Such an amazing podcast Brady. Thank you. I remember watching the BBC program when it came out. It was one of the main thing that convinced me of the importance, and by extension, application of maths to our lives. I’ve always been invested in it, but that’s what I think made me decide to do my degree.
And the weird thing is, most of those profits are just piling up somewhere and do nothing useful. They are just generating ever larger profits to pile up. It really borders on insanity.
^^^ Absolutely, people are only tersely glancing at these graphics and definitely not looking at the numbers. I have even seen graphics without numbers.
I agree, the logarithmic graphs do make it look like everywhere is just leveling off now and not peaking anymore, so can make people feel that the worst is over and not to worry. I prefer to use the data of daily deaths and positive tests, and look at those countries or areas that are having trouble getting test kits and PPE etc. Brazil are becoming overwhelmed at the minute, their president has had 2 tests that he is not sharing the results of, he's been shaking hands with everyone and refusing to lockdown, hospitals can't test their ill patients due to the lack of test kits and a backlog of previous tests, graves are being dug at mass. Yet this isn't reflected in their data they giving out to the world.. similarly we've seen those videos from Moscow of over 50 ambulances queing up for hours to get into hospitals, yet russia is reporting very little cases and deaths. There's been talk that the protocols for declaring the cause of death in Germany are very different to other countries.. only declaring covid19 as the cause of death in positive patients who died from respiratory failure.. not from other conditions such as diabetes, cardiac arrests etc.. even though in most countries they are being declared as having died from covid19 due to their pre existing conditions being made worse because of covid19, therefore covid19 is the cause of death. The data is all a bit of a shambles tbh, so you really have to dig deeper to understand whats actually going on around the world. Honestly who knows whats going on in India and Africa atm, they will never be able to procure & outbid other countries for enough test kits to find their outbreaks are. So tests will never reflect anywhere close to the true numbers. Unfortunately lockdowns in undeveloped countries are a bigger problem than the virus itself, thousands of indian migrant workers are now sleeping on the streets with nowhere to go, no food, water or money. This isn't a one shoe fits all kinda thing, countries should be working together to distribute equipment where appropriate, not out bidding each other and hoarding it for themselves. It's all gone crazy
way worse than you imagine, people look at the graphs and are unaware that causality is a thing in the universe. people have no idea that one aspect of the world can be a function of a different aspect. math illiteracy is truly horrifying
I agree with Brady about the log graphs. People who know how exponents work it's fine, but the average non-math person will almost certainly misunderstand it's meaning.
The funny thing is, our brain is actually wired logarithmically, not linearly. It's the reason why we can easily notice when a four becomes a five but hardly notice a ninety-four becoming a ninety-five
Fascinating, listening to this at the end of 2021. It's been less than 2 years. It's remarkable how much has changed, and also how much of this conversation is still relevant.
"Surely if you see a graph and see a gentle slope, but then you see the number 1000 a day, you'd still be concerned" (paraphrase). At least in my personal experience, no, people will definitely put more weight in the picture they see and just gloss over an abstract concept such as a number (even if it's an exact number). I think part of the issue is (purely my speculation) the graph is supposed to give context. To see 1000 of something, on a graph with a gentle slope probably implies to many people that 1000 isn't that big of a number.
Agreed. As an old audiophile, I can see & understand db s as a log based descriptor, but I remain slightly baffled by the log charts of the C19. I do not find them particularly useful in this instance. In audio terms it's understandable, cuz the ear is a continually narrowing helix.
Une des choses les plus intéressantes que jʼaie entendu (ou lu) sur la présente pandémie. One of the most interesting things I have heard (or read) about this pandemic.
Brady: as usual, great questions. Hannah: thank you for mathematical models :p I unfortunately agree with the closing thought. There will always be misunderstood/unseen concepts that frightened, hurt, or angry people will blame, to feel some sort of comfort or sense of justice. Governments, large companies, foreign nations. Even down to their own neighbours. It's human nature. But sad.
Lots of calamities are actually recorded by historians throughout the ages and humans across cultures are recorded to behave in similar ways as they do now. I'd say it's at least in part down to human nature.
They can't. It's the same reason why you always get more or less incompetent people voted into office. If you tell people the truth, they won't like it and are not going to vote for you. They'll vote for the one who tells them what they want to hear.
Who remembers Survivors, the BBC serial from the 1970s which was about a virus virtually wiping out the population? I found the complete box set in March 2020 & watched it all in a couple of weeks. It so easily could have gone that way.
Sorry but I think it's naively optimistic to think that most people are looking at the scale on the graph. At best, most people will look at the number at the top of the axis but will assume that it's a linear scale leading up to that point, few people will look at the whole scale and realise that it is a log scale, and even of those people who spot that the scale is non-linear, not all that many will realise what that means for the shape of the graph and the fact that the rate is accelerating. I'll be honest, even as a maths geek I don't always check the scale, especially when the graph is just a slightly fuzzy jpeg on a mobile screen.
There is no total lock-down in the Netherlands. schools are closed and the catering industry is also closed. But you can just go to a store, most are open (keeping distance of course) and hospitals actively call on people to go to the doctor or a hospital and not to stay away. There is a lot of criticism from other countries, but it seems to be effective. The number of deaths and admissions to ICs is decreasing without completely shutting down our country and the economy. Right from the start, it was explained that they assume that almost everyone is going to be infected and that (many) people will die from this. And that there was only one goal, not to overload hospitals. And we see that in all measures because the government listens to scientists here. You can watch live on TV how they give advice to politicians and that the measures are in line with these recommendations. 89% of people rate the measures taken as good here and understand them.
Our healthcare system been starved of funds for a decade though so the bar of failure is lower than it ought to be. The government has kept that bit quiet and is wholly put the onus and blame onto the public
I am very concerned about the potential infringement on privacy and personal liberties in response to this sort of thing. If the government takes steps towards that for the sake of an emergency I do not believe we can trust them to step back from it afterwards. Just look at how overzealous the police response has been in some cases, and that's just over people merely being outside (regardless of them being 2m from others) or buying non-essential items (items that are of course, still on sale). If you clamp down on a society too hard, it no longer constitutes one.
Yes. While I agree with the current lockdown in principle, and could support an invasive tracking app if done properly, I've been very disappointed by the dishonesty and lack of transparency of our politicians and some of the excessive actions of the police. We have every reason for our lack of trust in government and concern that they will exploit any new powers they get.
