March 12, 2021
Briefly
- I wrote about how many people we need to vaccinate and why it’s complicated, at the Spinoff
- And an expanded version of this post about the Pfizer vaccine and obesity, for ‘Statisticians React to the News’, a blog of the International Statistical Institute
- While it’s true that basically no deaths and hospitalisations have been seen in the vaccinated groups in the vaccine trials, there haven’t been very many seen in the control groups either. As Hilda Bastian explains in the Atlantic, the trials were designed to see differences in symptomatic Covid, not serious/fatal Covid, and there are uncertainties about differences between the vaccines and about whether they are extremely effective or just very effective. “It’s tempting to believe that a simple, decisive message—even one that verges on hype—is what’s most needed at this crucial moment. But if the message could be wrong, that has consequences.”
- The RECOVERY trial in the UK keeps churning out information about effectiveness of treatments for Covid based on large numbers of hospitalised patients. A new casualty: colchicine, a gout drug that appears beneficial in non-hospitalised patients in a smaller Canadian study. RECOVERY is now expanding internationally, starting with Nepal and Indonesia
- “But there’s something else interesting here. The fear-and-stress argument is introduced with an historical account about a medieval experiment conducted by medieval Persian philosopher Avicenna / Ibn Sīnā. The story is *total bullshit.* Avicenna did no such experiment.” from ‘Calling Bullshit’
- In one of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld books, there’s a personal organiser that does handwriting recognition. You show it a page of text, and it says “Yes, that’s handwiting, I’d recognise it anywhere”. Something a bit similar is suggested by Police Commissioner Andrew Coster’s claim “There is no use of police photos for facial recognition unless it is someone who is an unidentified suspect for an offence.”. If that were true, the facial recognition system would be able to examine a photo and say “Yeah nah, don’t recognise him but he looks like a suspect “ but nothing more useful. A facial recognition system needs basic training on faces (which is often problematic), a set of faces with known names (which is often problematic) , and a set of faces to recognise (which… well you get the idea). It matches the third to the second, using clues from the first about general face patterns. With just the third group of photos, nothing much will happen.
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 »