Fine, I'll run a regression analysis but it won't make you happy • Hacker News Board

Re: Fine, I'll run a regression analysis but it won't make you happy

#121

Post by brazzy » Sun, Oct 01, 2023, 10:36 PM UTC

CiteXieAlAlyEtc wrote: post #101

KerrAvon wrote: post #2

This is all fine, but the focus on deaths is sort of missing the larger societal problem. The COVID devastation is also about long COVID, and even people who had COVID but either recovered “fully” or never displayed symptoms. None of this is over, and we are so, so fucked. edit: Which is to say: The Great Barrington Declaration was wrong directionally as well. We really needed to optimize to eliminate COVID as much a…

> The COVID devastation is also about long COVID, and even people who had COVID but either recovered “fully” or never displayed symptoms. None of this is over, and we are so, so fucked You're right by way of the literature available to evaluate this claim. (Even jobs numbers are starting to note that some amount of the worker shortage is likely related to long COVID) Most of the "oh i got it [a few times] and i'm fin…

>This tragedy is so senseless and so avoidable. Zero COVID was and still is the rational strategy

That statement is beyond ridiculous. Zero COVID was a pipe dream (as in: flat out impossible to achieve by any realistically implementable policy) by the time Omicron appeared, which really means: by the time it was spreading in Africa and India.

Re: Fine, I'll run a regression analysis but it won't make you happy

#122

Post by philjohn » Sun, Oct 01, 2023, 10:39 PM UTC

Aachen wrote: post #98

iwonthecase wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good luck, there's still academics debating about the 1977 "Russian" flu [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1977_Russian_flu

> The outbreak in northern China started in May 1977 Coincidence? Do they have a climate conducive to these sorts of viruses combined with a large enough population to make it likely they get infected first or is this my selection bias in noticing when it says "started in China" versus any other country?

Large population that lives very close to natural reservoirs for viruses.

Spillover is a great book to read about zoonotic diseases.

Re: Fine, I'll run a regression analysis but it won't make you happy

#123

Post by lr4444lr » Sun, Oct 01, 2023, 10:40 PM UTC

KerrAvon wrote: post #2

This is all fine, but the focus on deaths is sort of missing the larger societal problem. The COVID devastation is also about long COVID, and even people who had COVID but either recovered “fully” or never displayed symptoms. None of this is over, and we are so, so fucked. edit: Which is to say: The Great Barrington Declaration was wrong directionally as well. We really needed to optimize to eliminate COVID as much a…

You have to stack long COVID against the long term mental health and social effects of lockdown, including but not limited to the atrocious loss of learning in school children, domestic abuse situations that spiraled, and an already alarming teen mental health problem that Jonathan Haidt has been documenting for about a decade.

Lockdowns did make sense initially, especially during the dominance of the Wuhan strain. But some countries like Taiwan and SK with experience dealing with respiratory virus pandemics opened up way sooner, smartly, and did not suffer tremendously for it.

Re: Fine, I'll run a regression analysis but it won't make you happy

#124

Post by mcguire » Sun, Oct 01, 2023, 10:40 PM UTC

Ok, so now I want to see the details of his first claim, "Until vaccines became available, there was little difference in COVID death rates between blue states and red states."

Re: Fine, I'll run a regression analysis but it won't make you happy

#125

Post by sanderjd » Sun, Oct 01, 2023, 10:41 PM UTC

xboxnolifes wrote: post #99

abirch wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Getting in an argument (vs disagreement) in real life is worthless. Getting into an argument on the Internet has even less value. Personally I think this was an easy article for him to write because he already had the data and he wants more subscribers (please take this take as neutral opinion and not a dis to Silver)

It's worthless if your goal is to influence your direct opposition. It's not worthless if your goal is to influence the curious on-lookers.

Yep, always good to keep in mind that the audience for public discussion is not the small number of people you're discussing with, but the large number of people reading the discussion.

Re: Fine, I'll run a regression analysis but it won't make you happy

#126

Post by rcbdev » Sun, Oct 01, 2023, 10:41 PM UTC

I don't know about other countries but in Austria nurses were highly incentivized to report deaths immediately following a vaccination or weeks after an infection has passed as a covid death in the sense of national statistics.