Hannah as ever a legend at dealing in complex mathematics in an understandable way while still remembering to "be a person." :). The bit at the end about mathematicians can't win here, you're dead right. The Y2K "bug" is now widely decried as the problem that never existed because nothing went wrong. But for those of us who were there, who spent so many hours weeks and months finding and FIXING many MANY bugs, which if left alone would have caused banks to fail... the reason it's now thought of as the problem that never existed is BECAUSE such a good job was done of dealing with it. That was just about computers. THIS, is about people's lives and I for one have tremendous respect for what everyone, including all the mathematicians, are doing to make the best decisions they can, _at the time, with the _*_information available at the time_* and I do wish the press would a) learn that "2, is not a trend" and b) stop feeding the fire to make us judge people, governments and anything else using data which _was not available at the time the decisions were made._. PS. Hannah for President of the World. :)
Err no Y2K really was a scam. Performance of systems updated vs not show no problems that could be related to that date bug. However it led to inventory of systems that was long necessary. Simply put, if code was so bad that it would fail on what year it was, it was so bad that it already had failed for some other reason and was gone.
At 21:40 Hannah describes the differing approaches Sweden and Norway are taking, but doesn't mention that some people in Sweden are horrified at their own Government's approach and are voluntarily acting like all the other countries that aren't Sweden (main source: messages sent to Dr John Campbell and read out by him on his excellent TH-cam channel). Worth a mention, I think...
I work in public health data. In the areas of the US that we cover, total hospital emergency department visits are down by half right now. This could be because less people going out means less people getting injured and therefore less visits. But I think a lot of them are people simply not going to the hospital when they normally would.
Best car interview ever. :-) One question. Do viruses become less virulent with time. If the worse happens and COVID-19 becomes a seasonal thing, will it become less virulent as the years go by (hopefully not just by killing off the most susceptible) ?
I believe this happens because a lower proportion of the population it susceptible to the virus. Mostly be having recovered from it and therefore having a bit of immunity. But also from us knowing better how to deal with them. We have data we can use to get better at fighting it.
One would usually expect that a virus will become less deadly/debilitating over time. This is because there is usually an evolutionary pressure to allow hosts to walk around and spread the disease more even while sick. However, in the case of SARS-CoV-2, it's not so clear. SARS-CoV-2 already has a long incubation period during which its host can spread it without even being aware of the infection, so there may not be much pressure for SARS-CoV-2 to become less deadly. It already "does its job" during the incubation period, so to speak. Regardless, the timescale for this sort of thing is quite long. Don't expect evolution to give us a reprieve any time soon.
One way in which it would be less deadly if it became endemic is that everyone would be exposed when young, so would have at least some immunity when they reach what is now a high-risk age.
Viruses can evolve to become more or less virulent, it's relatively random. More important factors might be: 1) People who have already had Covid-19 will now carry antibodies, which will mean that any subsequent case of Covid-19 infection they get is likely to be much less severe. 2) While infected, those who already have antibody-based resistance will be releasing a much lower viral load to their surroudings. So I would expect that the biggest risk from Covid-19 is in the current phase (in the UK at least), where a large proportion of the population are suffering their first infection (of a COMPLETELY NEW virus). For >95% of the population, I expect this would be their worst Covid-19 infection, since they currently have no acquired immunity. In many ways, I think it's similar to the what happened to Native Americans when Europeans turned up, when 90% of Natives died of newly-acquired European diseases, and their society collapsed in a short period of time. The difference being that in that case the Natives were suddenly exposed to possibly hundreds of new viruses, whereas Covid-19 is just one new virus.
One intermediate model you didn't mention between very well mixed and simply bumping into each other is the small world network model: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small-world_network The real world is basically a small world network, which approximates to well mixed, and is why the well mixed model works.
"You can't really stop the flu". I am curious as to how wide spread the seasonal glu will be this year. Australia is in autumn and winter is just around the corner. I've just had my annual flu shot in advance of the coming flu season. I am wondering if the lockdown and self isolation will severely limit the spread of the seasonal fu this winter at the same time as containing the covid-19 pandemic.
I am not a mathematician and i am still scared about those people that have power and just dont get the dynamics and argue with all kinds of obviously ill-adviced stuff. What they probably wouldnt do if they'd better understand the mathematics behind it. Because often the models tranlate into risks, and I dont think these risks are taken well enough into consideration. I mean like believing instead of understanding. Plus I have especially also the fear that nobody really understands the psychological influence on people and the influence of that on their economic decisions. To put it short: I dont think that people will just continue as usual even if the measures are lifted. The virus is still out there and that is the problem because it is potentially dangerous not only for yourself but also for others in particular. Or put it as a straight question: "Who the hell would now think about buying a car a house or some other stuff that is kind of not a daily thing and buying of it typically requires some bigger efford, and for which you would like to have a more or less clear mind?"
23:08 Hannah the legend spitting straight facts. Wish more people understood the situation many people are in these days. I wish the government wanted to do more to help those who need it, rather then pointing to the 0.1% of those who take the system for a ride as an excuse to get rid of safety nets and make endless cuts to much needed services.
I don't think forecasting that the pandemic would come from southeast Asia was all that prescient - the flu practically always comes from southeast Asia. That's just how it works more often than not.
Wow! That BBC Contagion video is pretty eye opening. Quite scary really. Thankfully the Coronavirus isn't super deadly. Based on that video though, and the reaction the world is having to the CV now, we would be screwed if a really deadly virus hit.
Hello how are you doing, I am a musician and was wondering if you may need intro or segways music? No charge I just would like to get on your show. Please get back if so.
Thamks for this insightfull podcast. I am going to watch Hannah's BBC program as well. Here in South Africa we have been in total lockdown, and will be so up to the end of April. The potential for disaster, both viral and social, is staggering.
My hypothesis for why the 5G conspiracy caught on. People are scared and don't know what to think. When people get scared they often feel the need to blame. Rather than people acknowledging that some things are complicated they ask who is conspiring against them.
That might be partially so, yet that doen't mean 5G is safe. As far as I know 5G has not been proven safe by researchers independent from the multi billion telecom industry. Because of that issue many people rationally don't trust 5G to be safe. Just a few decades ago sigarettes and asbestos were considered safe and also in those industries a lot of money was involved.
Plus it has an "off" switch. It's comforting to think that a danger has an off switch and the only thing keeping the danger around is the villain who won't flip the off switch. The world would be way less scary if that were true. Whack the villain, hit the off switch, and everything becomes peachy again. It shows up on both sides of this issue.
