A posting every day; an interesting idea every three months…
A post from Donald Trump, edited by Facebook:
I’m not sure how the identity of the president who takes over in January 2021 is relevant to a post regarding a coronaplague vaccine, but it is comforting to be reminded how lucky we are to have Joe Biden. #ThankYouFacebookEditorialDepartment
(The above was highlighted by a friend: “This is like AT&T listening to your call and editing.”)
From our local supermarket, Joe Biden is already an “American Legend”:
Suppose that you’re slightly fatter than the ordinarily chubby American (average BMI of 27, which is “overweight”). Maybe your BMI is 28.5, for example. Would it make sense to chow down at illegal holiday gatherings this year in hopes of hitting an “obese” BMI of 30? At that point, you could get priority for the COVID-19 vaccine.
Full post, including commentsTo the Swedish MD/PhDs, e.g., Johan Giesecke and Anders Tegnell, most of the world’s reaction to coronavirus is irrational panic. To the Karens with whom I am friends on Facebook, hiding in a bunker while waiting for the next batch of governors’ orders is an entirely rational, even “scientific”, response to a disease that has killed a significant number of people.
I wonder if we can look at how Americans respond to influenza as a way to determine how much of the COVID-19 shutdown is rationally motivated.
Influenza kills 80,000 Americans, mostly elderly, in a typical “bad” year and up to 225,000 (population-adjusted) in an exceptional year, such as 1957-58. Influenza infection can also leave victims with serious long-term health effects, such as impaired heart function. From the CDC:
Sinus and ear infections are examples of moderate complications from flu, while pneumonia is a serious flu complication that can result from either influenza virus infection alone or from co-infection of flu virus and bacteria. Other possible serious complications triggered by flu can include inflammation of the heart (myocarditis), brain (encephalitis) or muscle (myositis, rhabdomyolysis) tissues, and multi-organ failure (for example, respiratory and kidney failure). Flu virus infection of the respiratory tract can trigger an extreme inflammatory response in the body and can lead to sepsis, the body’s life-threatening response to infection. Flu also can make chronic medical problems worse. For example, people with asthma may experience asthma attacks while they have flu, and people with chronic heart disease may experience a worsening of this condition triggered by flu.
So let’s says that COVID-19 is 5X as bad, for both lethality and long-term effects on survivors, as a bad flu.
What happens when the flu season arrives in the U.S.? Do we shut down schools in communities where flu is “spiking”? Do young healthy adults don masks, saying that though they aren’t at risk they want to protect the elderly? Do people work from home whenever they’re able to? Do we establish any limits on retail or restaurant capacity, ban indoor dining, or limit hours?
In my experience, the answer to all of the above is “No.” From what I have seen, Americans tape up “It’s flu season; wash your hands” signs in a few places and continue with life as usual.
A rational and consistent group of humans, therefore, would respond to COVID-19 with something like 5X the actions taken during flu season. We would see 5X as many “wash your hands” signs. Children who lost 3 minutes of schooling during flu season (time spent washing hands instead of studying) would lose 15 minutes of schooling during COVID-19. Or maybe two windows would be opened in every classroom and mixing of students in the cafeteria would be curtailed in favor of lunch at desks. Instead, the reaction is 120X. Children lose 360 minutes of schooling (school entirely shut down) per day rather than 3 minutes. Children lose their social life, playgrounds, etc.
The same analysis could be done for adults. If they’re hiding in their bunkers 5 days per week currently, that would be consistent with their flu season response if they had previously hid 1 day per week during flu season.
Our universities are always in the vanguard…
From the above article, the 20th century’s best ideas are alive and well:
Typical penalties include writing letters of apology, performing community service projects, meeting with advisers, and completing educational research papers about public health—not to mention the shame most feel after having been shown to have placed their fellow students at risk.
Readers: Does the above way of looking at coronapanic make sense?
Related:
It was free last year, but you had to show up for a Boston January. This year we’re doing it all via Zoom (so anyone in China can watch!) and the price remains consistent with the value: our $0 ground school, otherwise known as MIT Course 16.687. If you’ve been needing a nudge to get a Private pilot certificate, this could be it. The course is also useful for drone enthusiasts.
Please follow the above link and register if you’re interested. Tina (MIT Aero/Astro PhD) and I will host a Zoom meeting every morning at 11 am, do a bit of live lecturing, and then spin folks off to watch the videos that we recorded in 2019. We’ll be available for questions as the day wears on.
All of the course materials are available online for free, either from our site or the FAA. I can sign you off to take the official FAA knowledge test at the end of the class (or a local instructor at your nearby flight school can).
Hope to see everyone in January as at least a grid element on my 32″ monitor!
Full post, including commentsA variety of friends on Facebook (mostly identifying as “women” and in their 50s) have been posting their concern regarding the wicked Swedes running out of ICU capacity, implicitly due to their failure to don the Church of Shutdown’s hijab and continuing to run (unmasked!) schools for everyone under 16.
