Re: Not to incite a language war but apparently the Corona lockdown was based on 13 year old undocumented C-Code

[Anatoly Chernyshev <achernyshev@gmail.com>]

"Clowns will dominate the pandemic-forecasting domain..."

I like that one...

Oh dear, you've lured me out. As a person who just published a Covid-19 forecasting model programmed in Ada, I can't stay away from this heated conversation.

There are so many concerns raised about scientists doing their rookie programming without resorting to professionals, so I don't even know where to start.

First of all, we are curious bunch, and learning something new (like programming) is always fun. Second, in scientific programming the chance that someone in power will lock down a country based on the output of your program is negligible (certainly it wasn't on the radars 13 years ago). Third, fourth... 

To make a long story short, for the experiment's sake, is there anyone willing to review my code? It's not a marvel of Ada programming, it just works.

Yet it's quite short - I went from the model's formulation, programming, testing, data acquisition, manuscript writeup in a matter of a fortnight.

If the review is useful, in terms that it helps to produce more accurate forecasts or identifies a drastic flaw in the code, I would be more than happy to do a revised version of the manuscript in a coauthorship with the reviewer(s). Or even go for a peer-reviewed publication when dust settles.

The model forecasts are here:
April 10th: https://xph.co.nz/temp/album/
May 12th: https://xph.co.nz/temp/album2005/
Some technical details: https://xph.co.nz/index.php/covid-19-progression-model/
The model description: https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.03.20052985v1

This is not an epidemiology-based model (so you don't have to be one). Rather, it's a phenomenological one. It can predict what will happen, but can't (yet) say why this will happen. A contribution on the model is welcomed too.

The code is not published (since I didn't expect anyone would care), but I'll do it once there's interest.

If keen, please write to me directly: a~at~xph~dot~co~dot~nz

Anatoly