@@EdoTimmermans It's generally not possible to prove anything safe. You can prove that something is dangerous. But when it's considered safe now, it can still turn out to be dangerous in the future, when we understand things better. "Most likely safe" is the best we can do. And 5G is "most likely safe".
@@harmless6813 Has any serious health related research been performed on 5G that is independent from telecom companies and governments? These parties have huge financial interests and it is easy enough for them to pay someone to declare 5G to be safe or 'most likely safe'. Besides health issues, 5G also makes it even easier to control citizens. Governments should listen to people being concerned about government abuse, some don't do that at all and others not enough.
I would love to hear your guys take on the nonsense approach the us is taking, here we are 4 months later and almost every country has some version of a reasonable response and here in the us, every decision we could make we have generally done the worst option and are reopening full speed despite how bad things are here. Like a look now 4 months later with what had worked places and what hasn't throughout the world. My point is we have a lot of dumb people here and too many of them are in power so it would be cool to hear an update of what worked and what didn't on the large scale.
Calculating the impact of lockdowns on the number of non-covid deaths is complicated. Yes lockdowns will prevent or deter some people from getting medical treatment, and poverty and isolation can both be deadly, but without lockdowns, covid will overwhelm health systems causing even more collateral damage to those with unrelated health problems. US hospitals are also reporting a big drop in traffic accident and gunshot injuries, while the overall US mortality rate dropped significantly after the lockdowns started. People are generally safer sitting at home.
Yes it would seem that way to the ones that get to work from or government workers that continue to earn a fine living. But we actually do need a proper productive functioning economy to grease the wheels of industry. Some body has to put on their big boy pants and make the tough decisions for the welfare of the world population. We cannot allow doctors and scientists to make the final decision otherwise the economy will be irreversibly destroyed and millions of lives will be destroyed .
@@eduardomexico7200 No it will not. The fact is, only a small part of the work done is really necessary. Most of it is just for pleasure or even waste in the end. I'd guess that the world could live just fine with about 20% of the work done. A big problem is the distribution though. At the moment we do that by forcing people to do _something_ . That obviously won't work if 80% of the population is just sitting at home. Thinking about it ... maybe you _are_ right: The economy - _as_ _we_ _know_ _it_ - might get destroyed. :-/
The sad fact is that the model blame game is starting now. Some news commentators are starting to allege corruption and bias on health system modelers for overshooting infection and death numbers, even though it's very difficult to model and predict in the first place.
I disagree with Hannah at the end how the mathematical models could get the blame. At the end of the day the decisions made are political ones. Saying you're following the advice of the modellers is a political decision. She herself points out that you must take into account that there are uncertainties, and it's up to the politicians to do that.
Sadly, a number of governments around the world are only too happy to push an anti-science agenda (see climate change, for example) to suit their ideology. If a country is very successful at keeping the numbers below the 'worst case' numbers, I fear many will say "see, you can't trust the scientists, they were just trying to destroy our economy, just like with climate change." We're seeing a hashtag firefauci narrative in the states, that is exactly that sentiment. The President re-tweeted a message with that hashtag just yesterday.
Politicians do not understand science, how it is done and how conclusions are reached. Any scientist talking to a politician should always keep this in mind and imagine they are talking to a school junior. Do not make any assumptions about their level of understanding.
I think you need a pretty advanced understanding of mathematics like ODE PDE nonlinear as kick. In particular average conditions doesnt mean you get the same average response. Meaning considering rather what happens in the local area and inventing strategies for that. And that now it's time for the local heroes that know how to handle that stuff. Versus centralised decisions that might actually harm things
The reason Sweden didn't have worse outcomes--they still had excess deaths, their economy still suffered--their people still stopped going out. They knew this was an epoch-marking disease.
I agree, the logarithmic graphs do make it look like everywhere is just leveling off now and not peaking anymore, so can make people feel that the worst is over and not to worry. I prefer to use the data of daily deaths and positive tests, and look at those countries or areas that are having trouble getting test kits and PPE etc. Brazil are becoming overwhelmed at the minute, their president has had 2 tests that he is not sharing the results of, he's been shaking hands with everyone and refusing to lockdown, hospitals can't test their ill patients due to the lack of test kits and a backlog of previous tests, graves are being dug at mass. Yet this isn't reflected in their data they giving out to the world.. similarly we've seen those videos from Moscow of over 50 ambulances queing up for hours to get into hospitals, yet russia is reporting very little cases and deaths. There's been talk that the protocols for declaring the cause of death in Germany are very different to other countries.. only declaring covid19 as the cause of death in positive patients who died from respiratory failure.. not from other conditions such as diabetes, cardiac arrests etc.. even though in most countries they are being declared as having died from covid19 due to their pre existing conditions being made worse because of covid19, therefore covid19 is the cause of death. The data is all a bit of a shambles tbh, so you really have to dig deeper to understand whats actually going on around the world. Honestly who knows whats going on in India and Africa atm, they will never be able to procure & outbid other countries for enough test kits to find where their outbreaks are. So tests will never reflect anywhere close to the true numbers. Unfortunately lockdowns in undeveloped countries are a bigger problem than the virus itself, thousands of indian migrant workers are now sleeping on the streets with nowhere to go, no food, water or money. This isn't a 1 shoe fits all kinda thing, countries should be working together to distribute equipment where appropriate, not out bidding each other and hoarding it for themselves. It's all gone crazy
Brady, you need to host nobel minds so badly, I mean your questions are spot on; and they also have a very bad host that interrupts every sentence the Nobel laureates try to make and her transitions aren't smooth at all.
There is a brilliant video over on 3Blue1Brown's channel about modelling and simulating this and how very small changes to some of the variables can have huge impacts. th-cam.com/video/gxAaO2rsdIs/w-d-xo.html Worth a watch!
Hannah, can you please do a collab project with Dr. John Campbell on this? I would love to see your two POVs together in a video (and the world might benefit from it).
thank you both; very informative/educational. I am certain that Brady's view re log scale vs linear scale to julie/joe public is correct - mainly driven by editors in mainstream media deciding public dont want to know so we will not tell them; f . . g murdoch again.
