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Process without common sense

One of my professors, Dr. Steven Johnson used to say one quote quite frequently, "common sense without process works but process without common sense is dangerous". The latest announcement of 10 days lockdown is like a process without common sense.  The idea of lockdown is to reduce the COVID growth but not reducing the numbers. If we observed carefully, even in the strict lockdown of first couple of months, the number did not reduce. It kept growing but the rate was slower. The graph never came down. This gave some time to the authorities to prepare the infrastructure. The first 3 months of lockdown has given enough time to be prepared. After that we expected a spike in COVID 19 patients. What we don't understand is that the spike also means at some point, the number will start reducing. Unfortunately, we are not prepared for the idea of the spike. With the new lockdown, we are just pushing it further. At the same time, we do not understand the other side of lockdown. Ma...
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Making sense of numbers

As a student of data visualisation, COVID19 gives me many opportunities of looking at the data. I started plotting different graphs to analyse the situation. However, before getting into graphs, I overlooked something very basic concept which we learn in school. "Sense of proportion" . In simple terms, population of India is approximately 1,35,00,00,000. Out of those, as of today, we have about 1,50,000 COVID19 positive cases. Lets do simple math. There are 0.00074% people are COVID19 positive in India. Even if it goes to 2 Lakhs the percentage would be 0.01% people will be affected. Now, I am talking about positive cases and not number of deaths. The ratio of number of deaths are 0.00023%.  Now, let's take an example of number of accidents per year. In 2018, there were 1,50,000 deaths because of accidents. That means there are about 0.011%. The ratio of deaths because of accidents are much higher than that of COVID19.  Since, we have numbers, let's talk abo...
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COVID19 -- Lockdown or not

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There are too many statistics, dashboards, and data about COVID19. Although, the numbers are increasing, we can say that lockdown helped to control the spread. We are in the lockdown from 22nd March. It's been almost 45-50 days. In these days, wherever I see, many people are saying we should be at home. The Lockdown should continue and shops shouldn't be open as people go out to buy things. Everyday, I get WhatsApp forwards stating that there is corona outside, and its at some stage so it will increase exponentially for the next few days. We have be refrain from going outside for morning/evening walks. It feels like we have gone into a phase of homeostasis.  So let me ask a question. If something is working, should we continue doing the same thing? So if we try to answer this question from the perspective of lockdown, the answer is yes. The argument is that lockdown has helped the numbers keeping down so we should do even more strict lockdown. Now, let me start wit...
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