I was apparently on the cutting edge with the info from bsking about increased pneumonia deaths (summary: turns out there are 1.5x more than usual, not 3x. Significant but less dramatic. Everyone asking "are they really CoVid?"). Now Radley Balko is saying the Florida pneumonia numbers are way high this year. Others are saying "and cardiac arrest, too!" I'm not linking to it, because the threads immediately turn into "You're a liar, they're no higher than usual." "No, you're a liar because Trump supporters always are." "Oh YEAH? Well, you're a bigger liar..." And so on. You don't need this, because you already know everyone's script. We are all going to have to poke around and find someone we think is above the fray and likely to give us as clear picture, then hope we were a good judge of character or expertise on that. This will be the next big internet battle, I think. Might last even more than a week! Wouldn't that be somethin', eh?
Balko is a hard libertarian from Reason magazine, so he's no liberal. However, he also really likes being the only person in the room who is right. So you have to sort that out as well.
I recommend you just don't read any comment sections on this at the moment. Pick who you are going to listen to, and studiously avoid running into any other opinions accidentally. It will only make you unhappy. Hell, it's already made me unhappy.
2 comments:
I will give Balko credit that he hedged appropriately given that it's not his field.
Given the topic though, another thread of interest is this one by Lyman Stonekey who writes for AEI and the Federalist, who ran the most recent CDC excess mortality numbers and is speculating we could be edging closer to 200k than we think:
https://twitter.com/lymanstoneky/status/1263863852506071041?s=20
Of particular interest given our last discussion is that Colorado is showing a notable bump in excess mortality, meaning they could have BOTH an undercounting and overcounting problem.
Also some really interesting info on where lockdowns/distancing seem to be working (spoiler: some countries, not others), and other great info. Highly recommend the whole thread, whatever your thoughts on anything.
With so few controls and so many variables (and so many of them not obvious), figuring out even the progress of the epidemic is hard. Figuring out what protects is even harder (Is a lockdown in county X == a lockdown in city Y ? Is test Z used in the field in the way it was in the lab? What are the co-infections? Is there a genetic component to resistance?)
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