Archive for coronavirus epidemics
updated (over)mortality curves
Posted in Statistics with tags coronavirus epidemics, COVID-19, France, INSEE, lockdown, mortality chart, official statistics, quarantine on May 26, 2020 by xi'an
and it only gets worse [verbatim]
Posted in Kids, Travel with tags Abraham Lincoln, Agent Orange, air pollution, America, baby Trump, Barack Obama, cliffs, coronavirus epidemics, COVID-19, decency, Donald Trump, Dover cliffs, EPA, hydroxychloroquine sulfate, incompetence, pandemic, revisionism, Spanish flu, Together Against Trump, US politics, US presidents on May 21, 2020 by xi'an
“They always said nobody got treated worse than Lincoln. I believe I am treated worse.” DT, 03 May
“We’re on the other side of the medical aspect of this [pandemic.]” J. Kushner, 29 April
““We will not see diseases like the coronavirus come here, we will not see terrorism come here, and isn’t that refreshing when contrasting it with the awful Presidency of President Obama?” K. McEnany, 25 February
“You all know what happened in 1917.” DT, 27 April
“Leadership may be hard to define, but in times of crisis it is easy to identify. As the pandemic has spread fear, disease and death, national leaders across the globe have been severely tested. Some have fallen short, sometimes dismally, but there are also those leaders who have risen to the moment, demonstrating resolve, courage, empathy, respect for science and elemental decency, and thereby dulling the impact of the disease on their people.” NYT editorial, 30 April
“In the past month alone, the [US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)] has dialled down regulations on automobile emissions and fuel efficiency put in place under former president Barack Obama; it has weakened rules on mercury and other pollutants emitted by power plants; and it has shied away from strengthening standards to reduce fine-particle air pollution.“ Nature, 28 April“
“It would have been bad even with the best of government. It has been an absolute chaotic disaster when that mindset — of ‘what’s in it for me’ and ‘to heck with everybody else’ — when that mindset is operationalized in our government.” Barack Obama, 09 May
“““Trump’s constant antics are a danger to the American people. The current approach to science and expertise within the Trump administration is a shame on many levels. Trump’s talking nonsense risks misleading the public, and it distracts top scientists who spend emotional energy neutralizing the damage he causes when they should be tackling the virus (…) Many scientists were dreading that the president would be faced by a test just like coronavirus. “ John Holdren, 03 May
“Probably it was incompetence. Somebody was stupid.” DT [an expert in the field], 10 May
DT, 18 May
politics coming [too close to] statistics [or the reverse]
Posted in Books, pictures, Statistics, University life with tags Bayesian decision theory, Boris Johnson, coronavirus epidemics, COVID-19, data, David Spiegelhalter, death certificate, Jim Smith, official statistics, The Guardian, UK Parliement, University of Warwick on May 9, 2020 by xi'an
On 30 April, David Spiegelhalter wrote an opinion column in The Guardian, Coronavirus deaths: how does Britain compare with other countries?, where he pointed out the difficulty, even “for a bean-counting statistician to count deaths”, as the reported figures are undercounts, and stated that “many feel that excess deaths give a truer picture of the impact of an epidemic“. Which, on the side, I indeed believe is a more objective material, as also reported by INSEE and INED in France.
“…my cold, statistical approach is to wait until the end of the year, and the years after that, when we can count the excess deaths. Until then, this grim contest won’t produce any league tables we can rely on.” D. Spiegelhalter
My understanding of the tribune is that the quick accumulation of raw numbers, even for deaths, and their use in the comparison of procedures and countries is not helping in understanding the impacts of policies and actions-reactions from a week ago. Starting with the delays in reporting death certificates, as again illustrated by the ten day lag in the INSEE reports. And accounting for covariates such as population density, economic and health indicators. (The graph below for instance relies on deaths so far attributed to COVID-19 rather than on excess deaths, while these attributions depend on the country policy and its official statistics capacities.)
“Polite request to PM and others: please stop using my Guardian article to claim we cannot make any international comparisons yet. I refer only to detailed league tables—of course we should now use other countries to try and learn why our numbers are high.” D. Spiegelhalter
However, when on 6 May Boris Johnson used this Guardian article during prime minister’s questions in the UK Parliement, to defuse a question from the Labour leader, Keir Starmer, David Spiegelhalter reacted with the above tweet, which is indeed that even with poor and undercounted data the total number of cases is much worse than predicted by the earlier models and deadlier than in neighbouring countries. Anyway, three other fellow statisticians, Phil Brown, Jim Smith (Warwick), and Henry Wynn, also reacted to David’s tribune by complaining at the lack of statistical modelling behind it and the fatalistic message it carries, advocating for model based decision-making, which would be fine if the data was not so unreliable… or if the proposed models were equipped with uncertainty bumpers accounting for misspecification and erroneous data.
un des aspects surprenants des analyses et des commentaires sur l’épidémie de Covid-19 est l’absence de la statistique
Posted in Statistics, University life with tags coronavirus epidemics, COVID-19, demographics, dynamical system, France, INED, Le Monde, Statistics on May 6, 2020 by xi'an
From one French demographer (INED) in Le Monde [my translation], with a clustering of French departments into three classes [the figures on the above map are the lags after the first death in Haut-Rhin]:
One of the surprising aspects of the analyses and commentaries on the Covid-19 epidemic is the absence of statistics. Every evening, however, we are bombarded with figures, and many sites, from Public Health France (SpF) to Johns-Hopkins University (Maryland), abound in data.
But a number carries a meaning only in reference to other figures. This is where the real statistics start. However, apart from comparing the number of contagions and deaths by country and date, little has been learned from the data, which could provide useful information on the nature and progression of the epidemic (…)
We can see that the diversity of close contacts is one of the keys to the evolution of the epidemic. Instead of reasoning on abstract coefficients such as the famous average number R⁰ of contagions per person, we should be able to delve into the details of these contagions. We see here that traffic axes, institutions and housing probably occupy a strategic position towards an explanation.
This analysis is inevitably limited to the nature of the data and their possible faults. It would be useful to collect more detailed information on the nature of the contacts of each new case of contagion and to analyze it, or even to carry out random surveys with Covid-19 test, in a word, to make the statistics.
Sceaux@NYT
Posted in pictures, Running, Travel with tags bakery, City Hall, coronavirus epidemics, COVID-19, France, masks, mayor, quarantine, Sceaux, The New York Times on May 5, 2020 by xi'an
