have come under criticism along two equally unreasonable lines. First,…

  • Pandemic: A world-building exercise

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    First, there was light news of a vaccine against COVID-19 nearing the end of its phase 3 clinical trials with very promising results, accompanied with breezy speculations (often tied to the stock prices of a certain drug-maker) about how it’s going to end the pandemic in six months. An Indian disease-transmission modeller – of the…

  • The number of deaths averted

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    VM
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    What are epidemiological models for? You can use models to inform policy and other decision-making. But you can’t use them to manufacture a number that you can advertise in order to draw praise. That’s what the government’s excuse appears to be vis-à-vis the number of deaths averted by India’s nationwide lockdown. When the government says…

  • The virus and the government

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    In December 2014, public health researchers and activists gathered at a public forum in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to discuss how our perception of diseases and their causative pathogens influences our ideas of what we can and can’t do to fight them. According to a report published in The Harvard Gazette: The forum prompted serious reflection about…

  • The Wolfram singularity

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    I got to this article about Stephen Wolfram’s most recent attempt to “revolutionise” fundamental physics quite late, and sorry for it because I had no idea Wolfram was the kind of guy who could be a windbag. I haven’t ever had cause to interact with his work or his software company (which produced Wolfram Mathematica…

  • On India’s path to community transmission

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    There’s a virus out there among many, many viruses that’s caught the world’s attention. This virus came into existence somewhere else, it doesn’t matter where, and developed a mutation at some point that allowed it to do what it needs to do inside the body of one specific kind of animal: Homo sapiens. And once…

  • ‘When you change something in a virus, you lose something else’

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    VM
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    The contents of this blog post should have come out earlier (in a different form) but better late than never, eh? The Ebola outbreak has been more threatening than ever of going out of control (even as whether we’re really in control now is doubtful). As doctors and healthcare workers grappled with containment in West Africa, Michael…