Super cool economic system we have where even with years to prepare and months before the pandemic hits us, we still can't do anything because the rich don't want to spend any money on saving the poor. They just care about "the economy", which crashes anyway. Capitalism is great you guys, really A+ for sustainability there
I hate to be so blunt, but can you stop making coronavirus videos? You've completely ignored the available evidence in favor of stoking panic in all of these videos. Any responsible mathematician has had enough data for weeks to conclude that the places exercising lockdowns and social distancing aren't seeing a different exponential growth rate than the places that aren't. There exists weekly flu data from the CDC for every year for the flu. You could have compared the death rate of covid-19 to the death rate of a developing flu season to show how the death rates appear incredibly similar. You could mention that the average covid-19 death is an 80-year-old with high blood pressure after a lifetime of smoking. The nonsense panic stoking has to end at some point. You can't keep ignoring reality.
I don’t think any of them have “stoked panic”? And this is a podcast on the more niche Numberphile2 channel. And the title makes it pretty clear it’s about coronavirus, so just don’t click it. 🤷♂️ New big number video on the main channel will be published tomorrow, and the video immediately before this one on the main channel was about squares and numbers. Hope those ones are to your liking. ✅ Plenty more typical fare is in the works.
@@numberphile2 Sorry, perhaps i wasn't being very constructive. I apologize for that. What i mean to say is I like math, and I think match is important. And when this is all over if everything that the big math youtubers predicted was completely wrong, then everyone is gunna say "see, we'll never use math in real life" when we've had enough solid numbers to make real conclusions for weeks now, and yet all the math channels want to putz around the status quo of "panic" while at best concluding "it's too early to know yet" when it really isn't. We've had enough data for weeks to conclude that no curve has been flattened because they are all the exact same exponential growth rate in every corner of the globe regardless of the area's policies.
You are just plain wrong. The lockdown measures _are_ working in several countries. You can find the public numbers everywhere. So I have no idea how you came to that obviously flawed conclusion.
@@harmless6813 Yes, graph the numbers from each country as a ratio of new cases from the last week against total cases. If the growth rate is exponential, this graph will be a straight line, and if they all have the same exponential growth rate, they will all fall on the same line. And they do. That is exactly the sort of video Numberphile should be doing. No flattening of any curve has occurred. The only places that have gotten off of exponential growth quickly are the places where everyone wears a medical mask (Japan #1 and South Korea #2) All this "stay 6 feet away" and "don't come to work" has had absolutely no effect, and we have had sufficient data to conclude that for over two weeks.
@@goseigentwitch3105 Oh for sure my dude, not going to work, the place where people have a highly contagious virus, is EXACTLY THE SAME as staying in an isolated building with no virus. You death cultists are getting more and more depraved, even when this is over you had better stay out of arm's reach.
It did not come from southeast Asia (like most pandemic strains). It came from central China. This is anomalous and lends much more credibility to a lab escape than a natural environmental evolution.
The probem is _literally_ Communism. China is a Communist country. Their economic practices caused food to be scarce, so the government allowed people to hunt and sell wildlife for food in unsanitary, regulation-less wet-markets, and that's where this virus was transmitted to a person most likely from a BAT. Do you consider BATs to be food? Do you want to see this sort of thing happening here too?
@@rade-blunner7824 China is capitalist you idiot. China hasn't been socialist since 1976 with Mao's death. Deng made reforms and degenerated to capitalism. And Communism is the higher phase of socialism, a classless, moneyless, stateless free association of producers. Read some Marxist literature before you comment on leftist theory.
45 minutes of Hannah Fry? Yes please!
ah Hannah, she is one of my favorite scholars
Such an amazing podcast Brady. Thank you.
I remember watching the BBC program when it came out. It was one of the main thing that convinced me of the importance, and by extension, application of maths to our lives.
I’ve always been invested in it, but that’s what I think made me decide to do my degree.
Actually, in my opinion, this is the best interview you have ever done, well done Brady and even better well down Hannah smart even and real.
30:19 - I agree with Brady; People aren't looking at the numbers, they look at the curve.
Thank you. I agree with you.
And the weird thing is, most of those profits are just piling up somewhere and do nothing useful. They are just generating ever larger profits to pile up. It really borders on insanity.
Re: logarithmic "Surely they will see ...and understand..." Um, no.
^^^ Absolutely, people are only tersely glancing at these graphics and definitely not looking at the numbers. I have even seen graphics without numbers.
Hannah : Surely they will read and comprehend the numbers.
Everyone : ...
Everyone : ...
Everyone : NO. NO. THEY DON'T READ THE NUMBERS. 🤣🤣
I agree, the logarithmic graphs do make it look like everywhere is just leveling off now and not peaking anymore, so can make people feel that the worst is over and not to worry.
I prefer to use the data of daily deaths and positive tests, and look at those countries or areas that are having trouble getting test kits and PPE etc.
Brazil are becoming overwhelmed at the minute, their president has had 2 tests that he is not sharing the results of, he's been shaking hands with everyone and refusing to lockdown, hospitals can't test their ill patients due to the lack of test kits and a backlog of previous tests, graves are being dug at mass. Yet this isn't reflected in their data they giving out to the world..
similarly we've seen those videos from Moscow of over 50 ambulances queing up for hours to get into hospitals, yet russia is reporting very little cases and deaths.
There's been talk that the protocols for declaring the cause of death in Germany are very different to other countries.. only declaring covid19 as the cause of death in positive patients who died from respiratory failure.. not from other conditions such as diabetes, cardiac arrests etc.. even though in most countries they are being declared as having died from covid19 due to their pre existing conditions being made worse because of covid19, therefore covid19 is the cause of death.
The data is all a bit of a shambles tbh, so you really have to dig deeper to understand whats actually going on around the world.
Honestly who knows whats going on in India and Africa atm, they will never be able to procure & outbid other countries for enough test kits to find their outbreaks are. So tests will never reflect anywhere close to the true numbers.
Unfortunately lockdowns in undeveloped countries are a bigger problem than the virus itself, thousands of indian migrant workers are now sleeping on the streets with nowhere to go, no food, water or money.
This isn't a one shoe fits all kinda thing, countries should be working together to distribute equipment where appropriate, not out bidding each other and hoarding it for themselves.
It's all gone crazy
way worse than you imagine, people look at the graphs and are unaware that causality is a thing in the universe. people have no idea that one aspect of the world can be a function of a different aspect. math illiteracy is truly horrifying
I agree with Brady about the log graphs. People who know how exponents work it's fine, but the average non-math person will almost certainly misunderstand it's meaning.
its
Just show both, and explain what they are showing. The linear shows how many get sick, the log scale shows if and when the growth is slowing down.