(For the first time in the year since Covid-19 reached the U.S./Europe, the Swedes have some real restrictions, e.g., movie theaters and similar large “public” gatherings are shut down; our Swedish helicopter instructors says that his mom’s hair salon has been open continuously, however, and remains open. His parents still don’t own a mask. They would be discouraged from hosting a party for 30 people at their house, but it would not be illegal for them to do so. Unlike in Maskachusetts, Swedes need not tell the government when they’ve traveled or to where nor do they need to submit medical records to government authorities “on request”.)
An example post: “ICUs in Stockholm reach 99 percent capacity: report” (The Hill).
In the best American fashion, this article presents all of the information out of context. How many ICU beds are there in Sweden? How does that compare to what we have here in the U.S.? How does the number of Covid-19 patients in the ICU compare to what Sweden had back in the spring of 2020?
First, it seems that the number of ICU beds occupied by Covid-19 patients is actually only about half what it was during the April 2020 peak:
How does 259 ICU patients with Covid-19 in wicked Sweden compare to the situation in place that is a model of shutdown (9 months) and masks (7-8 months)? Maskachusetts currently has 309 Covid-19 patients in the ICU (state dashboard) or 1.7X the rate when adjusted for population.
Second, it looks as though Swedes don’t have that many hospital beds that they designated as “ICU”. Reuters, under a headline that directly contradicts the above (“ICU bends not full”):
Sweden still has 148 unoccupied beds in intensive care wards nationwide, corresponding to 22% free capacity, said Irene Nilsson-Carlsson, senior public health adviser at the National Health Board.
In other words, the entire country of more than 10 million people has about 675 hospital beds designated as “ICU”.
How does this compare to the U.S.? Here in Maskachusetts, population 7 million, we have 1,500 “ICU” beds in ordinary times and that is boosted to 2,700 for a “surge” (boston.com). Sweden would need 4,000 ICU beds to have the same number per person as Massachusetts.
How about the rest of the U.S.? It looks as though 70,000 adult ICU beds is the baseline (aha.org). That’s 212 beds per million residents of the U.S. Sweden has 66 ICU beds per million residents.
So… even without coronavirus, if the Swedes organized medicine the way that we do, 100 percent full ICU in Sweden would correspond to 31 percent full in the U.S.
See also Infidels in Sweden are refusing to die (April 21):
Full post, including commentsFor True Believers in the Church of Shutdown, what Sweden is doing is merely a variant form of their own religion, just as Hinduism was for the Portuguese who spent an entire summer on the west coast of India in the late 15th century. So strong was their belief in Christianity that they believed Hindu temples to be churches (and Ganesha was Jesus with a big Jewish nose?). They attended Hindu religious rituals and believed that they were observing Christian practices.
A scientific analysis of the effects of California’s Santa Clara County’s mask order of April 17.
Source: Karl Dierenbach
Full post, including commentsFrom the world’s leading expert on how information presentation affects decision making, a new book: Seeing with Fresh Eyes.
A new book on information design is either extremely timely, if you believe that humans are making data-driven decisions regarding coronaplague, or mostly for post-vaccine reading, if you believe that humans are using “science” and data to confirm already-held beliefs regarding what should be done.
As with previous books by Professor Tufte, the teachings are via positive and negative examples. The reader can dip into the book at any point and if you don’t get something that you can use from one example, you might from the next.
Pages 48-53 provide interesting demonstrations of the dramatic impact of breaking up a continuous paragraph with newlines.
Page 66 looks at a word tree from a book by Galileo and also “stacklists”, a way of formatting words that would be tough to replicate in HTML and certainly isn’t supported by WYSIWYG editors.
A healthy (so to speak) fraction of the book deals with data in medical contexts. Sample:
Screening tests produce many false alarms, terrifying millions of healthy people. False alarms cascade into more tests. Mass screenings are now regarded as dubious–because of false alarms, harms, and failure to reduce all-cause mortality. … Since survival time = time from diagnosis to death, early diagnosis can create statistical illusions of improved survival times. And false alarms, if their falsity is not detected, lead to treatments of patients for a disease they don’t have.
(The latter point is the true magic of screening tests. The annual mammogram that Americans eagerly adopted circa 1990 resulted in improved five-year survival statistics… because people who didn’t have breast cancer and who nonetheless received treatment for breast cancer were unlikely to be dead from breast cancer five years later.)
On page 94, Professor Tufte provides what I think is the best example of survivorship bias: “Most medieval castles were made of wood. We think most were made of stone because of survivor bias.”
As the author of the world’s first web-based electronic medical record system, Tufte’s lambasting of the EHR is a little painful to read, but I’ve written some similar stuff here! (see, for example, Doctors willing to say that the electronic medical record emperors have no clothes)
Page 108 provides “a short list of medical reversals,” many of which were due to misinterpretation of data.
Faith that government experts and regulators will save us from coronavirus? Page 112:
Every single oxycodone pill was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, and was made by licensed drug companies, prescribed by licensed doctors, sold by licensed pharmacists. All 72,000,000,000 pills (500 pills/U.S. household) were tracked to the exact place/time/amount of sale by the Drug Enforcement Agency.
