Tag Archives: covid-19

those wild, wacky Covid-19 data points

Leave a reply

I have noticed for awhile that the CDC’s Covid-19 data doesn’t agree with other sources, which don’t agree with each other. Looking at my home city (and County) of Philadelphia, the CDC’s numbers have been consistently higher for many months. This matters because government agencies, employers (including mine), and individuals are basing decisions on these numbers, often the CDC numbers.

Let’s look at today’s numbers for Philadelphia. I’ll look just at “confirmed cases” because that seems to be the most readily available and frequently updated by all sources, although really I think we should be focused more on deaths at this point, because deaths (although morbid) gives you some information on cases and vaccination/immunity combined. In other words, if cases are high but deaths are low, you would have an annoyance but not a major problem. Nonetheless, let’s look at those cases for Philadelphia today! I’m writing this on Sunday, November 21, 2021. I’m using the links from my coronavirus tracker post.

  • CDC: 111.55 / 100,000 population / 7 days (data from November 13-19)
  • Pennsylvania state health department: 86.4 / 100,000 population / 7 days (data from November 12-18)
  • Covid Act Now: 116.2 / 100,000 population / 7 days (data from November 20 which they describe as a 7 day average provided by the New York Times)

There are a number of things that could explain differences in the numbers. First, the time periods the data represent varying slightly by source. Second, whether the data represent the date the test was done, the test was reported, or the estimated date of infection. Generally I think what is reported is the date the test was done. This is hard data of a sort, but it introduces a time lag as numerous and scattered labs report their data. The data you are looking at might not yet represent all the data available on a given day, and it might be corrected retroactively, meaning if you check what today’s number was a week from now, you might see a different number from today. Finally, when reporting data for a location like a county, it may be important whether they are reporting all tests done in that county or matching tests to the home addresses (or employer addresses?) of the individuals tested. Philadelphia, for example, has a huge health care industry with a lot of commuters not just from surrounding counties in Pennsylvania but parts of New Jersey and Delaware. (States were never the right entities to track this pandemic, it should obviously be done by entities covering metro areas.)

If all the sources were using similar data but using slightly different time periods or calculation methods, I would expect some differences but I would expect the differences to be random. The state health department numbers are consistently lower, however. I am hoping that might be because they are doing a better job of matching tests to home addresses.

The Onion interviews Dr. Fauci

Leave a reply

The Onion has a fun (and obviously made up and satirical, people) “interview” with Dr. Fauci on how he is “planning for the next pandemic”. It turns out he is planning to intentionally create the next pandemic, as he has all pandemics for at least the last few decades. This is some laugh-out-loud, yet dark, humor people.

The Onion: What type of P.P.E. will be needed for this one?

Fauci: Everyone will need oven mitts and a chef’s hat to ward off infection…

The Onion: What are you most excited about the next pandemic?

Fauci: This one is gonna kill a shit ton of dogs.

The Onion

Now that crosses the line. We can let a million or so people die, especially poor people and babies once they are born and properly baptised, and poor people shouldn’t be having babies to begin with, but don’t mess with our dogs!

If there is any doubt in your mind, that was also satire. I like puppies, and babies, and babies playing with puppies. These are things I hope will continue for some time.

gain-of-function research

Leave a reply

According to Vanity Fair, a lab in New York collaborated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology to “enhance a bat coronavirus to become potentially more infectious to humans”. I personally don’t care about the “lab leak hypothesis” at this point. It is clear that this type of research is common now and probably happening all over the world. It needs to be tightly monitored and controlled or we may be in for a bleak future.

“Disease X”

Leave a reply

Are you worried that nobody is prepared for the next big pandemic? Have no fear, there is a group preparing to “advise the WHO on developing a framework to define comprehensive studies” about that. And after that, the WHO is going to be “developing policies and enhancing preparedness” about it. I am sure this will not take very long!

It seems like the UN and the WHO should be the organization to lead this effort globally, and creating new bodies in parallel would be redundant and counter-productive. But the UN approach did not seem to work very well this last time around. There are also the intertwined risks of natural pandemics, biological warfare and biological terrorism that need to be dealt with, and the WHO does not seem to be the agency to deal with these as existential threats. It seems to be more about representing the world’s under-represented people and countries at the table where these things are discussed.

In the U.S., our existing agencies (CDC, customs, FEMA, etc.) did not deal with this threat effectively. Again, nobody wants to just make new redundant agencies, and nobody wants to just turn the thing over to the military industrial complex. But it seems like we need to do something. Maybe this is why Obama created the “white house office of pandemic whatever” to try to coordinate or at least understand all this. Not a new parallel agency, but a new layer of oversight or at least a watchdog. The government grows this way, and the new growth may be healthy, but we never prune out the dead underbrush.

