Researchers are hard at work to determine all facets of COVID-19 ( https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus for example). I'm no expert, but I just wanted to play with some data a bit and see what I got. I do sort of thing a lot, and decided to share. This is a quick attempt at estimating the COVID-19 mortality rate / case fatality rate (number of people who die from it over number of people who got it). That's not the only important number, and can vary from place to place given appropriate medical attention, etc. But I ran across this tweet : and I was curious about what story that data might tell us. Disclaimer up front. There's a lot we don't know as of this writing (March 16, 2020) about COVID-19. There may very well be people who have it without symptoms or who have otherwise not been tested. People who have it now may die from it. People who have it now may recover from it. There's a lot of uncertainty. Also, disclaimer, I'm having a little trouble
There's a joke (or as my former professor might have said, "it's like a joke, it just lacks humor") about how programmers think: Programmer: "How do I make pasta?" Recipe: How to make pasta: Fill an empty pot with cold water Boil it Add pasta Programmer goes home and wants to make pasta. She sees a pot of boiling water already on the stove. So she pours it out, fills it up with cold water, boils it, then adds pasta. Again, like a joke, but potentially lacks humor. For those not "in the know," the joke is that programmers tend to reduce problems to ones they've already solved. In this case, the programmer already had a solution for making pasta. So, she changed things around until she could use it. In this case, we end up doing more work than necessary, but in general, this can be extremely effective. This week, the Google Doodle is pretty great. It's a coding game geared toward kids, in the same vein as Scratch or