(See Who funded America’s opiate epidemic? You did.)
The above paragraph subtly shows a Tufte principle by placing the 72 billion pills in context with “500 pills/U.S. household.”
Readers know how passionate and frustrated I am about dishwashers. Page 18 singles out a particularly bizarre Bosch owner’s manual page. A similar one from our latest Bosch:
Who back in Germany thought that there was someone in the U.S. who was going to follow this plan? (Or that this was an effective way to communicate it?)
Computer programmers will appreciate page 14, pointing out the importance of spacing and formatting for source code.
Some of the last pages relate what Tufte has learned from teaching 930 one-day courses to 320,000 students and are worth reading for anyone who wants to give effective presentations. (The one-day course is now offered in an online video version that includes a complete set of the hardcopy books.)
The organization and formatting makes this more challenging than some of Professor Tufte’s earlier works, but it should reward study. A great Christmas gift for anyone who has the preceding four books!
Related (read these first if you’re new to Tufte):
And, what do we think of this U.S. map in which every state, except Hawaii, is presented in the same color? (from www.covidexitstrategy.org, which Maskachusetts officialdom uses to decide whether or not to fine residents $7,000 or not if they choose to travel)
From a recent Costco excursion, a 29-hour 28-CD audiobook by Barack Obama:
It is impossible to imagine a better Christmas gift for your friends, who can wrap themselves in 29 hours of bliss and comfort every time something upsetting is said by Donald Trump or those Republicans who remain unkilled by COVID-19.
(What if you have neglected to defriend all Republicans? This is an even better gift for a Deplorable because Deplorables need to hear these healing messages more than the righteous.)
Separately, in terms of page count, this is the same length as Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey combined. Homer’s epics were almost the sole basis for education for centuries. Perhaps we could design a public school curriculum where A Promised Land was the only book studied from K through 12?
An Amazon review:
Obama’s autobiography is very wordy, slow and much of it boring. And I like the guy and loved his first book. There is no real news in this autobiography which is mostly about politics and how moderate he was as president. Too long, too. Too much about his time in the Illinois legislature and the U.S Senate. The book should have been edited down. Volume One is 752 pages and ends with the killing of Osama bin Laden. Volume Two likely will be equally long.
Hallelujah! There will be four Iliads worth of content soon enough.
Related:
Maskachusetts is the 3rd most restricted state in the U.S. (WalletHub ranking). Florida is ranked #11 for freedom. Yet the latest map from covidexitstrategy.org, which our state officials use to decide cleanliness/godliness for travel order purposes, shows that no-mask-order Florida has 427 new cases of COVID-19 per million residents while fully-masked-since-May Massachusetts has 704 new cases per million (slightly lower positivity rate, but that could simply be due to the fact that universities here are constantly testing the rich white locked-in students and thus pumping up the denominator).
If the God of Shutdown is a just god, and the people of Florida have been flouting the church dogma of shutdown+masks, aren’t we forced to conclude that the God of Shutdown has a special love for Floridians?
Related:
A variety of Facebook friends today posted their respect for Chuck Yeager, who died yesterday at age 97. Some had been in meetings with General Yeager when he was serving in various high management roles and talked about the pointed intelligent questions that he asked.
What about on days when a hero such as Yeager did not die? The same folks post approvingly of rules to forbid the assignment of high management roles to Americans such as Yeager who identify as straight white males. For example, “Nasdaq to Corporate America: Make your boards more diverse or get out” (CNN):
Nasdaq is proposing a rule that would require at least some measure of diversity on the boards of directors of companies listed on the exchange.
The rule, which needs the approval of the Securities and Exchange Commission to take effect, would require companies to have at least two diverse directors, including one woman and one member of an “underrepresented” minority group, including Black people, Latinos or members of the LGBTQ+ community. Smaller companies and foreign companies on the exchange could comply with two woman directors.
(separately, how do the money nerds at Nasdaq evaluate whether someone is a “member of the LGBTQ+ community”? Will it be like the gay evaluation scenes in the Kevin Kline movie In & Out, e.g., a quiz on the titles of Barbra Streisand‘s recorded oeuvre? Does a person meet the B victimhood designation within LGBTQIA+ if he/she/ze/they merely finds people in multiple gender ID categories attractive, but doesn’t act on this attraction by having sex with those people? Similarly, what constitutes “Black people” as far as a Wall Streeter is concerned? Will Nasdaq start looking at Quadroons and Hexadecaroons and decided how many of them are required to add up to the business wisdom of a single “Black” individual?)
(Also, what about Elliot Page? We are informed that a man who was born with XX chromosomes is no different than a man who was born with XY chromosomes. Mr. Page identifies as a man currently. Mr. Page may also identify as white. If are going to give maximum respect to transgenderism, shouldn’t Elliot Page therefore be excluded from boards due to being a white male?)
From the National Air and Space Museum, an X-15 points at Yeager’s old X-1:
(Both the downtown D.C. Museum and the Dulles Airport annex that celebrate Americans willing to risk their lives in the air are currently closed due to coronavirus fears.)
Full post, including comments