With the Delta variant on the loose, Covid is now global. As mentioned in the last report South and Southeast Asia, a region only lightly touched by the virus for over a year has, since early summer, become a hot spot. Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Indonesia and Myanmar are each averaging the equivalent of 1,000 to 3,000 deaths a day in the U.S. For reference the seven-day average for deaths in the U.S. peaked at 3,500 in mid-January 2021 and is currently at 1,060.
Two months ago I felt we were past the worst of covid but am no longer so optimistic. Actually we are past the worst, I just thought things would continue to improve as they had since the spring. Two months ago I wasn't wearing a mask when going into a store, now I am. I know several vaccinated people who have recently got covid, though none ended up in the hospital.
This piece from Charles Cooke at National Review sums it up, "The Bitter Truth: There's Still No Rhyme or Reason to Covid-19":
Two presidents. Fifty states. One-hundred-and-ninety-five countries. A multitude of different approaches. And still, there’s no rhyme or reason to this pandemic.
A few days ago, the New York Times ran an excellent piece on the terrible spike in Florida. “Even a state that made a major push for vaccinations . . . can be crushed by the Delta variant,” the paper observed, while noting that “Florida ranks 21st among states and Washington, D.C., in giving people of all ages at least one shot.” Indeed, the Times noted, nobody is quite sure why this is happening. “Exactly why the state has been so hard-hit,” it concluded, “remains an elusive question” — not least because “other states with comparable vaccine coverage have a small fraction of Florida’s hospitalization rate.”
Many of the Times’s readers were frightfully upset by this blunt assessment of the facts.
For months, many in the press have banged on and on and on about Florida’s governor and then been shocked to learn that, even after a terrible spike — a spike that, mercifully, is beginning to fade — Florida’s record remains better than those of New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Michigan, and Illinois; that the number of children who have died in Florida (per capita) is not only exactly in line with the national average, but around five times lower than D.C.’s number, and just over half of New York’s; that, far from lagging behind, Florida’s vaccination rate is above the national average; and that, despite having a disproportionately old population, Florida sits in the bottom half for deaths among senior citizens. The state of Louisiana, which seems to get hit around the same time as Florida each time there is a wave of COVID-19 infections, currently boasts many policies that Florida does not — among them, an ongoing indoor mask mandate that applies even to the vaccinated, a statewide school-mask mandate for all students over the age of five, and, in the city of New Orleans, a system of vaccine passports. Despite this, Louisiana’s death rate is the fourth worst in the nation, while Florida — which has a much older population (as of 2020, Florida has the largest senior population in the union; Louisiana’s is 42nd) — sits in 20th place. What gives?
The uncomfortable truth is that, beyond developing, encouraging, and providing inoculation, there’s not much that any government can do to guarantee success — and, even when it does what it can, a lot of people are going to resist for reasons bad and good.
Given how polarized we are at present, one can easily comprehend why, in its early days, so many political obsessives thought it might be efficacious to use the pandemic as a stick. But now? Eighteen months in? It’s beyond time for them to shut the hell up.
Covid is a virus and it's going to do it's virus thing. Get vaccinated (isn't it great it became available so quickly?), take reasonable precautions, and hope for the best. Johns Hopkins maintains a data base of opening and closing decisions by each state along with case trends. I can't make out much of a connection between those decisions and the disease outcomes.
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The case against masking children in school. Matt Shapiro is pretty objective in my view and sets out the reasons for his position.
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Simpson's Paradox strikes again! How what looks like lower vaccine efficacy in an amalgamated population can be deceptive.
Great chart of how the perceived decline in vaccine effectiveness might be driven, largely or in part, by Simpson's Paradox*
— Derek Thompson (@DKThomp) August 19, 2021
*ie: in which efficacy vs. hospitalization for specific age cohorts is actually MUCH HIGHER than efficacy for the total population pic.twitter.com/5PJPWK3GJq
Simpson's Paradox (about which I wrote several years ago) is when a top line result looks very different from its individual components because of ratio differences between those components. Here's another recent example related to Covid. A couple of months ago I noticed that Florida's covid mortality rate was about 10% higher than California's but when I looked in more detail I discovered the death rate in each individual age group was higher in California than in Florida! What drove the top line difference was that Florida has a much older population than California.
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