Probably wasted money on vaccine promotion. It didn't feel like a vaccine did much difference in such short time-frame and number of immune people rose super slow even towards the end.
When they extend the game till the end of 2021 and beyond vaccines may make huge sense.
The problem is this: if you assume an exponential decay, you're saying there's no point after infection at which the probability of transmission is zero. Probability of infection has a half-life in SIR. But for a virus like covid, we know that's not true: if you're infected, give it six weeks and you won't be infectious any more, one way or another. If you replace an exponential decay with a finite transmission lifetime, you do end up with different epidemic curves: they have steeper fall-off, for instance.
What's the reasoning here?
IFR could be calculated only from the explanation only at the final screen, where the actual number of infections is estimated (it's several times higher than the confirmed cases)
We could legitimately say that in your game, the number of infected people was not 2.1M, but, including reinfections, there were up to 6.2M infections, according to experts’ theories. The game and your results only register the officially recorded infections (based on test data).
Taking in data present today and looking at countries that are doing nothing (Sweden), their total population death rate isn't as high as 4% either.
Do you have a source?
First, this URL https://covidgame.info/ loads the game in English by default. There was a plan to popularize the game outside of Czechia but, frankly, we missed the window when major news outlets were interested.
The game source code is here: https://github.com/swehq/corona-game
I added few comments on the other thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27763873#27766930
Afterwards there were a few more weekends with lower turnout and until about month or two ago there were free testing places all over the country. These were during many periods require to cross between regions, go to work or shops. Significant fraction of population was getting tested on weekly-biweekly basis.
I can't find a good chart because most only show PCR tests (for a good reason!) but according to [2] Slovakia averaged 7300 tests per 1000 people.
The initial mass testing weekend was useful to get an overview of distribution of the infections and remove a large chunk of the infected from the pool (despite high false negative rate of those tests). It was also good PR and made people more aware how serious the situation is and reconsider if they would rather wear the mask and distance than go through this.
However the continued testing is now viewed as mostly useless. More money spent or tracing and targeted PCR testing, plus vaccine campaigns could have helped more.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/01/half-slovakia-... [2] https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus-testing#how-many-test...
I know it was only few instances and the same relationship doesn't hold for other countries, and also most recent school opening in the summer didn't cause the next wave for the first time. But I think in Poland where we don't party all that much those little unhygienic buggers share way larger portion of the burden than science could establish so far.
Antigen tests are less sensitive, applicable in a much more narrow time frame than PCR tests, and not as trivial to perform correctly as suggested in the media. On top of that, they can be sensitive to external factors as well (such as temperature swings for tests in storage, and fast expiration).
I dislike these antigen tests due to the false sense of security they give people. They have their uses, but they are not a substitute for PCR tests.
There's a reason why influenza antigen tests are not widespread.
The only problem is that in hindsight of course we can do pretty well. I guess most governments could do better after the fact. Too bad you can't play the future with random-generated possibilities. The fact that we don't know what's going to happen would make it in part more accurate.
The idea that viruses spread like this isn't new. It happened before. Africa had seen it. Asia had seen it. When Europe went crazy with "they're taking away our freedoms" a lot of my Chinese friends hopped on a plane to China, away from the "plague enthusiastic" westerners.
A lot of what happened over the last year was pure crazy, and entirely foreseeable. It wasn't clear when or where such a spillover event would occur, but what would happen (or not) after that, as a function of actions taken (or not) was painted out and experienced before, by epidemiologists and entire countries. And it was promptly ignored by policy-makers, journalists, and the general population.
I lost a lot of faith in (western) humanity over the last year. I have little hope left that we'll learn anything from it. In fact we're already seeing that some of the obvious promises made with easily verifiable binary outcomes, like better income or security for frontline workers, are being dropped.
I recently watched a youtube video from May 2020, and in the end the person on screen hears noise, goes to the balcony and starts clapping with everyone to celebrate "our heroes".
That didn't fucking age well.
</rant>
I specifically meant erring on the other side.
Moreover, law enforcement isn't perfect at enforcing laws. If you lock down too much for too long, more and more people will ignore the rules. Eventually people will start to protest and rebel. If the government persists, leadership will be removed through impeachment or other methods.
This game (and many other data sources) are discussed in the Astral Codex Ten post Lockdown Effectiveness: Much More Than You Wanted To Know.[3]
2. https://sci-hub.st/10.1126/science.abd9338
3. https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/lockdown-effectiveness...
