Tag Archives: Healthcare

by Ken Melvin What to do About The Schools There needs to be a plan in place that deals with: grade levels, Covid Virus testing, schedules, classroom size, in-school traffic flow patterns, staffing, transportation, …  The how and when are tied together. And yes, all these are interconnected. How to safely get 3,000 high school students to and from school; from class to class; to, into and out of classrooms; to, into and out of the cafeteria; … ...

National Geographic published this.  This seems to be an unusual topic for that publication and I wonder why Fauci selected  it. Fauci: No scientific evidence the coronavirus was made in a Chinese lab The rest is copied exactly from National Geographic Fauci, the director of the U.S. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, shot down the discussion that has been raging among politicians and pundits, calling it “a circular argument” in a...

About a month ago I wrote on the COVID 19 plight of the Navajo Indians in New Mexico, Arizona and Utah. New Mexico Governor Lujan Grisham requested military field hospitals to be set up to handle the fast moving virus. Trumps comment was, “Wow, that’s something.” The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and Federal Emergency Management Agency together constructed three reservation field hospitals to be used as alternative care sites according to the tribe earlier...

The humans always observe back: why I am rooting for NY to “crush the curve” So, in addition to a bunch of States in the Confederacy and a few in the high plains deciding that May 1 was the Day of Virus Jubilee, yesterday saw further discouraging news that not one but two epidemiological models drastically increased their estimates of deaths, while there was another revelation that Trump and the White House were relying on a “cubic” model devised by Kevin...

I don’t know what to do about the widespread complete ignorance about the concepts of null hypothesis, rejection, failure to reject, p-levels. I will rant after the jump A glossary is urgently needed. 1. Size — the size of the test is the probability that a true null hypothesis will be rejected. For purely historical reasons the size 0.05 is often discussed. This is basically because the smallest 95% interval of a normal is roughly an even 4 standard...

April jobs report: disastrous, but not as cataclysmic as feared; lower paid part time workers take the biggest hit HEADLINES: -20.5 million jobs lost. Between March and April this is a loss of 14.0% of all jobs since February. U3 unemployment rate up 10.3% from 4.4% to 14.7% U6 underemployment rate rose 14.1% from 8.7% to 22.8% February and March were both revised downward, by -45,000 and -169,000 respectively, for a net decline of -214,000 jobs from...

Infections in US States by population density Since COVID-19 is a communicable disease, it should hardly be a surprise that the most densely populated States have the most cases per capita, and conversely the least densely States have the least cases.  But since that basic point is lost in a lot of the analysis, let’s take a look. Below are two charts consisting of the 12 most and least densely populated States, their respective population densities,...

A Very Grey Swan Keynes and Knight famously simultaneously in 1921 identified the concept of fundamental uncertainty as a situation not understandable by using a probability distribution, an idea popularized by Nassim Taleb just as the 2008 crash happened as a “black swan.”  Taleb defined white swans as situations describable by Gaussian normal distributions.  For situations not full uncertainty or white swans Taleb coined the idea of “grey swans,”...

There is a severe Remdesivir shortage On March 2 2020, I warned you that this was going to happen. I did not warn about the opaque and arbitrary Trump administration policy, because the Trump administration is always “worse than you imagine possible even taking into account the fact that it is worse than you imagine possible” Brad DeLong 2003 or so referring to the last Republican presidency. When are Americans going to notice the pattern ?...

Comparing the US’s coronavirus response with its Western European peer group Western Europe is a reasonable peer group of countries against which to compare the US response to coronavirus. The 5 largest countries in Western Europe in particular – in order, Germany, the UK, France, Italy, and Spain – together have a population of about 324 million, vs. 332 million for the US. So let’s take a look at this peer group of European States vs. the United States...