Magical Epidemic Thinking

Ukraine's COVID-19 disaster stuck on a quiet plateau

Information from Ukraine’s Health Ministry about COVID-19 infections in conjunction with a neural network to determine the efficacy of quarantine measures is being used to create models to help predict when it will be safe to rub noses again.

Ukraine today looks less like Italy and Spain, according to Chief Sanitary Doctor Viktor Liashko, who says the virus is spreading more like in Poland or Sweden, depending, with a two-week lag.

Whatever that means. (It might be shorthand for: “We have decided not to test widely in order to avoid freaking out about what the test results would probably show.”)

“[If we had not imposed a quarantine,] we could have had 180,000 COVID-19 patients, but now we have only about 10,000. There has been no rapid spread of the virus here. We have reached a quiet plateau, where we are recording new cases. Taking into account those who have recovered and died, cases are not increasing more than 10% daily. We are moving towards an optimistic forecast of the develo…