Given my lack of access to twitter, I thought it would be wise to transition to daily updates here.
COVID:
This BBC story crossed my plate. It's about how Hokkaido in Japan beat back Covid early on, but now there is a resurgence after lockdowns were lifted.
It refers to the fact that South Korea decided to do a ton of testing, while Japan declared such testing a waste of resources. The article states Japan has "now had to change its tune a bit"
During a crisis, especially a novel (new) one, there is no playbook. Imagine if you will that aliens, the size and shape of small household drone toys, invaded your house. How would you fight them off? If I asked a dozen people, I'd get a dozen answers. We won't know until we look at those dozen houses after the fight, who was right.
Covid is like that, but even more difficult. It takes 5 days for symptoms to appear. It takes (it seems) 2 weeks for an infected person who will die from covid, to die from covid. This delay makes actions difficult. Beyond that, data takes time to collect. Tests take time to perform, time to process, and time to report. Those figures take time to build a trend. Even then, because every country has slightly different standards, that data takes time to interpret. Once fully interpreted, the news needs to get out, but it is crowded by news stories about all the other steps in the process. The dissemination time for this data only adds to the lag.
Even with the best, fastest, most accurate data, with the best interpretations, it can take one to two full weeks to get a handle on what is happening. That means that countries, today, on April 16th, are reacting to how things were on April 1st. And that's considering a case where everything is working.
It was a completely valid view that you could beat this without extensive testing. Now that we have updated data, nobody thinks this way anymore. At the time these decisions were made, however, this was still a valid strategy.
By June, maybe the end of June, we (the world) will have a good idea for what actually works and what actually does not work when it comes to dealing with the coronavirus. We may even have early data on how to properly end a lockdown; but full proper data on how to end a lockdown will not be available until after a number of countries do it wrong.
The good news is that one we get this stuff down, we can use it against future novel virus outbreaks. Unlike SARS, Covid-19 is traumatic enough that it will stick with most people for decades. We will, eventually, get ahead of this, but, it will take time, and mistakes will be made along the way.
ISRAEL AND IRELAND:
Both countries continue to slowly bumble towards a coalition. I will update if/when things change. In Israel in particular things seem to swing between "the talks are breaking down" and "the talks are going well" daily, if not hourly, but unless the talks end - either in an agreement or without an agreement - things simply continue.
SOUTH KOREA:
Election results are in!
180 - DPK (government, liberal)
103 - UFP (main opposition, conservative)
6 - JP (progressive)
3 - OD (pro-DPK, progressive)
3 - PP (liberal)
0 - PPL (liberal)
0 - KEP (conservative)
0 - ORP (far-right)
5 - Independents
Roughly what I projected in my previous post; which isn't bad for a formula that is literally just X²
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