March 1, 2022

Briefly

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  • Like a lot of news outlets, the Herald and  Newshub reported the case of a US teen needing amputations after eating some dodgy leftover lo mein.  Fortunately or unfortunately, it’s not true — well, the “after” is true, but the implied “because of” isn’t. The victim had meningoccal disease, which isn’t foodborne, and the connection came only from YouTube.  As the Boston Globe and Ars Technica report “The article never mentioned the leftovers again—because the food wasn’t linked to his illness. The lo mein was simply a red herring that the doctors dismissed, according to the article’s editor and director of the clinical microbiology laboratory at Massachusetts General Hospital, Eric Rosenberg.”
  • As Siouxsie Wiles says in Stuff, we could really use a Covid prevalence survey now that case counts aren’t a reliable way to assess infection numbers and allow hospitals to predict what they’re going to see in a week or so.  As a stopgap, we could use various existing data sources to cobble together an estimate, but a proper random survey like the one the UK has been running would be better.  The UK is stopping theirs; the president of the Royal Statistical Society writes about why this is bad
  • Interesting US political research: I’ve mentioned quite a few times that opinion polls have a problem with the difference between what people believe and what they say.  This research looked at people who say they believe the 2020 US election was really won by Donald Trump, and concludes that most of them actually do believe it.
  • On the other hand, YouGov finds substantial differences between the proportion of people who support vaccine mandates for schoolkids and the proportion who think “parents should be required to” have their children vaccinated.
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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 »