The average person responds to the personal anecdote next to the graph, even if the story goes against the data.
Problem with not using a log-graph is that then it often looks like "oh, it's just a few days"
The funny thing is, our brain is actually wired logarithmically, not linearly. It's the reason why we can easily notice when a four becomes a five but hardly notice a ninety-four becoming a ninety-five
Brady, there is so much quality content in those links! And this was a great bit of content, I can't thank you enough. Keep it coming mate 💪
Fascinating, listening to this at the end of 2021. It's been less than 2 years. It's remarkable how much has changed, and also how much of this conversation is still relevant.
"Surely if you see a graph and see a gentle slope, but then you see the number 1000 a day, you'd still be concerned" (paraphrase).
At least in my personal experience, no, people will definitely put more weight in the picture they see and just gloss over an abstract concept such as a number (even if it's an exact number). I think part of the issue is (purely my speculation) the graph is supposed to give context. To see 1000 of something, on a graph with a gentle slope probably implies to many people that 1000 isn't that big of a number.
Agreed. As an old audiophile, I can see & understand db s as a log based descriptor, but I remain slightly baffled by the log charts of the C19. I do not find them particularly useful in this instance. In audio terms it's understandable, cuz the ear is a continually narrowing helix.
A sane conversation what a lovely change, well done
enjoyed that while I head through southern Europe on Euro Truck Multiplayer
How is even her wave-form charming? XD
This programme was an instant “what to do” and someone buried it. We are paying the price.
My favorite public intellectual and thought leader
Two years later, someone recommended Hannah Fry and her work as something interesting to know. The recommendation was spot on. Thank you for sharing.
Kinda depressing how few views this has. And also still scary how 2 years later we're still messing up and getting nowhere.
Une des choses les plus intéressantes que jʼaie entendu (ou lu) sur la présente pandémie.
One of the most interesting things I have heard (or read) about this pandemic.
Man, I pegged her accent as Sheffield right away. So proud of myself.
Brady: as usual, great questions.
Hannah: thank you for mathematical models :p
I unfortunately agree with the closing thought. There will always be misunderstood/unseen concepts that frightened, hurt, or angry people will blame, to feel some sort of comfort or sense of justice.
Governments, large companies, foreign nations. Even down to their own neighbours.
It's human nature. But sad.
Little that we call "human nature" is inherent in us, really... I'd instead call it "human culture" or something. I otherwise agree.
Lots of calamities are actually recorded by historians throughout the ages and humans across cultures are recorded to behave in similar ways as they do now. I'd say it's at least in part down to human nature.
That was the quickest (and awesome-est) 45 minutes ever. :)
Agree with Hannahs assessment of how people will view the benefits of maths modelling. Not sure how mathematicians can win!
They can't. It's the same reason why you always get more or less incompetent people voted into office. If you tell people the truth, they won't like it and are not going to vote for you. They'll vote for the one who tells them what they want to hear.
Who remembers Survivors, the BBC serial from the 1970s which was about a virus virtually wiping out the population? I found the complete box set in March 2020 & watched it all in a couple of weeks. It so easily could have gone that way.
Sorry but I think it's naively optimistic to think that most people are looking at the scale on the graph. At best, most people will look at the number at the top of the axis but will assume that it's a linear scale leading up to that point, few people will look at the whole scale and realise that it is a log scale, and even of those people who spot that the scale is non-linear, not all that many will realise what that means for the shape of the graph and the fact that the rate is accelerating. I'll be honest, even as a maths geek I don't always check the scale, especially when the graph is just a slightly fuzzy jpeg on a mobile screen.
25:51 Where can I find that analysis by Davis Beagle. I can't pull anything form a Google search.
Even her voice graphic is beautiful.
Hannah: ... my children ...
Me: 💔
I know
Singapore and South Korea never really locked down. A small price to pay for a brilliant response.
Can we get an updated version on this?
There is no total lock-down in the Netherlands. schools are closed and the catering industry is also closed. But you can just go to a store, most are open (keeping distance of course) and hospitals actively call on people to go to the doctor or a hospital and not to stay away. There is a lot of criticism from other countries, but it seems to be effective. The number of deaths and admissions to ICs is decreasing without completely shutting down our country and the economy. Right from the start, it was explained that they assume that almost everyone is going to be infected and that (many) people will die from this. And that there was only one goal, not to overload hospitals. And we see that in all measures because the government listens to scientists here. You can watch live on TV how they give advice to politicians and that the measures are in line with these recommendations. 89% of people rate the measures taken as good here and understand them.
Our healthcare system been starved of funds for a decade though so the bar of failure is lower than it ought to be.
The government has kept that bit quiet and is wholly put the onus and blame onto the public
I admire the fact you took measures to edit the conversation and make it sound so great.
I admire the fact that you allege so much by saying so little and backing up your libel with nothing.
I am very concerned about the potential infringement on privacy and personal liberties in response to this sort of thing. If the government takes steps towards that for the sake of an emergency I do not believe we can trust them to step back from it afterwards.
Just look at how overzealous the police response has been in some cases, and that's just over people merely being outside (regardless of them being 2m from others) or buying non-essential items (items that are of course, still on sale).
If you clamp down on a society too hard, it no longer constitutes one.
Yes. While I agree with the current lockdown in principle, and could support an invasive tracking app if done properly, I've been very disappointed by the dishonesty and lack of transparency of our politicians and some of the excessive actions of the police.
We have every reason for our lack of trust in government and concern that they will exploit any new powers they get.
Hannah as ever a legend at dealing in complex mathematics in an understandable way while still remembering to "be a person." :). The bit at the end about mathematicians can't win here, you're dead right. The Y2K "bug" is now widely decried as the problem that never existed because nothing went wrong. But for those of us who were there, who spent so many hours weeks and months finding and FIXING many MANY bugs, which if left alone would have caused banks to fail... the reason it's now thought of as the problem that never existed is BECAUSE such a good job was done of dealing with it. That was just about computers. THIS, is about people's lives and I for one have tremendous respect for what everyone, including all the mathematicians, are doing to make the best decisions they can, _at the time, with the _*_information available at the time_* and I do wish the press would a) learn that "2, is not a trend" and b) stop feeding the fire to make us judge people, governments and anything else using data which _was not available at the time the decisions were made._.
