Some people ask why the epidemic situation in Hong Kong is so stable. I just want to say that all mainstream opinions today are one-sided.
picture / headline netizen
The real reason is: the infection shock wave follows the social phenomenon caused by various factors unique to Hong Kong, showing the long tail effect on the statistical model. Is
difficult to understand? That’s right! Because most people have no concrete idea about it.
When I went to school before, the teacher would not teach you scientific knowledge, but would only make you memorize it by rote and then do the questions like crazy. The two subjects of statistics and probability and cannot be learned in universities until thousands of people have passed the college entrance examination. Even according to majors, a considerable number of people can only take them as electives.
is way off base.
In short, the public lacks enough understanding of this basic common sense.
I think the reason why we are not fully prepared for this liberalization is related to this common phenomenon, from decision-making officials to the grassroots and the masses.
01
As shown in the picture above, the poster said that Hong Kong has not experienced a medical run. Later in the comment area, someone said that Hong Kong's "overpeak" was because the statistics were not detailed enough, or that they ignored the situation and praised it, and then called on the mainland to follow suit.
Picture/Headline netizen
is just talking nonsense with his eyes open!
When the first wave of infections peaked in February, the number of new cases in Hong Kong doubled several times a day. How could there be no talk of a medical run? The high mortality rate in Hong Kong is the best proof. Criticism that the data is not detailed is completely groundless. It is just a different statistical caliber.
As for those who call on the mainland to imitate Hong Kong, their heads are even more confused: Hong Kong was forced to liberalize, and although we are forced to liberalize by various factors, will we completely liberalize without the "New Ten Policies" promulgated by high-level officials?
In essence, we are taking the initiative to let go. The top management was also very cautious and held many expert symposiums to discuss state affairs before liberalization. Since
is actively liberalized, it is essentially different from Hong Kong's passive liberalization. When Hong Kong was initially liberalized, it was logical that phenomena such as a shortage of medical resources, insufficient vaccine vaccination rates, and insufficient protection for the elderly, weak, sick and disabled appeared.
Look at the mainland, you can experience it for yourself.
02
Instead of asking whether the mainland will be like Hong Kong, which only experiences one wave of peaks, and the rest of the peaks are very small, it is better to compare the differences between the mainland and Hong Kong in various social factors.
On the one hand, Hong Kong was once colonized by foreign powers, and people’s thoughts have long been exaggerated by Western cultures such as carpe diem.
Looking at the low-level performance of Western countries after the outbreak, we can also feel that Hong Kong citizens generally adopt a relaxed attitude when it comes to epidemic prevention and control. They already have an answer in their minds about whether life or freedom is more important.
Soon after the liberalization, you can see that Central, Kowloon, New Territories, Sham Shui Po, Mong Kok, Tsuen Wan and other places are overcrowded.
On the other hand, Hong Kong once ranked first among the Asian Tigers and is a developed economic region. It has enough strength to support citizens to go out for shopping and consumption.
Just the year before last and the year before last, the SAR government distributed tens of thousands of Hong Kong dollars to citizens. This approach can not only drive consumption, but also align with the over-issuance cycle of the US dollar (the Hong Kong dollar adopts a linked exchange rate system and anchors assets to the US dollar). Why not?
The overcrowded streets of Hong Kong
But for the mainland, let alone whether it can learn from Hong Kong’s liberalization model, it cannot even learn from Taiwan’s liberalization model.
The reason is that the mainland people have adopted a more cautious attitude towards the sudden relaxation of epidemic prevention and control than the official attitude.
In the past few days, some experts believe that as soon as the economy is relaxed, within a few weeks, our mainland will be like Hong Kong, with overcrowding everywhere, and the economy will get rid of the impact of the epidemic and prosper.
Seeing is believing, and experiment is the only criterion for testing truth.
It has been at least three weeks since the "New Ten Articles" were promulgated. Where are the people on the street? What about customers in physical stores? Where's the promised express delivery?
Because the people in the mainland have adopted a cautious attitude, compared with the people in Taiwan, they are even worse, and even surpassed!
03
Jin Dongyan, the previously famous professor of the School of Biomedical Sciences of the University of Hong Kong, said in an exclusive TV interview with Phoenix TV host Wu Xiaoli :
"I have some reservations (opinions) about whether the mainland can have 60% of the infections in the first wave."
