May 23, 2020
COViD links
- Matt Nippert has two wonderful stories about the government response to the pandemic, in the NZ$ Herald. He’s used the huge trove of documents released by the government about a week ago to show the government scrambling frantically, but still (by luck and skill and co-operation) managing to keep up. We were so close to having the wheels come off the public-health response system.
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“You always expect some resistance but if I had known people’s mental anchor in that negotiation was 10 cases, I might not have been so courageous in my recommendations. So I’m pleased I didn’t know that.” Ayesha Verrall, who audited the contact-tracing system, talking to Derek Cheng in the NZ$ Herald.
- “the stark turning point, when the number of daily COVID-19 cases in the U.S. finally crested and began descending sharply, never happened. Instead, America spent much of April on a disquieting plateau” Ed Yong’s brilliant ‘patchwork pandemic’ story in The Atlantic
- There’s still controversy over whether the infection fatality rate of COVID-19 is around 1 in 100 or around 1 in 1000. Hilda Bastian comments on the latest meta-analysis by John Ioannidis.
- Meanwhile, in New York City, excess deaths this year reached 20,569, which works out to one person in 400.
- Good news (via XKCD and HuffPost and Pew) is that most people in the US agree with the social-distancing programs.
- Less good news: only 52% even of Democrats will call ‘false’ the statement “Bill Gates wants to use a mass-vaccination campaign against COVID-19 to implant microchips that would be used to track people with a digital ID” (via @publicaddress).
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 »