PS. Hannah for President of the World. :)
Err no Y2K really was a scam. Performance of systems updated vs not show no problems that could be related to that date bug. However it led to inventory of systems that was long necessary.
Simply put, if code was so bad that it would fail on what year it was, it was so bad that it already had failed for some other reason and was gone.
At 21:40 Hannah describes the differing approaches Sweden and Norway are taking, but doesn't mention that some people in Sweden are horrified at their own Government's approach and are voluntarily acting like all the other countries that aren't Sweden (main source: messages sent to Dr John Campbell and read out by him on his excellent TH-cam channel). Worth a mention, I think...
Dr Campbell is now talking about vaccine injuries, appears there are some awful ones going on!
Never enough Dr Hannah Fry!
I work in public health data. In the areas of the US that we cover, total hospital emergency department visits are down by half right now.
This could be because less people going out means less people getting injured and therefore less visits. But I think a lot of them are people simply not going to the hospital when they normally would.
Let us all be honest, Hannah reminds us of our secret love for our primary school teacher.
So I'm not the only one!?!? I thought it was just me! xD
Makes a documentary about CV a year n a half before the plan de mic...ok
I hear you.
Hannah Fry for prime minister
Best car interview ever. :-) One question. Do viruses become less virulent with time. If the worse happens and COVID-19 becomes a seasonal thing, will it become less virulent as the years go by (hopefully not just by killing off the most susceptible) ?
I believe this happens because a lower proportion of the population it susceptible to the virus. Mostly be having recovered from it and therefore having a bit of immunity. But also from us knowing better how to deal with them. We have data we can use to get better at fighting it.
One would usually expect that a virus will become less deadly/debilitating over time. This is because there is usually an evolutionary pressure to allow hosts to walk around and spread the disease more even while sick.
However, in the case of SARS-CoV-2, it's not so clear. SARS-CoV-2 already has a long incubation period during which its host can spread it without even being aware of the infection, so there may not be much pressure for SARS-CoV-2 to become less deadly. It already "does its job" during the incubation period, so to speak.
Regardless, the timescale for this sort of thing is quite long. Don't expect evolution to give us a reprieve any time soon.
One way in which it would be less deadly if it became endemic is that everyone would be exposed when young, so would have at least some immunity when they reach what is now a high-risk age.
Viruses can evolve to become more or less virulent, it's relatively random.
More important factors might be:
1) People who have already had Covid-19 will now carry antibodies, which will mean that any subsequent case of Covid-19 infection they get is likely to be much less severe.
2) While infected, those who already have antibody-based resistance will be releasing a much lower viral load to their surroudings.
So I would expect that the biggest risk from Covid-19 is in the current phase (in the UK at least), where a large proportion of the population are suffering their first infection (of a COMPLETELY NEW virus). For >95% of the population, I expect this would be their worst Covid-19 infection, since they currently have no acquired immunity.
In many ways, I think it's similar to the what happened to Native Americans when Europeans turned up, when 90% of Natives died of newly-acquired European diseases, and their society collapsed in a short period of time. The difference being that in that case the Natives were suddenly exposed to possibly hundreds of new viruses, whereas Covid-19 is just one new virus.
That's nice. Now get back in line! :}
@@harmless6813 :( okay
One intermediate model you didn't mention between very well mixed and simply bumping into each other is the small world network model:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small-world_network
The real world is basically a small world network, which approximates to well mixed, and is why the well mixed model works.
"You can't really stop the flu".
I am curious as to how wide spread the seasonal glu will be this year. Australia is in autumn and winter is just around the corner. I've just had my annual flu shot in advance of the coming flu season. I am wondering if the lockdown and self isolation will severely limit the spread of the seasonal fu this winter at the same time as containing the covid-19 pandemic.
Seasonal Glu depends on how many horses we can get into the barn. Seasonal Glau depends on when you watch Firefly.
Brady always talks about mathematicians like mathematicians are such special people. But I think that anyone can be a mathematician.
I am not a mathematician and i am still scared about those people that have power and just dont get the dynamics and argue with all kinds of obviously ill-adviced stuff. What they probably wouldnt do if they'd better understand the mathematics behind it.
Because often the models tranlate into risks, and I dont think these risks are taken well enough into consideration. I mean like believing instead of understanding.
Plus I have especially also the fear that nobody really understands the psychological influence on people and the influence of that on their economic decisions. To put it short: I dont think that people will just continue as usual even if the measures are lifted. The virus is still out there and that is the problem because it is potentially dangerous not only for yourself but also for others in particular.
Or put it as a straight question: "Who the hell would now think about buying a car a house or some other stuff that is kind of not a daily thing and buying of it typically requires some bigger efford, and for which you would like to have a more or less clear mind?"
I wonder - those listeners who gave it a thumbs down - what did they expect?? The Daily Mail?? Great input from Hannah and Brady.
23:08
Hannah the legend spitting straight facts. Wish more people understood the situation many people are in these days. I wish the government wanted to do more to help those who need it, rather then pointing to the 0.1% of those who take the system for a ride as an excuse to get rid of safety nets and make endless cuts to much needed services.
I don't think forecasting that the pandemic would come from southeast Asia was all that prescient - the flu practically always comes from southeast Asia. That's just how it works more often than not.
Wow! That BBC Contagion video is pretty eye opening. Quite scary really.
Thankfully the Coronavirus isn't super deadly. Based on that video though, and the reaction the world is having to the CV now, we would be screwed if a really deadly virus hit.
We would be screwed if a deadly virus **with a long incubation period** hit.
This thing will prove plenty deadly enough in the poorer regions of the world. :-(
All psyops come with a practice run.
Hannah: At the end of all this, I don't know if anyone will thank the mathematicians
Brady: I will
What a fucking *King*
Love you Brady
The, by now famous, German virologist Drosten said pretty much the same thing as you: there is no glory in prevention.
But don't worry, there will be plenty of blame and misunderstanding to make up for it!
Why does the audio waveform move from right to left?
Hello how are you doing, I am a musician and was wondering if you may need intro or segways music? No charge I just would like to get on your show. Please get back if so.
EMF toxicity is very real and serious. And it certainly is making it worse, but the extreme can be argued over.
Thamks for this insightfull podcast. I am going to watch Hannah's BBC program as well. Here in South Africa we have been in total lockdown, and will be so up to the end of April. The potential for disaster, both viral and social, is staggering.
Two years on and it's unsurprising how right Dr. Fry was.