"We can understand by talking about examples from a few places. First of all, let's look at Hong Kong. In fact, it did not actively relax, but passively broke through. In this case, the epidemic began from It rose in early February and fell to the bottom (the number of infections) in early April, but its peak was in March, one month after (the epidemic broke through), and the entire cycle is about two months. Because the first wave affected enough people, Hong Kong was at a very low epidemic level from May to December. "
" But if it is an area that actively liberalized, like Taiwan, China, it began to liberalize in May, but until now in December, its epidemic has basically not stopped, and there have been two epidemic peaks, and these two peaks are equally high. "
"If Beijing opens up now and people stay at home, no one goes to restaurants to eat, and few people take the subway, it will be similar to the effect of "closing the city." If you want to reach 60% (the infection rate), you may not be able to achieve it, and it will become 30%. Then there may be another wave next time, another 30%. "
" This has advantages and disadvantages. The advantage is that the impact of the two waves (peaks of infections) on our medical system and society is relatively small, which is the "staggered peak". But the disadvantage is that the duration of the epidemic is relatively small. longer. "
" I give these examples to illustrate that China may not be the same model in the end. An ideal situation for moving from a pandemic to a regional epidemic is to have a large peak followed by small peaks (in terms of data presentation). This is the ideal situation. "
Picture/Phoenix TV Douyin Account
Professor Jin Dongyan's words illustrate at least the following four points:
1. At the peak of the first wave of the epidemic, the infection rate among the mainland population may not reach 60%.
Let’s popularize science here. In order to form a solid enough herd immunity barrier against the epidemic, the current relatively unified academic conclusion in the domestic epidemiology community is that the number of infected people must reach at least 60% of the total number of people, while major overseas countries have higher requirements, such as the United Kingdom, which must reach more than 70%.
2. Referring to Hong Kong, after passive relaxation, there was only one major peak of the epidemic this year, with a cycle of about two months. The infection rate was extremely high, but there was no high rebound in the following months, and the population immune barrier was high.
3. Referring to Taiwan, after the proactive liberalization, there were two major peaks of the epidemic this year. From May to December, the epidemic continued.
4. The ideal situation for the epidemic to move from a pandemic to a regional epidemic is to have a big peak, followed by several smaller peaks.
At present, it seems that my country is likely to follow Hong Kong's model in relaxing the epidemic. However, as I have said above, in reality, the attitude of the people in the mainland is more cautious than that of the people in Taiwan.
Empty physical stores during the epidemic
Of course, it is still too early, and we must observe the national peak data of the first wave of infections around New Year's Day and Spring Festival before we can draw a conclusion.
But now we can follow Professor Jin Dongyan’s statement and speculate whether the final infection rate data at the peak of my country’s first wave of epidemics can exceed 60%.
04
Large-scale nucleic acid testing has now been cancelled. The official specific confirmed case data is distorted and not informative.
So how do we measure the number of infections in each city?
For the United States, which wanted to relax the epidemic at that time, this was also one of the difficulties that troubled her. However, they used the mathematical model of Hopkins University to replace the nucleic acid testing data at the federal level.
Now we are also adopting this method: A private big data technology company has developed a small program called "City Database" on WeChat , which contains the infected population data of various cities in China after deduced by mathematical models, as well as the trend chart of the number of infected people.
There are more than 300 cities in the country. It is impossible for us to check them one by one. We can only select representative cities for sample analysis.
Since my country has chosen to actively liberalize the epidemic in order to boost the economy and people's livelihood, we will select cities that have a greater impact on economic development and divide them into three grades to analyze their infection data.
is the first level, five megacities: Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Chongqing.
As shown in the figure, As of December 25, Beijing has passed the first wave of infection peaks, and the cumulative predicted population infection rate is 56.32%. If we calculate the cumulative infection rate on the day when the first wave peak ends based on the ratio of 1.92%, the result is 76.24%.
By analogy, is calculated based on the infection rate of 3.17% on that day. The cumulative infection rate in Shanghai on the day when the first wave peak ends is 72.36%.
The cumulative infection rate of the first wave in Guangzhou was 74.53%.
Shenzhen City is 83.6%.
Chongqing City is 73.66%.
It can be seen that the cumulative infection rate in my country's five megacities on the end of the first wave peak is generally above 70%.
Next is the second level, three megacities: Hangzhou, Wuhan, and Nanjing.
