SARS-CoV-2 Coronavirus (COVID-19)

It wouldn't be a conversation with a conspiracy theorist without the ad hominems.

 

This pretty well documents what is going on:

• Alabama, California, and USA
• Cases about the same rate
• Hospitalizations, Alabama significantly higher than California and USA
• Deaths, Alabama highest, USA next, California lowest
• Vaccinations, Alabama lowest, USA next, California highest

Serious, just take your Murdoch murder-suicide pill.

Bob Wilson

 

That's an interesting article from last September, and you also find links there to three "correspondences" published last December in response to it.

There was one thing jumped out at me looking at one of the original article's graphics, and it turns out to be one of the things also commented on in the second correspondence (the one by Mulot et al.):

They're talking about this boxplot from the original article:



The "categorisation ... is arbitrary" comment seems to be a low-key way of noticing that the boxplot makes six separate bins out of the 0 to 30 percent vaccinated range at the low end, and one bin out of the corresponding high range, 70%+. I didn't remember offhand what the highest vaccination rates were last September, but the original article mentions counties with up to 99.9% even then, so there could be a lot to see behind that 70%+ curtain.

The choice to bin things that way seems even more striking when you reflect that the biggest relative changes in number of unvaccinated lungs exposed to the virus are happening in that upper range. Going from a 95% to a 90% vaccination rate doubles the available unvaccinated lungs. At 80% they're quadrupled. At 70% they're hextupled.

By contrast, the boxplot spends six bins to cover the low-vaccination range where even going from 30% to 0% vaccinated only gives you 43% more unvaccinated lungs.

The funniest thing is even when you just look at that boxplot, even drawn the weird way that it is, you visually notice a clear downward trend of means and variances across the whole right two-thirds of it, even though there's six times the territory crammed into that final bin as in any other bin of the plot. The commenters, in their same low-key way, say "we cannot find an empirical justification for the claim that “cases per 100,000 people in the last seven days is largely similar", and they go on to show with a simple test on the same data that your eyes aren't deceiving you, and there's "strong evidence that a higher vaccination rate is associated with a lower 7-day incidence."

I think if I had been commenting on the article, I'd also have asked about the choice to bin the data by fixed increments of vaccination percentage (5 percentage points per bin except for the weird last one). Those are coming from a lot of counties of different sizes, which surely means those bins are including very different numbers of people. If you ran a second set of x-axis ticks by cumulative % of population covered, those numbers would be going up from left to right also, just not by a constant width per bin.

I'd be curious to see a companion version of the same plot where the bin widths were regularized to even divisions of the population. On that plot, it would be the percent-vaccinated numbers that would be going up left to right but by nonconstant amounts. It would be interesting to see if the variances bounced around as much that way.

There are probably equal or greater statistical challenges to displaying it that way, but it would be interesting to see.

 

Before jumping to conclusion on these graphs, I would think you'd need to do some more analysis.
For example, every county is not the same. There are some counties where the people live closer together and utilize mass transit and other counties that are much less dense. Mono county and Lassen county are very different than LA county, SD county and Bay area counties. At the very least I'd like to see the graphs with a 3rd dimension on population density. There may be other factors as well that need to be considered.

Mike

 

highly technical representation of past and future trends.

 

ah, the joy of the internet.

 

Apparently I can get custom lettering on masks:

YOUR mask rights end
with MY breath, nose,
throat, and lungs​

Bob Wilson

 

Apparently nobody got the word.

The war is over.
The CDC took a sharpie to the Covid tracking map and "did science"................Juuuuust in time for the SOTU.

Of course a an enfeebled Oxygenerin-in-Chief has a right to take his victory lap....even though MORE people died on his watch WITH a vaccine than did for the last guy....but hey....

"Science!" right?
POLITICAL Science.....
https://www.wfsb.com/2022/03/01/unmask-our-kids-encourages-students-walk-out-schools-that-still-require-masks/

 

even i'm not that skeptical, but i'm not affiliated with either party

 

MY skepticism is not skewed by red or blue light shifts......


CDC revises mask guidelines, says millions of Americans no longer need to wear masks indoors - CBS News
Congress drops mask mandate just ahead of Biden's State of the Union address - ABC News
Around the nation: House lifts mask mandate ahead of State of the Union address

 

Does that mean New Yorkers can enter buildings without showing their papers?
.

 

not sure if this is a sign for more aluminum foil or less.

I so confuse !

 

Credit where credit is due ... we've certainly got an entertaining figure of speech and meme now that we'd never have had without living through an administration where such things actually, literally happened.

For what it's worth, that's roughly what I've been doing since last summer. I found a site that regularly updates the capacity utilization at my two county hospitals, and I've been pretty much keeping my eye on that. Around me there've been the usual swirling arguments and changing guidelines about what precautions people ought to be taking and why ... and watching the hospital stress figures gives a way to fast-forward through a lot of that, and get to the "so how's that working out for ya?" question.

The local hospital stress has (finally!) begun to come down here. Steadily decreasing this week. A welcome development.

 

If these WorldoMeters figures are still reasonably accurate, new cases (graph to March 1) really have plummeted in the past few weeks:


Deaths, which significantly lag new cases, are also down though less sharply so far.

 

similar thing last late winter/spring summer, regardless of variant.

enjoy it while you can, next fall is unpredictable at best. we still won't be dining inside. numbers are low, but not zero.

 

dr. fauci said we're heading in the right direction. white say we're entering the endemic phase, other experts say you can't predict the future.

 

I own stock too. <GRINS>

I'm fairly sanguine that COVID has had a free attack of our lungs and omicron attacked the upper respiratory surfaces. About the only thing not yet attacked, teeth and tongue. Looking forward to snaggle-toothed anti-MASK and anti-VAX ... not that it would change their appearances.

The good thing is during the lull, real biologists, viralogists, and bio-engineers will have relief from the 'attack dogs' who spread FUD. There will be obscure but detailed papers improving our understanding and improving reaction times.

Bob Wilson