a journal of the plague year [are we there yet?!]

Read the next volume of the Witcher series, Baptism of Fire, with even less enthusiasm than for the previous one, as the momentum of the series seems to have stalled… (Despite reading some highly positive reviews.) Some dialogues are funny enough, along with progressive views not particularly common in fantasy, like the support of reproductive rights, incl. abortion (and even less supported in the home country of the author, Andrzej Sapkowski!). But overall, not much happening and too much infodump!

Baked Ethiopian lentils & spinach mix, to get along with a slow cooking Ethiopian beef stew. And cooked more Venetian dishes. And had a great Korean streetfood dinner at (or from) MamiBaba by Quinsou, near Montparnasse, with pajeon (the cousin to okonomiyaki!) and kimchee. Accompanied by a first attempt at baking a chocolate pie.

Watched a few episodes of Alice in Borderland, vaguely suggested as hearsay by my daughter, but despite the fascinating scenes of an empty Tokyo, the plot is not particularly engaging, the tricks towards solving the game often lame, and the characters are not developed at all. Then watched Kurosawa’s Creepy, a gripping if not particularly realist psychological thriller that was premiered at the 2016 Berlin Film Festival. And reminded me of the much more disturbing Losey’s The Servant…

Read two further volumes of John Harvey’s Charlie Resnick, in a random order, volumes that I found in and returned to the exchange section in front of our library as usual. And which I found almost as good as the first one, with its insistence on the humanity of each of the characters rather than indulging in manicheism. References to jazz pieces got a wee bit annoying by the third volume… And there is a maximal number of rye bread sandwiches with Polish pastrami I can swallow!

Watched also for the first time the fascinating The Wild Goose Lake (南方车站的聚会 which translates as A Rendez-Vous at a Station in the South), by Diao Yinan, a 2019 Cannes Festival selection, a psychological and violent noir film taking place in Wuhan among local gangs, when a gang boss kills by mistake a policeman after a very gory episode. The classical story line of the chase à la A bout de souffle is both tenuous and gripping, with an painful attention to colour and lightings, most scenes taking place at night with ghastly lights, with an intentional confusion between gangs of criminals and groups of cops, the final scene in full daylight making everything else sounding like a bad dream. The two main characters are striking, with an outlandish swan-like actress Gwei Lun-Mei. This also led me to watch the earlier Black Coal Thin Ice, which I also found impressive in terms of filming [that makes the cold and snow in this Northern city almost perceptible!] and definition of characters, once again involving Gwei Lun-Mei as the central, almost mute, and doomed, woman, but puzzling in terms of psychology and scenarios. (The shootout in the gallery is plain ridiculous imho.)

ABC on COVID-19

The paper “The effect of travel restrictions on the spread of the 2019 novel coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak”, published in Science on 06 March by Matteo Chinazzi and co-authors, considers the impact of travel restriction in Wuhan on the propagation of the virus. (Terrible graph by the way since the overall volume of traffic dropped considerably after the ban.)

“The travel quarantine of Wuhan delayed the overall epidemic progression by only 3 to 5 days in Mainland China, but has a more marked effect at the international scale, where case importations were reduced by nearly 80% until mid February.”

They use a SLIR (susceptible-latent-infectious-removed) pattern of transmission, along with a travel flow network based on 2019 air and ground travel statistics, resorting to ABC for approximating the posterior distribution of the basic reproductive number. It is however unclear to me that the model is particularly accurate at the levels of the transmission pattern (which now seems to occur much earlier than when the symptoms appear) and of the detection rates (which vary greatly from one place to another).

SMC on the 2019-2020 nCoV outbreak

Two weeks ago, Kurcharski et al., from the CMMID nCoV working group at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, published on medrXiv a statistical analysis via a stochastic SEIR model of the evolution of the 2019-2020 nCoV epidemics, with prediction of a peak outbreak by late February in Wuhan and a past outbreak abroad. Here are some further details on the modelling:

Transmission was modelled as a geometric random walk process, and we used sequential Monte Carlo to infer the transmission rate over time, as well as the resulting number of cases and the time-varying reproduction number, R, defined as the average number of secondary cases generated by a typical infectious individual on each day.

To calculate the likelihood, we used a Poisson observation model fitted jointly to expected values based on three model outputs. To calculate the daily expectation for each Poisson observation process, we converted these outputs into new case onset and new reported cases inside Wuhan and travelling internationally. We assumed a different relative reporting  probability for Wuhan cases compared to international cases, as assumed only a proportion of confirmed Wuhan cases had known onset dates (fixed at 0.15 based on available line list data). As destination country was known for confirmed exported cases, we used 20 time series for cases exported (or not) to most at-risk countries each day and calculated the probability of obtaining each of these datasets given the model outputs. International onset data was not disaggregated by country and so we used the total daily exported cases in our Poisson probability calculation.

I did not look much further into the medrXiv document but the model may be too simplistic as it does not seem to account for the potential under-reporting within China and the impact of the severe quarantine imposed by Chinese authorities which may mean a new outbreak as soon as the confinement is lifted.