Why list these three cities? Because they have absorbed enough labor and employed people in recent years, their economic development prospects are relatively bright, and the flow of people and goods is relatively important to their economic development.
The cumulative infection rate at the end of the first wave of the peak in Hangzhou was 74.05%.
Wuhan City is 78.75%.
Nanjing City is 81.46%.
To sum up, the three cities that represent the "new first tier" have generally reached more than 70%. Among them, Nanjing beat the others, with a cumulative infection rate of more than 80% by the end of the day.
Finally, there is the third level, which represent the manufacturing industry cluster zones that are the lifeblood of my country's economy. One is Suzhou City located in the Yangtze River Delta , and the other is Dongguan City located in the Pearl River Delta.
For the economic vitality of these two cities, letting go of the epidemic is a life-saving straw.
Suzhou City is 74.08%.
Dongguan City is 75.96%.
Like all other cities, the cumulative infection rate in these two cities on the end of the first wave peak also exceeded 70%.
05
However, does the above data deduction show that Professor Jin Dongyan’s concern that the cumulative infection rate at the peak of the first wave will be less than 60% will not come true?
The answer is not necessarily.
First, because these data are only the results of mechanical calculations based on the predicted infection rate on December 25th, the reference is a bit weak.
Because the downward trend after the epidemic reached its peak is getting stronger day by day, and the infection rate is relatively slow, the rough calculation of the city’s infection rate lacks accuracy.
Second, the data settings of the statistical model can be offset, and then the problem of weight preference will occur.
For example, in the price index (CPI) that everyone is familiar with, the weight of pork and eggs and milk alone accounts for more than half, while commodities such as real estate, which have experienced the largest increase in the past, are not included in the statistical scope.
As for this big data system that predicts the peak of epidemic infections, it also has its own weight preference issues that cannot be avoided. For example, it can only view cities, but cannot specifically view infection data in rural areas.
Although according to the division of administrative divisions in my country, most rural areas belong to the district or county level and are directly under urban administration, this cannot be an excuse for missing data. The statistical bias of this forecasting system is urban rather than rural.
In addition, due to the relative lack of medical resources and insufficient medical staff in rural areas, they are easily squeezed out, resulting in greater humanistic and moral risks. Therefore, rural areas should not reach the peak too quickly, and cannot selectively ignore such problems in order to stimulate economic recovery as soon as possible.
Third, there is a concept in statistics called "excess rate." For example, when we look at statistics on the number of deaths from the epidemic, we will get data that is much larger than the actual situation.
Only in this way can we incorporate various risk parameters. This system will also set the "excess infection rate" in the prediction model to ensure that its predictions are closer to the real data.
But here we need to analyze the situation rationally and objectively. In addition to taking into account various risk factors, what other factors affect the forecast data of this system.
, the "urban database" system, claims that the data for the prediction model comes from search engines of major Internet companies such as , Baidu, index, and Huge Computing. The specific principle of is that during the period of liberalization, mobile phone users log on to Baidu or Toutiao pages to search for terms related to the epidemic. , such as " new crown ", "fever", "fewer fever", "muscle pain", " pneumonia ", etc., is integrated through big data technology and then used to make prediction models.
But after all, it is not the confirmed case data officially released by the country, and it has no advantages in terms of authority and reference.
In addition, we have to consider three questions:
First, will a considerable part of this data be searched by people who have returned to positive?
Everyone knows that the definition of "recovery positive" is not that is infected with again, but that it was originally infected, then turned negative and did not recover, and then relapsed. In essence, it is still the first infection.
Is it possible that there is such a part of the data in the current system prediction model, which actually disturbs the authenticity of the statistical results and increases the number of confirmed cases and the infection rate of the population in disguise?
Secondly, people who are not infected will be filled with worry and anxiety because everyone around them is positive, and they will instinctively search for relevant terms and take a shot in their hearts.
However, this prediction model did not exclude this group of people. It also pushed up the infection rate of the population, making it deviate from the real situation.
Thirdly, the group of people who cannot use smartphones to search for terms online have become the "silent majority" in this prediction model. , such as the elderly and underage children, also poses a big challenge to the authenticity of the data.
After the above analysis, I choose, like Professor Jin Dongyan, to have reservations about whether the infection rate of the people affected by the first wave of epidemic after the relaxation can reach 60%.
(This article is originally written by @正伟说. It is strictly prohibited to re-publish it on other platforms without consent. Violators will be prosecuted)