Everyone has a 5g conspiracy nutjob mate don’t worry Hannah 🤦♀️🤦♂️
Hannah Fry, the only person on yt that can tell the audience that they are probably ugly and gets drowned in love letters all the same!
Math lovers are masochists
My hypothesis for why the 5G conspiracy caught on. People are scared and don't know what to think. When people get scared they often feel the need to blame. Rather than people acknowledging that some things are complicated they ask who is conspiring against them.
That might be partially so, yet that doen't mean 5G is safe. As far as I know 5G has not been proven safe by researchers independent from the multi billion telecom industry. Because of that issue many people rationally don't trust 5G to be safe. Just a few decades ago sigarettes and asbestos were considered safe and also in those industries a lot of money was involved.
Plus it has an "off" switch. It's comforting to think that a danger has an off switch and the only thing keeping the danger around is the villain who won't flip the off switch. The world would be way less scary if that were true. Whack the villain, hit the off switch, and everything becomes peachy again. It shows up on both sides of this issue.
@@mattj65816 That is plausible.
@@EdoTimmermans It's generally not possible to prove anything safe. You can prove that something is dangerous. But when it's considered safe now, it can still turn out to be dangerous in the future, when we understand things better. "Most likely safe" is the best we can do. And 5G is "most likely safe".
@@harmless6813 Has any serious health related research been performed on 5G that is independent from telecom companies and governments? These parties have huge financial interests and it is easy enough for them to pay someone to declare 5G to be safe or 'most likely safe'. Besides health issues, 5G also makes it even easier to control citizens. Governments should listen to people being concerned about government abuse, some don't do that at all and others not enough.
I would love to hear your guys take on the nonsense approach the us is taking, here we are 4 months later and almost every country has some version of a reasonable response and here in the us, every decision we could make we have generally done the worst option and are reopening full speed despite how bad things are here. Like a look now 4 months later with what had worked places and what hasn't throughout the world. My point is we have a lot of dumb people here and too many of them are in power so it would be cool to hear an update of what worked and what didn't on the large scale.
It's worth knowing that several candidate vaccines are in clinical trials and about 50 candidate vaccines are in development.
Richard Farmbrough and we have to wait over a year before people can get it
after reading "Eating Animals"
by Jonathan Safran-Foer I didn't eat chicken for 6 months
Where's my new HI episode
Calculating the impact of lockdowns on the number of non-covid deaths is complicated. Yes lockdowns will prevent or deter some people from getting medical treatment, and poverty and isolation can both be deadly, but without lockdowns, covid will overwhelm health systems causing even more collateral damage to those with unrelated health problems. US hospitals are also reporting a big drop in traffic accident and gunshot injuries, while the overall US mortality rate dropped significantly after the lockdowns started. People are generally safer sitting at home.
Yes it would seem that way to the ones that get to work from or government workers that continue to earn a fine living.
But we actually do need a proper productive functioning economy to grease the wheels of industry.
Some body has to put on their big boy pants and make the tough decisions for the welfare of the world population.
We cannot allow doctors and scientists to make the final decision otherwise the economy will be irreversibly destroyed and millions of lives will be destroyed .
@@eduardomexico7200 No it will not. The fact is, only a small part of the work done is really necessary. Most of it is just for pleasure or even waste in the end. I'd guess that the world could live just fine with about 20% of the work done. A big problem is the distribution though. At the moment we do that by forcing people to do _something_ . That obviously won't work if 80% of the population is just sitting at home. Thinking about it ... maybe you _are_ right: The economy - _as_ _we_ _know_ _it_ - might get destroyed. :-/
The sad fact is that the model blame game is starting now. Some news commentators are starting to allege corruption and bias on health system modelers for overshooting infection and death numbers, even though it's very difficult to model and predict in the first place.
The models WERE and ARE still wrong. Wake up
I disagree with Hannah at the end how the mathematical models could get the blame. At the end of the day the decisions made are political ones. Saying you're following the advice of the modellers is a political decision. She herself points out that you must take into account that there are uncertainties, and it's up to the politicians to do that.
Sadly, a number of governments around the world are only too happy to push an anti-science agenda (see climate change, for example) to suit their ideology. If a country is very successful at keeping the numbers below the 'worst case' numbers, I fear many will say "see, you can't trust the scientists, they were just trying to destroy our economy, just like with climate change." We're seeing a hashtag firefauci narrative in the states, that is exactly that sentiment. The President re-tweeted a message with that hashtag just yesterday.
Politicians do not understand science, how it is done and how conclusions are reached. Any scientist talking to a politician should always keep this in mind and imagine they are talking to a school junior. Do not make any assumptions about their level of understanding.
I think you need a pretty advanced understanding of mathematics like ODE PDE nonlinear as kick. In particular average conditions doesnt mean you get the same average response. Meaning considering rather what happens in the local area and inventing strategies for that. And that now it's time for the local heroes that know how to handle that stuff. Versus centralised decisions that might actually harm things
The reason Sweden didn't have worse outcomes--they still had excess deaths, their economy still suffered--their people still stopped going out. They knew this was an epoch-marking disease.
Hannah; Beauty and brains...
Maybe today people would be more willing to join even more detailed studies (with apps on their devices) yielding even more useful data.
I agree, the logarithmic graphs do make it look like everywhere is just leveling off now and not peaking anymore, so can make people feel that the worst is over and not to worry.
I prefer to use the data of daily deaths and positive tests, and look at those countries or areas that are having trouble getting test kits and PPE etc.
Brazil are becoming overwhelmed at the minute, their president has had 2 tests that he is not sharing the results of, he's been shaking hands with everyone and refusing to lockdown, hospitals can't test their ill patients due to the lack of test kits and a backlog of previous tests, graves are being dug at mass. Yet this isn't reflected in their data they giving out to the world..
similarly we've seen those videos from Moscow of over 50 ambulances queing up for hours to get into hospitals, yet russia is reporting very little cases and deaths.
There's been talk that the protocols for declaring the cause of death in Germany are very different to other countries.. only declaring covid19 as the cause of death in positive patients who died from respiratory failure.. not from other conditions such as diabetes, cardiac arrests etc.. even though in most countries they are being declared as having died from covid19 due to their pre existing conditions being made worse because of covid19, therefore covid19 is the cause of death.
The data is all a bit of a shambles tbh, so you really have to dig deeper to understand whats actually going on around the world.
