All about risk
Graphic:
Methodology: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/05/13/how-we-estimated-the-true-death-toll-of-the-pandemic
Publication Date: 15 May 2021
Publication Site: The Economist
Link: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/372/6543/694.1
Excerpt:
As scientists with relevant expertise, we agree with the WHO director-general (5), the United States and 13 other countries (6), and the European Union (7) that greater clarity about the origins of this pandemic is necessary and feasible to achieve. We must take hypotheses about both natural and laboratory spillovers seriously until we have sufficient data. A proper investigation should be transparent, objective, data-driven, inclusive of broad expertise, subject to independent oversight, and responsibly managed to minimize the impact of conflicts of interest. Public health agencies and research laboratories alike need to open their records to the public. Investigators should document the veracity and provenance of data from which analyses are conducted and conclusions drawn, so that analyses are reproducible by independent experts.
Author(s): Jesse D. Bloom, Yujia Alina Chan, Ralph S. Baric, Pamela J. Bjorkman, Sarah Cobey, Benjamin E. Deverman, David N. Fisman, Ravindra Gupta, Akiko Iwasaki, Marc Lipsitch, Ruslan Medzhitov, Richard A. Neher, Rasmus Nielsen, Nick Patterson, Tim Stearns, Erik van Nimwegen, Michael Worobey, David A. Relman
Publication Date: 14 May 2021
Publication Site: Science
Excerpt:
Now, in a letter in the journal Science, 18 prominent biologists—including the world’s foremost coronavirus researcher—are lending their weight to calls for a new investigation of all possible origins of the virus, and calling on China’s laboratories and agencies to “open their records” to independent analysis.
“We must take hypotheses about both natural and laboratory spillovers seriously until we have sufficient data,” the scientists write.
The letter, which was organized by the Stanford University microbiologist David Relman and the University of Washington virologist Jesse Bloom, takes aim at a recent joint study of covid origins undertaken by the World Health Organization and China, which concluded that a bat virus likely reached humans via an intermediate animal and that a lab accident was “extremely unlikely.”
Author(s): Rowan Jacobsen
Publication Date: 13 May 2021
Publication Site: MIT Tech Review
Link: https://polimath.substack.com/p/never-trust-a-clean-partisan-story
Graphic:
Before [wrong]:
After [correct]:
Excerpt:
The biggest problem with this study is the fact that they made what is an elementary statistics error and it went all the way to publication and no one caught it.
The authors took the per capita COVID case and death numbers among the “red states” and “blue states” and ran an analysis on them. In doing this, they gave North Dakota the same weight as Texas and Hawaii the same weight as New York despite the obvious population differences. Their chart is tiny and unreadable, so I’ve roughly duplicated their work here.
At first glance, this looks like the authors at least have their data correct. It looks like, after the initial wave, states with red governors had consistently higher patterns of cases and deaths from the summer all the way through the winter surge.
However, what we’re seeing here is due to the fact that the authors weighted the death rates for small and rural states with the same weight that they applied to high population states. This is a statistics error that is so common it has its own name: Simpson’s Paradox. It is when you take the average of the averages instead of calculating the overall average based on the properly weighted data.
Author(s): PoliMath
Publication Date: 13 May 2021
Publication Site: Marginally Compelling at substack
Link: https://www.nationalreview.com/2021/05/rebekah-jones-the-covid-whistleblower-who-wasnt/
Excerpt:
There is an extremely good reason that nobody in the Florida Department of Health has sided with Jones. It’s the same reason that there has been no devastating New York Times exposé about Florida’s “real” numbers. That reason? There is simply no story here. By all accounts, Rebekah Jones is a talented developer of GIS dashboards. But that’s all she is. She’s not a data scientist. She’s not an epidemiologist. She’s not a doctor. She didn’t “build” the “data system,” as she now claims, nor is she a “data manager.” Her role at the FDOH was to serve as one of the people who export other people’s work—from sets over which she had no control—and to present it nicely on the state’s dashboard. To understand just how far removed Jones really is from the actual data, consider that even now—even as she rakes in cash from the gullible to support her own independent dashboard—she is using precisely the same FDOH data used by everyone else in the world. Yes, you read that right: Jones’s “rebel” dashboard is hooked up directly to the same FDOH that she pretends daily is engaged in a conspiracy. As Jones herself confirmed on Twitter: “I use DOH’s data. If you access the data from both sources, you’ll see that it is identical.” She just displays them differently.