I would not be surprised if this "nudging" of on the ground reports over the course of the pandemic has rendered the data around covid deaths unreliable.

Re: Fine, I'll run a regression analysis but it won't make you happy

#127

Post by autoexec » Sun, Oct 01, 2023, 10:43 PM UTC

mjmsmith wrote: post #68

phkahler wrote: post #56

>> This wasn’t intended as any sort of super-duper hot take, and I pared the post down to avoid having too much of an attack surface. It is intended to shame Republicans. What other possible reason is there to tie death rates to political party? So yes it was a hot take. You planted a lightning rod. Making something like vaccination a political issue does everyone a disservice.

It certainly did a disservice to the people who died because their politics convinced them that the vaccine was worse than the disease.

The idea that nobody should ever point that fact out seems crazy to me. We should be using this as an example when teaching critical thinking skills to kids in schools so that they know not to let political ideology and lies manipulate them into the grave.

Re: Fine, I'll run a regression analysis but it won't make you happy

#128

Post by todd8 » Sun, Oct 01, 2023, 10:44 PM UTC

Here are a few observations.

From the CDC [1], 2020 total covid deaths by state: West Virginia 1318, Florida 21546, Maine 344, Vermont 134.

The corresponding April 2020 census populations [2] for these four states are: West Virginia 1793716, Florida 21538187, Maine 1362359, Vermont 643077.

Thus, before the vaccines for covid were available the deaths per 100,000 persons for these four states are: West Virginia 73, Florida 100, Vermont 21, Maine 25.

Someone should probably check my math, but it looks like voting for Trump causes over three times as many deaths even before vaccinations were available. In other words, the analysis in the original article may be affected by unaccounted for confounding factors. For example, COPD is a significant medical risk factor for serious covid complications according to the CDC. COPD affects over 13.6% of the population of West Virginia (the worst rate in the country) but affects only 5.9% of the population of Vermont [3].

Personally, I chose to get vaccinated and boosted at the earliest possible dates. I also caught covid during the initial big wave of omicron cases in my state.

[1] https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/99750

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...

[3] https://www.lung.org/research/trends-in-lung-disease/copd-tr...

Re: Fine, I'll run a regression analysis but it won't make you happy

#129

Post by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF » Sun, Oct 01, 2023, 10:44 PM UTC

staticfloat wrote: post #62

diogenes4 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, so what does arbitrary mean to you if not "the result of a judgement or choice"? Is it just a synonym for random to you?

Yes, that’s what it means for me. I’ve never heard someone use the word arbitrary to mean anything other than “a random choice”, or even “a poorly thought-out choice”. My professors in grad school explicitly discouraged use of that word anywhere in technical writing, as they felt it would immediately give the reader the impression that the actions taken in the research were not thought through. Example: “This new tec…

I’m not convinced by the argument in your second paragraph. It actually makes it seem like arbitrary means exactly “based on judgment or choice” if it can be replaced so easily with “a wide range of”. How was the “wide range” chosen, if not arbitrarily?

Re: Fine, I'll run a regression analysis but it won't make you happy

#130

Post by sarchertech » Sun, Oct 01, 2023, 10:45 PM UTC

fwungy wrote: post #92

sarchertech wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Moderna and Pfizer vaccines have been approved by the national health agencies of dozens of countries, and China has approved a very similar home grown mRNA Covid vaccine. No amount of money in the world could pay to do that and keep it secret.

Corrupt government officials get a commission on big contracts. It happens all the time. Why do you think people spend so much campaigning for low paying political offices? They can be quite lucrative investments. There are NDAs and other threats to shutdown whistleblowers.

Think about how many people were involved in the approvals across the entire globe? Most of the approvals processes were conducted in public by career scientists and doctors. There were tens of thousands of people involved that would have to look the other way.

Any company that’s capable of pulling off a global operation like that with absolutely zero exposure, is already running the world and doesn’t need to bother with piddly $40 billion scams.