COVID-19: Chapter 7 - Brags, Beats, and Variants

This isn’t even accurate though because national “debt” isn’t really “debt” in the way you think about personal debt.

Can’t do that doncha know, we are strictly 9-5, and we all need to be in church on Sundays, and Saturday is the day of rest!

1 Like

Manhattan’s Javits Center, a large convention hall that was the site of a field hospital in the spring, is now a mass vaccination site that will eventually be running nonstop and delivering 25,000 vaccinations a day. There will also be mass vaccination sites at Yankee Stadium and Citi Field (where the Mets play), among other locations in the city.

3 Likes

Agree it’s a simplified terminology. The basic point of collectively bearing the burden via government support versus sentencing millions to poverty living.

1 Like

I’ll believe it when I see it. So far “nonstop” has meant “during normal business hours, and definitely not on any major holidays.”

Anyone know how common it is to have no/zero reaction to the vaccine? The flu shot usually gives me a sore arm but I don’t feel anything 24 hours after the vaccine.

When I mentioned this to the gf this morning she jokingly suggested that I was fake-vaccinated and now I can’t stop thinking that it might be true.

1 Like

PLACEBO! JK, I’ve anecdotally heard reports on the first shot from folks saying it was sore like a flu shot, but I do know someone who said they didn’t notice anything. Incidentally, that person got their second shot last week and said it was a different experience. I wouldn’t sweat it, and I’d enjoy your good fortune :)

2 Likes

The funny thing is that the people who are most sanctimonious about the bad science being peddled by Prof. Oster are also the most assiduous about hyping shitty-econ-papers-dressed-up-as-science. Here is a piece from Rachel Cohen just a couple weeks ago, purporting to summarize the “higher-quality research” that’s beginning to emerge. She talks about three papers:

  1. The goofy linear regression paper that you were all excited about in December, where the authors found that the change in COVID case rates shifting from remote schooling was related positively to the square of current COVID case rates in Michigan, but related negatively to the same measure in Oregon and also there was a linear impact which was almost 900 times as large in Michigan as in Washington, then proceeded to draw various conclusions from extrapolating that model to case rates that were not reflected in their sample data.

  2. This paper, which demonstrates that reopening schools increases the rate of COVID transmission, BUT it’s OK because the act of reopening schools will violate the normal rules of temporal causality and retroactively cause your COVID infection rate for the 10 days leading up to the reopening to plummet:
    image

  3. This paper, which focuses on total hospitalizations and also looks super confused, but basically reaches the conclusion that there’s no impact on hospitalization rates from OFS, but their different models and data sources start breaking down and pointing in different directions at the higher end of the distribution, so probably that means there’s a big positive impact. The data stuff is not especially funny to quote, but this not-very-important footnote where the authors struggle in vain to estimate the number of people who have a family member who lives or works in a school is a little funny:

This number accounts for the fact that many students are in the same households with one another. To avoid double-counting, we specifically assume that one-third of the 53 million are siblings of one of the others in that count. Also, note that 69 percent of children are in two-parent households, so the average number of parents in the household for the average student is 1.7. We further assume that the average student has 0.5 non-school-age siblings at home and, finally, that the average school staff member lives in a household with two other non-school people. This yields:
(53* 0.33* 0.5)+(53 * 0.33)(1.7+0.5)+(53* 0.67)(1+1.7+0.5)+(5* 3)=8.7+38.5+113.6+15=175.8 million.

2 Likes

lol, I’ve literally never heard of Cohen or this thinkpiece of hers.

Oh, well you might want to check her out. Dan’s post was reacting to a podcast episode that someone posted here where Cohen was interviewed about the COVID/schools debate. The link is here if you’re interested (the article I was talking about is in the show notes):

https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL2ZlZWRzLndueWMub3JnL29udGhlbWVkaWE/episode/YTQ2NzNmMjgtNDg0ZS00MWM5LTg3MDgtYzFmYzM2ZGU2YzFl

2 Likes

11 Likes

OK, I didn’t pay attention to her name, sick gotcha.

Agree. There is messy real science and the there are people with an agenda.

It’s not that hard to tell the difference.

People that put out their methodology and then adapt with feedback and further findings are different than those that do intentionally bad work to support a conclusion that then spread as far and wide as possible is just dressed up Q nonsense.

Neil do you wipe your ass?

2 Likes

? What am I missing

The real head-scratcher is why media outlets from The Atlantic to WaPo to NPR immediately blasted her ideas far and wide with almost no critical analysis from actual epidemiologists or even other economists. The magical power of a spicy hot contrarian take turns people’s minds into oatmeal, apparently.

That combined with the fact that people overwhelmingly WANT kids to go to school. They want it so, so badly. Parents want it so, so badly. The kids learn more, and the parents are better able to provide for their families when the kids go to school. And parents WANT to not feel like they are harming their children. Because of these factors, the voices suggesting that it is fine to send your kids to school are necessarily amplified.

The big difference in the way people approach this is that being in a car accident hurts the people in the car. Your kid getting COVID at school is very unlikely to hurt them, and even parents are unlikely to have serious consequences. It’s not difficult to keep your kid away from vulnerable people in your own family, so the main risk is that your coworker’s mother will catch fourth-hand COVID from one of your children’s classmates.

I thought we were limiting discussions of Rebekah Jones to the containment thread??

5 Likes

Man I’m not Jones defender. You’re really grasping at straws here.