Or, to put it more bluntly, she displays them badly. When you get past all of the nonsense, what Jones is ultimately saying is that the State of Florida—and, by extension, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—has not processed its data in the same way that she would if she were in charge. But, frankly, why would it? Again, Jones isn’t an epidemiologist, and her objections, while compelling to the sort of low-information political obsessive she is so good at attracting, betray a considerable ignorance of the material issues. In order to increase the numbers in Florida’s case count, Jones counts positive antibody tests as cases. But that’s unsound, given that (a) those positives include people who have already had COVID-19 or who have had the vaccine, and (b) Jones is unable to avoid double-counting people who have taken both an antibody test and a COVID test that came back positive, because the state correctly refuses to publish the names of the people who have taken those tests. Likewise, Jones claims that Florida is hiding deaths because it does not include nonresidents in its headline numbers. But Florida does report nonresident deaths; it just reports them separately, as every state does, and as the CDC’s guidelines demand. Jones’s most recent claim is that Florida’s “excess death” number is suspicious. But that, too, has been rigorously debunked by pretty much everyone who understands what “excess deaths” means in an epidemiological context—including by the CDC; by Daniel Weinberger, an epidemiologist at the Yale School of Public Health; by Lauren Rossen, a statistician at the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics; and, most notably, by Jason Salemi, an epidemiologist at the University of South Florida, who, having gone to the trouble of making a video explaining calmly why the talking point was false, was then bullied off Twitter by Jones and her followers.
Author(s): Charles C. W. Cooke
Publication Date: 13 May 2021
Publication Site: National Review
Link: https://voxeu.org/article/social-and-economic-costs-covid-19
Graphic:
Excerpt:
First, we compute the differences between the output paths for 2020–2030 projected before and after the pandemic (the shaded area in Figure 1) and estimate its present value discounting at a 0% real interest rate (a reasonably conservative assumption in a context where real rates are negative for most developed countries). This yields a total loss of about half of global GDP.
Next, there is the question of the fiscal stimulus (equivalent to 15% of GDP, according to the IMF fiscal monitor) without which the output loss in 2020 would have been much steeper. How much of the economic impact of the fiscal unwinding is properly accounted for in the revised growth projections (Beck et al. 2021), particularly given that a big part of the stimulus (6% of the 15%) was below the line (loans, equity stakes, guarantees) with a cost that is contingent on the speed and composition of economic recovery in each country? There is no simple answer here. Moreover, we are ignoring potential bouts of financial stress or debt restructurings in heavily indebted countries (Persaud 2021), as well as the second wave of stimulus already in line for 2021 in many advanced economies. All things considered, adding the full 15% of GDP as an indicative measure of the cost of fiscal support does not look unreasonable.
Third, there is the value of the excess deaths due to Covid-19. There is, of course, no uncontroversial way to put a value on human life. For the sake of argument, we follow a recent estimation for the US by Cutler and Summers (2020) that uses the ‘statistical lives’ value to place it between $10 million and $7 million per life. If we take the considerably more conservative $5 million per life, acknowledging that the statistical value may vary across countries, the cost related to the global cumulative deaths registered so far amounts to 16.9% of global GDP.
Author(s): Eduardo Levy Yeyati, Federico Filippini
Publication Date:
Publication Site: Vox EU
Excerpt:
When the CDC issued new guidelines recently on when people still need to wear masks, the guidelines were seen as so conservative that they prompted a primetime rant on “The Daily Show.”
“I know science is difficult … but who’s running messaging at the CDC?” asked the show’s host, Trevor Noah.
Some public health experts are asking the same question. Most experts interviewed for this story say the agency has struggled to take advantage of the latest scientific findings to communicate as rapidly as possible with the American public. And when the guidance is issued, it tends to be overly cautious.
….
Still, public health officials say the conservative nature of the agency’s approach to Covid is a marked departure from how it deals with other major public health issues, like HIV and opioid use disorder.
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Multiple experts told STAT that they fear the CDC’s recommendations are becoming irrelevant for most Americans. They worry, too, that guidelines, like the CDC’s advice on masking, so seriously underplay the benefits of getting vaccinated that they risk dissuading people from getting a shot in the first place.
Author(s): Nicholas Florko
Publication Date: 11 May 2021
Publication Site: Stat News
Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/11/briefing/outdoor-covid-transmission-cdc-number.html
Excerpt:
When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention released new guidelines last month for mask wearing, it announced that “less than 10 percent” of Covid-19 transmission was occurring outdoors. Media organizations repeated the statistic, and it quickly became a standard description of the frequency of outdoor transmission.
