FWIW, up until a few weeks ago, almost all of Taiwan’s cases were incoming travelers from abroad - in other words, they weren’t a reflection of the domestic internal situation at all. Taiwan was essentially entirely Covid-free, domestically, from April last year all the way up until a few weeks ago, when a doctor who treated Covid patients was infected himself.
Since this thread has more or less run its ATMB course, I wonder if the mods are going to move it to Quarantine?
Here’s his question and your answer. His question was not about a page full of graphics. DMC’s question was specifically about Sweden and Taiwan. He named the countries and linked the graphic where those two countries’ graphs were found.
If the point was made, you didn’t concede in that exchange that his point was made. You claimed that they all looked similar. Your claim is again conflicting with what happened.
I don’t know how many times I can tell you the same thing. The question of his that I answered was whether I went to the page. Yes, I went to the page. To even ask that implies a certain antagonism in the first place. To further distract from the discussion at hand by pulling out one comparison among all the possible comparisons – and using one with hardly any data reflected in it, at that – was not an honest attempt to address the questions being raised in the thread. And it was not an honest characterization of my observation that the set of graphs might indicate an underlying phenomenon – outliers notwithstanding.
If the proper response to that should have instead been ‘My apologies for being too literal. How about “all the curves that aren’t special cases like Taiwan?”’, then fine. I am sorry that I didn’t say that.
Now, did that add anything to the discussion, to point out that Taiwan was a very clear outlier? I don’t know. We’re all our own judges of that, I suppose.
But it didn’t stop there. He goes on to talk about Gaussian and Gompertz functions. I don’t really know what he’s claiming there, because I don’t tend to think of Gaussian functions when it comes to epidemiology or biological or population growth, like you would with Gompertz. Maybe he can tell us what he was getting at, if he thinks those graphs showed that the virus was behaving in a Gaussian way, whatever that would mean, in some countries and a Gompertz sort of way in another. I’d certainly be interested in reading that mathematical discussion.
Now, if what he meant instead was that you could fit a Gaussian function to some curve that you see…well, okay. There’s certainly nothing profound about that. Or even necessarily revealing anything anywhere near resembling an underlying truth. You can write lots of functions to fit lots of curve. Doesn’t mean your guess is necessarily right.
ATMB is for discussion of the rules, moderation, etc. of the SDMB. While some of the discussions about curves and such were relevant to the discussion about how things were being moderated, this is not the forum to have an in-depth discussion on this topic.
This is closed.
If you want to continue the Covid portion of this discussion, feel free to start a new thread in QZ (or join an existing one) and link back to the relevant posts here.