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Rage, Woodward and Data

  • opinion

Mr. Sum started reading Woodward’s Rage yesterday. Fascinating and potentially useful for estimating how data, beliefs and networks play their roles in White House federal politics in the US. For helping to set up toy worlds that try to simulate the trade war, for example. It goes into detail about what Trump knew about the CIVID-19 pandemic, how he got that knowledge, how he fitted it into his ethos, selected his approach, and then shaped it. Sum enjoys and is grateful that his jurisdiction shows somewhat more transparent and less arbitrary decision-making. Yet at the same time he is uncertain about how that decision-making will work out. Today (September 18), for example, is the weekly update of Dutch COVID-19 key figures was made available. Sum summarized them in Fig. 1.

Fig. 1 COVID-19 figures per week for NLD up to and including week 37

The numbers of infections (tested positive) per week are increasing exponentially again. We are back at the level of the peak of the first wave. In that regard, weeks 8-15 resemble weeks 28-37. However, this is not the case at all for the mortality rates, although the possibility remains that these will lag behind. The day after tomorrow, the government will discuss new restrictive measures. Sum is looking forward to that discussion.

It is unfortunate that we have not been able to consolidate the contamination level from week 24.