March 17, 2020

Briefly

By
  • Statisticians from the Human Rights Data Analysis Group write in the UK literary magazine Granta, about the uncertainty in COVID-19 mortality rates.  They’re saying similar things to what I and other statisticians have said, but should be reaching a new audience, including some influential people.
  • The infectious disease modelling group at Imperial College, London, have put out a new paper on suppressing infections (PDF, Financial Times, Guardian).  The take-home message is the same as the animation in this Spinoff piece by Siouxsie Wiles and Toby Morris: distancing measures can potentially suppress the epidemic, but if they work we need to keep doing them until a vaccine arrives. “The major challenge of suppression is that this type of intensive intervention package – or something equivalently effective at reducing transmission – will need to be maintained until a vaccine becomes available (potentially 18 months or more) – given that we predict that transmission will quickly rebound if interventions are relaxed”
  • Alberto Cairo links to an interesting essay (previously a lecture,PDF) on ‘the ethics of counting’: “But wait!” the kid thinks to himself. “A grown-up lumped these different things together so I guess I’m supposed to consider them as the same.” Notice that when kids learn to count, they’re not just learning number words and symbols; they’re learning how adults see things
  • Via flowingdata.com, a map of all the trees and forests in the United States
  • From Kieran Healy, a map of all the rivers and streams in the US
  • Along similar lines, from the Herald a couple of years ago, a map of NZ with place names coloured by whether they are in te reo.
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Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »

Comments

  • avatar
    Antonio Rinaldi

    I’m disturbed by the animation in the Spinoff piece: it’s misleading.

    5 years ago

  • avatar
    Joseph Delaney

    I am rather disturbed by the 18 month window for social distancing. I do not doubt that it may well be accurate but it rather increases economic/social cost to rather . . . exciting levels.

    5 years ago

    • avatar
      Thomas Lumley

      Yes – and one of the questions is how much you actually need to do for that long. They weren’t talking about complete lockdown like in Italy, but even so.

      5 years ago

  • avatar
    Steve Curtis

    There is a paper out looking at the Diamond Princess cruise ship
    ‘Estimating the infection and case fatality ratio for COVID-19 using age-adjusted data from the outbreak on the Diamond Princess cruise ship’
    https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.03.05.20031773v2.full.pdf

    Its interesting as it was a closed off system which acted like an incubator.
    They say 83% didnt have the virus and with 7 deaths ‘the age-adjusted infection fatality rate was 1.2% (0.38%–2.7%)’

    5 years ago

    • avatar
      Steve Curtis

      Its seems they did around 3000 tests on the 3700 passengers and crew on board, starting from the most elderly and descending by age.
      The average age on board was 58, but might be skewed to a wealthier, more active and healthier age group.

      5 years ago