July 2021 in Review

Leave a reply

July 2021 is in the books. In current events (I’m writing on Sunday, August 1), the Delta variant of Covid is now ripping through the unvaccinated population in the U.S. and predictably leaking out into the vaccinated population. I wasn’t too focused on Covid in July though, looking at the posts I have chosen below.

Most frightening and/or depressing story: The western-U.S. megadrought looks like it is settling in for the long haul.

Most hopeful story: A new Lyme disease vaccine may be on the horizon (if you’re a human – if you are a dog, talk to your owner about getting the approved vaccine today.) I admit, I had to stretch a bit to find a positive story this month.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: “Cliodynamics” is an attempt at a structured, evidence-based way to test hypotheses about history.

how to tape an air filter to a box fan

Leave a reply

Yes, you can tape a furnace air filter to a box fan and use it as an air purifier. Here’s a long article with many links and videos on the options. You have to be careful – my own family has burned out fan motors trying to put seemingly light weight nets over them to keep childrens’ fingers out (no smoke, no fire, they just quit working, but still a good idea to switch fans off when you are away from home as a general principle). You can in fact just tape the filter to the back of the fan and be done. More elaborate setups build a cube out of the filters with the fan inside, increasing the surface area and putting less stress on the motor. Some approaches use cardboard cutouts to channel the air flow (which seems harder on the motor to me). People are Covid-focused these days, but seasonal allergies will be around long after Covid is gone. This seems like it could be a particularly cheap and effective intervention in offices and schools.

Modern, cheap plastic fan blades won’t cut off or even break your fingers by the way, in my experience, and I do have experience. As a relatively tall man, I also have experience being whacked in the head by a ceiling fan blade a time or two. Both these things cause significant pain, but I am still here with all my body parts and no long-term damage.

June 2021 in Review

Leave a reply

Most frightening and/or depressing story: For every 2 people who died of Covid-19 in the U.S. about 1 additional person died of indirect effects, such as our lack of a functioning health care system and safe streets compared to virtually all our peer countries.

Most hopeful story: Masks, ventilation, and filtration work pretty well to prevent Covid transmission in schools. We should learn something from this and start designing much healthier schools and offices going forward. Design good ventilation and filtration into all buildings with lots of people in them. We will be healthier all the time and readier for the next pandemic. Then masks can be slapped on as a last layer of defense. Enough with the plexiglass, it’s just stupid and it’s time for it to go.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: The big U.S. government UFO report was a dud. But what’s interesting about it is that we have all quietly seemed to have accepted that something is going on, even if we have no idea what it is, and this is new.

one more Covid-19 dashboard

Leave a reply

In the U.S., it feels like we are done with Covid. At least, for those of us who are vaccinated adults. For those of us with children, life is still not back to normal because even as we are being told we can return to the office, we can’t actually do that because the children are still home. And the world is clearly not done with Covid-19, as vaccination is proceeding slowly in many countries outside North America and Europe.

Anyway, here is one more simulation dashboard that shows an ensemble of simulations going forward up to four weeks. This might be useful to see if there are blips on the horizon when (if?) the kids really are allowed to go back to school in the fall. Here’s an article describing the site in MIT technology review.

May 2021 in Review

Leave a reply

Most frightening and/or depressing story: The Colorado River basin is drying out.

Most hopeful story: An effective vaccine for malaria may be on the way. Malaria kills more children in Africa every year than Covid-19 killed people of all ages in Africa during the worst year of the pandemic. And malaria has been killing children every year for centuries and will continue long after Covid-19 is gone unless something is done.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: I learned about Lawrence Kohlberg, who had some ideas on the use of moral dilemmas in education.

“breakthrough malaria vaccine”

Leave a reply

Forbes reports a promising malaria vaccine produced by “the Oxford University team behind the Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid-19 shot”. It doesn’t say whether the technology developed for the Covid shot did anything to hasten this vaccine along. It still has some testing and licensing to go through.

The article has some horrifying stats on malaria, which is a major killer of children.

229 million. This is roughly how many cases of malaria there were around the world in 2019, according to the WHO. Around 400,000 died from the disease, which consistently ranks as one of the top ten causes of death in low income countries, despite falling significantly in recent years. Africa is disproportionately affected by the disease, with over 90% of cases occurring there. Children account for almost 70% of deaths. 

Forbes

Doing the math here (journalists, why can’t you do the math for me?), the death rate is about 0.2% of cases. If this is the death rate in Africa (but it could be higher if Africans receive less or lower quality treatment) and the other percentages hold, around 250,000 children in Africa die of malaria each year. From Our World in Data, the death toll in Africa from Covid-19 over the last year is around 120,000.

It occurs to me that countries where people deal with horrible diseases that mass murder children every year might be less horrified by Covid-19, which kills a fraction of older people. Of course I am not saying the lives of poor people have less value or the lives of older people have less value (although this is a perennial debate and people of all ages have a variety of reasonable opinions), but I think you can legitimately ask whether an available dollar should be invested in stopping Covid vs. other horrible diseases people have been dealing with for decades.