Balanced Risk Strategies, Ltd. - Martin Pergler
  • Home
  • About Martin Pergler
  • Delivery models
  • Articles
  • Why balance?
  • Old blog

News and thoughts. Read at your own risk!

Coronavirus: Shortening our lives by a year

24/3/2020

 
Getting COVID steals a year of your remaining actuarial life, regardless of your age. That's the interesting conclusion of this chart (not mine) that plots the COVID infection mortality rates versus age cohort on the same axes as actuarial chance of death in one normal year.

Of course, there are lots of caveats in this apples-to-oranges comparison. It's simple age cohorts, US normal death rates, and -- most importantly -- assumes we still succeed in flattening the curve enough for medical care to be there for those who need it. If not, it might be 2-3 years of actuarial life rather than 1.

(It's a bit hard to find in the comment thread: the data is IFRs from the Imperial study, i.e. P(death|tests positive AND ventilators available), not P(death) overall.)

For those still reading under the fold, this type of lifespan-reduction analysis from risks taken, voluntarily or involuntarily, is explored further (8 years ago, so pre COVID) by Prof David Spiegelhalter at Cambridge University in his concept of microlives.

[Originally posted on LinkedIn and facebook].

Coronavirus: social isolation is to buy time, not the sustainable solution

15/3/2020

 
Posted on LinkedIn 

Coronavirus: monitoring change in contagion dynamics

14/3/2020

 
People seem to be increasingly internalizing and accepting efforts prudentially required to slow down COVID-19s exponential infection rates. And hopefully we'll converge even more from the poles of "barricade ourselves behind hoarded toilet paper" and "what me worry, I don't see a problem yet" behaviour. However, given differences in, and evolution over time of, testing and reporting around the world, we also need to get ahead of monitoring the evolution of the outbreak and its containment in different geographies. We've all seen the "buy time to flatten the curve" graphic many times by now, but I think we all hope we can minimize the area under the curve, not just flatten it.

With this in mind, I'm happy to see a paper on statistical time series modeling applied to localized contagion dynamics cross my desk, from Italy no less! Pretty technical in nature, and frankly there isn't truly enough data to draw any actionable conclusions yet, but we're going to need analysis of this type to be able to extrapolate sensibly going forward, and to judge to what extent containment approaches -- including different intensities of social distancing -- are working. 

As a minor improvement (and I've reached out to the author), one could consider adding a "medium-term dependence" factor over a sliding window of length equal to the incubation time. While this factor does become embedded in the long-term dependence factor, i.e. is not neglected, separating it out might allow monitoring and comparing effectiveness of social distancing measures, over time and between geographies.

Arianna Agosto and Paolo Giudici (University of Pavia), A Poisson autoregressive model to understand COVID-19 contagion dynamics, March 9 2020. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3551626

By the way, this article in the Lancet ( https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(20)30567-5/fulltext ) outlines some of the tradeoffs of managing spread vs long term social/economic impact, given significant and sustained reduction of R0 is needed.

    Martin Pergler

    Principal, Balanced Risk Strategies, Ltd..

    Picture

    Archives

    February 2023
    June 2022
    January 2022
    October 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    March 2020
    January 2020
    March 2019
    January 2019
    July 2018
    February 2018
    October 2017
    September 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    November 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    February 2016
    November 2015
    June 2015
    April 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014

    Categories

    All
    News
    Offtopic
    Thoughts

    RSS Feed

Copyright © 2014-2020, Balanced Risk Strategies, Ltd. – Contact us
  • Home
  • About Martin Pergler
  • Delivery models
  • Articles
  • Why balance?
  • Old blog