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That benchmark “seems to be a huge exaggeration,” as Dr. Muge Cevik, a virologist at the University of St. Andrews, said. In truth, the share of transmission that has occurred outdoors seems to be below 1 percent and may be below 0.1 percent, multiple epidemiologists told me. The rare outdoor transmission that has happened almost all seems to have involved crowded places or close conversation.
Saying that less than 10 percent of Covid transmission occurs outdoors is akin to saying that sharks attack fewer than 20,000 swimmers a year. (The actual worldwide number is around 150.) It’s both true and deceiving.
Author(s): David Leonhardt
Publication Date: 11 May 2021
Publication Site: NY Times
Link: https://www.theinsight.org/p/the-few-sentences-that-explain-much
Excerpt:
Why did it take so long to accept that SARS-CoV-2 was being transmitted through aerosols, respiratory particles that are small enough to remain suspended in the air, rather than through short-range respiratory droplets that could not travel more than a few feet because of their (bigger) size?
The reasons for this delay go back more than a century, to the fight against (incorrect but prevalent) theories that blame miasma—noxious odors, especially from rotting organic material—for diseases. While trying to counter erroneous but millenia-long folk-beliefs, some of the founders of public health and the field of infectious control of diseases around the world made key errors and conflations around the turn of the 20th century. These errors essentially froze into tradition and dogma that went unchanged and uncorrected for more than a century, until a pandemic forced our hand.
Author(s): Zeynep Tufekci
Publication Date: 7 May 2021
Publication Site: Insight at substack
Link: https://thebulletin.org/2021/05/the-origin-of-covid-did-people-or-nature-open-pandoras-box-at-wuhan/
Excerpt:
A tale of two theories. After the pandemic first broke out in December 2019, Chinese authorities reported that many cases had occurred in the wet market — a place selling wild animals for meat — in Wuhan. This reminded experts of the SARS1 epidemic of 2002, in which a bat virus had spread first to civets, an animal sold in wet markets, and from civets to people. A similar bat virus caused a second epidemic, known as MERS, in 2012. This time the intermediary host animal was camels.
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Contrary to the letter writers’ assertion, the idea that the virus might have escaped from a lab invoked accident, not conspiracy. It surely needed to be explored, not rejected out of hand. A defining mark of good scientists is that they go to great pains to distinguish between what they know and what they don’t know. By this criterion, the signatories of the Lancet letter were behaving as poor scientists: They were assuring the public of facts they could not know for sure were true.
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One of the very few establishment scientists to have questioned the virologists’ absolute rejection of lab escape is Richard Ebright, who has long warned against the dangers of gain-of-function research. Another is David A. Relman of Stanford University. “Even though strong opinions abound, none of these scenarios can be confidently ruled in or ruled out with currently available facts,” he wrote. Kudos too to Robert Redfield, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, who told CNN on March 26, 2021 that the “most likely” cause of the epidemic was “from a laboratory,” because he doubted that a bat virus could become an extreme human pathogen overnight, without taking time to evolve, as seemed to be the case with SARS2.
Author(s): Nicholas Wade
Publication Date: 5 May 2021
Publication Site: Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
Video Description:
Reviewing the CDC death data, 2020-2021, as of May 5, 2021
Dashboard page: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/co…
Author(s): Mary Pat Campbell
Publication Date: 6 May 2021
Publication Site: Meep’s Math Matters at YouTube
Excerpt:
It is a wonder that nobody choked on their morning toast and tea, for if Imperial modelling has stood for anything in this crisis, it is relentless pessimism. Plummeting figures were certainly not predicted by its researchers. The difference this time is that the Government has pressed ahead with reopening despite the doom-mongering, and so has proven the models wrong.
Here is what they said would happen and what we know now: Hospital admissions When the Government published its roadmap out of the pandemic on Feb 22, it was largely based on modelling assumptions from Imperial, the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine and Warwick University.
Imperial modelled four unlocking scenarios, ranging from “very fast” to “gradual”. Under the fastest, full lifting would occur at the end of April, while under the slowest, Britain would not see restrictions eased until Aug 2.
In the end, the Government chose a path somewhere between “fast” and “medium”, yet the Imperial model predicted that would still lead to Covid hospital bed occupancy of about 15,000 to 25,000 in the summer and early autumn – which was higher than the first peak in April 2020.
Author(s): Sarah Knapton
Publication Date: 5 May 2021
Publication Site: The Telegraph (UK)