Honestly who knows whats going on in India and Africa atm, they will never be able to procure & outbid other countries for enough test kits to find where their outbreaks are. So tests will never reflect anywhere close to the true numbers.
Unfortunately lockdowns in undeveloped countries are a bigger problem than the virus itself, thousands of indian migrant workers are now sleeping on the streets with nowhere to go, no food, water or money.
This isn't a 1 shoe fits all kinda thing, countries should be working together to distribute equipment where appropriate, not out bidding each other and hoarding it for themselves.
It's all gone crazy
Excellent post.
I don't know, just press 9
I'm a simple man. I hear Hannah Fry, I like
Brady, you need to host nobel minds so badly, I mean your questions are spot on; and they also have a very bad host that interrupts every sentence the Nobel laureates try to make and her transitions aren't smooth at all.
Have you ever been so happy to be wrong?
"I just don't know about a 12 month time scale..."
Just to spread a positive thought, the lack of air pollution could save alot of lives
There is a brilliant video over on 3Blue1Brown's channel about modelling and simulating this and how very small changes to some of the variables can have huge impacts.
th-cam.com/video/gxAaO2rsdIs/w-d-xo.html
Worth a watch!
Hannah, can you please do a collab project with Dr. John Campbell on this? I would love to see your two POVs together in a video (and the world might benefit from it).
So heartbreaking to hear Hannah Fry from Nov 2020 pessimistic about vaccines for the wrong reason
"if somebody struggled to read a graph...let me rephrase that"
america destroyed
thank you both; very informative/educational. I am certain that Brady's view re log scale vs linear scale to julie/joe public is correct - mainly driven by editors in mainstream media deciding public dont want to know so we will not tell them; f . . g murdoch again.
Hello Hannah! 💓😀
Hannah seemed to miss the point Brady made about log graphs communicating a much milder version of reality than a linear graph would.
Super cool economic system we have where even with years to prepare and months before the pandemic hits us, we still can't do anything because the rich don't want to spend any money on saving the poor. They just care about "the economy", which crashes anyway.
Capitalism is great you guys, really A+ for sustainability there
Ooh shes ginger.
Deliciously so.
WTF, the documentary is only allowed in the UK?! I'm pissed....
There are... other... places you can find it.
That's the real reason why you should have a vpn
“Nobody saw this coming”
Why is no one mentioning the World of Warcraft plague?
Mentioned in a recent Half As Interesting video.
Because it was very artificial. And I don't mean the fact that it happened in a game but the fact that is was spread on purpose by certain players.
@@harmless6813 Which also happened with coronavirus.
Nah ccp is the bearer of 100% of the blame
Bill Gates made the same prediction.
I hate to be so blunt, but can you stop making coronavirus videos?
You've completely ignored the available evidence in favor of stoking panic in all of these videos.
Any responsible mathematician has had enough data for weeks to conclude that the places exercising lockdowns and social distancing aren't seeing a different exponential growth rate than the places that aren't.
There exists weekly flu data from the CDC for every year for the flu. You could have compared the death rate of covid-19 to the death rate of a developing flu season to show how the death rates appear incredibly similar.
You could mention that the average covid-19 death is an 80-year-old with high blood pressure after a lifetime of smoking.
The nonsense panic stoking has to end at some point. You can't keep ignoring reality.
I don’t think any of them have “stoked panic”? And this is a podcast on the more niche Numberphile2 channel. And the title makes it pretty clear it’s about coronavirus, so just don’t click it. 🤷♂️
New big number video on the main channel will be published tomorrow, and the video immediately before this one on the main channel was about squares and numbers. Hope those ones are to your liking. ✅ Plenty more typical fare is in the works.
@@numberphile2 Sorry, perhaps i wasn't being very constructive. I apologize for that.
What i mean to say is I like math, and I think match is important.
And when this is all over if everything that the big math youtubers predicted was completely wrong, then everyone is gunna say "see, we'll never use math in real life" when we've had enough solid numbers to make real conclusions for weeks now, and yet all the math channels want to putz around the status quo of "panic" while at best concluding "it's too early to know yet" when it really isn't. We've had enough data for weeks to conclude that no curve has been flattened because they are all the exact same exponential growth rate in every corner of the globe regardless of the area's policies.
You are just plain wrong. The lockdown measures _are_ working in several countries. You can find the public numbers everywhere. So I have no idea how you came to that obviously flawed conclusion.
@@harmless6813 Yes, graph the numbers from each country as a ratio of new cases from the last week against total cases. If the growth rate is exponential, this graph will be a straight line, and if they all have the same exponential growth rate, they will all fall on the same line.
And they do.
That is exactly the sort of video Numberphile should be doing.
No flattening of any curve has occurred.
The only places that have gotten off of exponential growth quickly are the places where everyone wears a medical mask (Japan #1 and South Korea #2)
All this "stay 6 feet away" and "don't come to work" has had absolutely no effect, and we have had sufficient data to conclude that for over two weeks.
@@goseigentwitch3105 Oh for sure my dude, not going to work, the place where people have a highly contagious virus, is EXACTLY THE SAME as staying in an isolated building with no virus.
You death cultists are getting more and more depraved, even when this is over you had better stay out of arm's reach.
It did not come from southeast Asia (like most pandemic strains). It came from central China. This is anomalous and lends much more credibility to a lab escape than a natural environmental evolution.
Oh, not _that_ again ...
If I can't see your pretty face, I'm just not interested.
I'm a simple man. I see a video with Hanna Fry, I close the door, I take off my pants.
Aw come on keep it clean
The problem is capitalism. We need a planned economy and transition to a Communist society.
Yeah, wake me if you've found a Communist system of economics that actually works. Hint: the USSR went bankrupt, that's probably why.
The probem is _literally_ Communism. China is a Communist country. Their economic practices caused food to be scarce, so the government allowed people to hunt and sell wildlife for food in unsanitary, regulation-less wet-markets, and that's where this virus was transmitted to a person most likely from a BAT. Do you consider BATs to be food? Do you want to see this sort of thing happening here too?
Haha lol
@@rade-blunner7824 Dogs, Bats, Pufferfish, squirrels, they're all edible but NOT RECOMMENDED.
@@rade-blunner7824 China is capitalist you idiot. China hasn't been socialist since 1976 with Mao's death. Deng made reforms and degenerated to capitalism. And Communism is the higher phase of socialism, a classless, moneyless, stateless free association of producers. Read some Marxist literature before you comment on leftist theory.