The Angry Bear

I want to try to punch above my weight (and be a troll) and contest this Dr. Kathryn Hibbert, director of the medical intensive care unit at Massachusetts General Hospital … said it will take weeks or months to get results and doctors and patients will need to wait for the results of the clinical trials before knowing which Covid-19 patients — if any — should be getting remdesivir. “I think we should be extremely cautious about responding too...

A bit of a post-mortem on my last post.  Andrew Gelman discusses the Santa Clara county study here.  He focuses on sample imbalances, selection bias, and especially the way the authors deal with the specificity of the test.  See his post for the gory details, but he is quite critical of the study, to the point of asking for an apology from the authors for wasting our time: I think the authors of the above-linked paper owe us all an apology. We wasted time...

(Dan here…I know its long, broad, … but I think it says somethings that need be said.  Another look??) by reader Ken Melvin The Anthropocene and Global Warming Anthropocene: geological epoch dating from the commencement of significant human impact on Earth’s geology and ecosystems. Someday, anthropologists and historians will look again at the possible causes of Global Warming. That it was Anthropogenic has long since been recognized, but let them ask...

Abbreviated coronavirus dashboard for April 18 Here is the update through yesterday (April 17) There are some extended comments I want to make about the pandemic, and some graphs comparing States, etc., that are best done separately, so this will be an abbreviated update. Here are yesterday’s numbers. Number and rate of increase of Reported Infections (from Johns Hopkins via arcgis.com) Number: up +35,354 to 706,779 (vs. 35,219 prior peak on April...

by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for April 13 – 17 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. The final dominoes among the coincident indicators fell this past week. In the “real economy,” the impact of the coronavirus pandemic is fully priced in. In the stock market . . . I’m scratching my head. As usual, clicking over and reading should not only be informative for you, but tosses me a penny or two for my efforts in bringing...

What the Index of Leading Indicators tells us about the 2020 Presidential election One of the better econometric models that I made use of back in 2016 was that by Prof. Robert S. Erickson of Columbia University and Prof. Christopher Wlezien of the University of Texas at Austria, entitled “Forecasting the Presidential Vote with leading economic indicators and the polls” The model takes two steps. First, average the head-to-head heats by the two major...

Reposted from Brad DeLong’s Grasping Reality: What is the Real Prevalence of Coronavirus Across States? Click on the image to enlarge Tests per million times cases per test gives you confirmed cases per million. But we want true cases per million. Tests per million are different across states because (a) the states are undertaking testing with different levels of effort and (b) the prevalence of the virus is different in different states. Confirmed...

I want to think about how two pieces of news should change my thinking about COVID-19.  (Warning:  I have no expertise in medicine or public health, and you have no reason to take my thoughts seriously – but you knew that already.) A new serological study in Santa Clara county (discussed by Kevin Drum here) suggests that far more people have been infected with COVID-19 than researchers had previously believed.  This is only one study and full of...

Only two because the FDA did play an important role in the US Covid 19 testing fiasco. the first cheer is for extreme speed in approving phase 1 trials of candidate vaccines (vaccine in a person within 2 months of publication of the Sars Cov2 sequence) and phase III trials of Remdesivir (results leaking already) and hydroxychloroquine. The second and even louder cheer is for the expanded access to Remdesivir policy. I actually predicted that this...

The action sure isn’t over. The armies are still on the field, but I fear the outcome is no longer in doubt and hydroxychloroquine will lose this battle. There are two good studies which show almost exactly no benefit of hydroxychloroquine. They are reveiewed here. Basically the only benefit detected is as a nonspecific anti-inflamatory. There is essentially no evidence that hydroxychloroquine blocks replication of Sars Cov2 in people as it does in...