“The [UK] Department of Health says reported changes to the abortion law, that would allow women to take both pills at home during the coronavirus outbreak, are not going ahead.” Independent, 23 March
“Texas and Ohio have included abortions among the nonessential surgeries and medical procedures that they are requiring to be delayed, saying they are trying to preserve precious protective equipment for health care workers and to make space for a potential flood of coronavirus patients.” The New York Times, 23 March
“Le ministre de la Santé, Olivier Véran, et la secrétaire d’Etat chargée de l’Égalité femmes-hommes, Marlène Schiappa, ont tenté lundi de rassurer : les IVG « sont considérées comme des interventions urgentes », et leur « continuité doit être assurée ». Le gouvernement veillera à ce que « le droit des femmes à disposer de leur corps ne soit pas remis en cause », ont-ils assuré.” Le Parisien, 23 March
“Lawmakers voted on Wednesday to liberalize New Zealand’s abortion law and allow unrestricted access during the first half of pregnancy, ending the country’s status as one of the few wealthy nations to limit the grounds for abortion during that period.” The New York Times, 18 March
Archive for coronavirus epidemics
coronavirus also hits reproduction rights!
Posted in Kids with tags abortion, anti-abortion organisations, Brett Kavanaugh, coronavirus epidemics, France, New Zealand, pro-choice, reproductive rights, Roe v. Wade, United Kingdom, US politics, USA on March 27, 2020 by xi'an
BrewDog punk sanitiser
Posted in pictures, Wines with tags BrewDog, brewery, Britain, charity, coronavirus epidemics, craft beer, Ellon, punk IPA, sanitiser, Scotland, Scottish beer on March 25, 2020 by xi'an
and it only gets worse [verbatim]
Posted in Travel with tags America, baby Trump, Bernie Sanders 2020 campaign, cliffs, coronavirus epidemics, Donald Trump, Dover cliffs, Iran, Médecins Sans Frontières, Together Against Trump, US politics, US presidents, US sanctions on March 24, 2020 by xi'an
“Iran is facing a catastrophic toll from the coronavirus pandemic. U.S. sanctions should not be contributing to this humanitarian disaster. As a caring nation, we must lift any sanctions hurting Iran’s ability to address this crisis, including financial sanctions.” Bernie Sanders, 20 March
“The whole world should know that humanitarian assistance to Iran is wide open, it’s not sanctioned (…) The Wuhan virus is a killer and the Iranian regime is an accomplice,” Mike Pompeo, 20 March
“Expelling Médecins sans Frontières [from installing a field hospital in Isfahan] will be a decision based on wisdom because their presence is a cover for non-humanitarian activities. As France has in practice repeatedly proven its enmity against Iran, the question is why our officials allowed the group to enter in the first place,” he said, describing the permit as “dangerous recklessness.” Hossein Shariatmadari, 24 March
“We lose thousands of people a year to the flu. We never turn the country off. We lose thousands of people per year to automobile accidents.” DT, 24 March
“The economic sanctions are working. If we didn’t have these sanctions in place, literally Iran would have tens of billions of dollars. They would be using that for terrorist activities throughout the region. There is no question that by cutting off the economics to the regime we are having an impact” Stephen Mnuchin, 10 Jan
“…we have [the coronavirus pandemics] totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China, and we have it under control. It’s going to be just fine..” DT, 22 Jan
“I think the numbers are going to get progressively better as we go along.” DT, 18 Feb
“I really get it. People are surprised that I understand it. Every one of these doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should have done that instead of running for president.” DT, 9 March
the exponential power of now
Posted in Books, Statistics, University life with tags Agent Orange, Biometrika, coronavirus epidemics, Imperial College London, Krishna, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Medical Research Council, MRC, paal paysam, The New York Times, University of California Berkeley on March 22, 2020 by xi'an
The New York Times had an interview on 13 March with Britta Jewell (MRC, Imperial College London) and Nick Jewell (London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine & U of C Berkeley), both epidemiologists. (Nick is also an AE for Biometrika.) Where they explain quite convincingly that the devastating power of the exponential growth and the resulting need for immediate reaction. An urgency that Western governments failed to heed, unsurprisingly including the US federal government. Maybe they should have been told afresh about the legend of paal paysam, where the king who lost to Krishna was asked to double rice grains on the successive squares of a chess board. (Although this is presumably too foreign a thought experiment for The agent orange. He presumably prefers the unbelievable ideological rantings of John Ioannides. Who apparently does mind sacrificing “people with limited life expectancies” for the sake of the economy.) Incidentally, I find the title “The exponential power of now” fabulous!
ABC on COVID-19
Posted in Books, pictures, Statistics, Travel with tags ABC, Approximate Bayesian computation, China, coronavirus epidemics, COVID-19, Science, SIR, travel ban, Wuhan on March 20, 2020 by xi'an
The paper “The effect of travel restrictions on the spread of the 2019 novel coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak”, published in Science on 06 March by Matteo Chinazzi and co-authors, considers the impact of travel restriction in Wuhan on the propagation of the virus. (Terrible graph by the way since the overall volume of traffic dropped considerably after the ban.)
“The travel quarantine of Wuhan delayed the overall epidemic progression by only 3 to 5 days in Mainland China, but has a more marked effect at the international scale, where case importations were reduced by nearly 80% until mid February.”
They use a SLIR (susceptible-latent-infectious-removed) pattern of transmission, along with a travel flow network based on 2019 air and ground travel statistics, resorting to ABC for approximating the posterior distribution of the basic reproductive number. It is however unclear to me that the model is particularly accurate at the levels of the transmission pattern (which now seems to occur much earlier than when the symptoms appear) and of the detection rates (which vary greatly from one place to another).
