Author: admin

The Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center keeps track of the COVID-19 pandemic data reported from most of the countries in the world. One common way to measure how countries are handling the coronavirus relative to one another is to compare their COVID-19 mortality rates per 100,000 people. In that respect, the U.S., at 57.97 per 100,000, is doing better than the Belgium, United Kingdom, Spain, Brazil, and Italy, with rates at 86.78, 62.68, 63.34, 60.85, and 58.85 respectively. On the other hand, the COVID-19 mortality rates in Sweden, France, Canada, Germany, and South Korea currently stand at 57.33, 45.93, 24.83, 11.26, and 0.67 respectively.

Another oft-cited statistic is that the U.S., with just 4 percent of the world’s population, accounts for 24 percent of the world’s diagnosed COVID-19 cases and 22 percent of the deaths attributed to the disease. Based on these figures, the U.S. has not been all that great at mitigating the pandemic.

During an interview last week on the BBC Newshour, President Trump’s new coronavirus epidemic adviser Dr. Scott Adams more or less dismissed these figures as misleading and instead pointed to excess deaths as the better way to measure a country’s success in responding to the coronavirus. And he has a point, to some extent.

A September 1 article in Nature noted that during outbreaks of disease, researchers need to tally deaths rapidly. To do so, they usually turn to a blunt but reliable metric: excess mortality. “It’s a comparison of expected deaths with ones that actually happened, and, to many scientists, it’s the most robust way to gauge the impact of the pandemic,” explained Nature.

Using death data from 32 countries and four major cities, the Nature article observed that by the end of July, diagnosed COVID-19 deaths across the 32 countries and four major cities numbered 413,041, whereas the figure for total excess deaths stood at 593,344. A small proportion of excess deaths are an indirect result of the conditions created by the impact of the pandemic—people missing cancer treatments or failing to go to emergency rooms during a heart attack—rather than because of the virus itself. On the other hand, deaths may decline due to fewer traffic accidents and increased social distancing.

At the beginning of his interview with Trump adviser Atlas, the BBC Newshour presenter asked Atlas about his credentials and credibility.

“I am a total straight shooter,” responded Atlas. “I am a very direct blunt speaker. I am not shy about saying the truth. I will never say something that I do not believe is correct, period.”

The Newshour interviewer then went on to point out that “America’s record is much worse than other countries, 4 percent of the world’s population, a quarter of the confirmed Covid-19 cases and deaths.”

Atlas’ response was scathing:

You know what that’s a completely incorrect assessment of what’s happening. The only really legitimate way to compare countries is, if you really want to get down to it, it’s something that most epidemiologists understand. And that is something called excess mortality. And what that means is comparing deaths this year, during the pandemic, compared to your baseline, your country’s baseline. And the facts are the following: Europe has done 28 percent worse than the United States in excess mortality. No one talks about this. This is a quantitative appropriate epidemiologic criterion here, excess mortality. It’s really sort of, again, an example of how a sloppy thinking and really amateurish thinking has somehow come to the fore here. This is not a political issue. You have to use the facts. When you read the data you have to know what you’re talking about when you make a statement like that.

As it happens, Atlas’ boss has made several similar assertions in the past month. At an August 11 White House press briefing, the president asserted, “Europe has experienced a nearly 40 percent higher excess mortality rate than the United States.” At an August 17 campaign speech, he once again said, “Europe, by contrast, has experienced a 40 percent higher rate of excess mortality than the United States. Think about that, you don’t hear those stories, they don’t tell you that.” More recently during an August 19 briefing, the president lowered his claim saying that “excess mortality in Europe this year is 33 percent higher than the United States.”

So has Europe done some percent worse than the U.S. in excess mortality? British statisticians Janine Aron and John Muellbauer took a look at the data at the request of Factcheck.org, and find the comparison of excess deaths somewhat misleading.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) calculations, between Feb. 1 and Aug. 8, there have been between 174,930 and 235,728 excess deaths across the country, for a midpoint value of 205,329 deaths.

In comparison, through week 33 of this year, or Aug. 16, 204,634 excess deaths occurred in 24 European countries or parts of countries, according to estimates by EuroMOMO, a group monitoring mortality trends in Europe.

The two numbers—which are about equal—need to be adjusted for population, which reveals that there are 665 excess deaths per million people for the covered European area, compared with 622 excess deaths per million in the U.S., using the midpoint CDC value.

That works out to Europe having around 7 percent more excess deaths per million than the U.S. The percentage rises as high as 26 percent if the lower CDC value is used. Perhaps it is from this calculation that Atlas derives his comparison figure. On the other hand, if the upper-end CDC estimate is used, then the U.S.’s excess mortality rate is 7 percent higher than that of the E.U.

In the Nature article, University of California, Irvine demographer Andrew Noymer noted that people in his field will probably never know the pandemic’s final toll with certainty. “We haven’t even settled on how many people died in the 1918 flu,” said Noymer. “And we’ve had 100 years to sort out the numbers.”

In the meantime, citing only one of a range of calculations that just happen to make your boss look better may not be “sloppy thinking and really amateurish thinking,” but it certainly is “a political issue.”

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3h8VFGo
via IFTTT

In the time of a global pandemic, soaring unemployment, massive wildfires, and racial strife, it feels like the world is going to hell.

It’s not, says Reason Science Correspondent Ronald Bailey, the coauthor (with HumanProgress.org’s Marian Tupy) of Ten Global Trends Every Smart Person Should Know: And Many Others You Will Find Interesting. “In 1820,” Bailey tells Nick Gillespie, “84 percent of the world’s population lived on [the equivalent of] less than $1.90 a day. It took 160 years for that to get down to only 41 percent. But since then, it’s now below 10 percent…and we’ll probably be 5% or less by 2030.”

Bailey’s new book also shows that forests are increasing in size, deaths from natural disasters are declining, and there are fewer autocratic governments than ever. He believes climate change will become a significant problem, but one that can be handled with technology and economic growth. The main reasons for massive and persistent progress are better ideas for organizing human society. “Basically,” he says, “the Enlightenment happened.” With that came the rise of representative government, property rights and markets, and especially a belief in free speech and open inquiry that are essential for technological and social innovation.

If improvements are so ubiquitous, why don’t we recognize it more? Bailey argues that politicians and media outlets have vested interests in focusing on bad news and that humans have a “glitch” that leads us to take progress as a given. “We just take it for granted, he says. “What we’re trying to do with this book is to not let people take it for granted and [remind them], this is what has happened. And look to the future. If we keep the same institutions that enabled this, then much more of it will happen in the future.”

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2DINItJ
via IFTTT

Turns out President Donald Trump has good reason to be playing rhetorical footsie with former supporters of former Libertarian Party presidential candidate Gary Johnson supporters—the road to his re-election may well be blocked by those 7.8 million Americans who voted third-party and independent in 2016.

“The combined national NBC News/Wall Street Journal polls from this year,” reported NBC News last week, “have interviewed 215 voters who said they backed either [Gary] Johnson or [Jill] Stein in 2016….Forty-seven percent say they’re voting for [Joe] Biden, 20 percent are supporting Trump, and 33 percent are unsure or say they’re backing another candidate.”

That sample size is very small, but the implications are potentially huge, and in line with several other indicators about third-party voters over the past two years. If you crudely assigned 47 percent of the 5,946,559 Johnson/Stein voters to Biden, 20 percent to Trump, and otherwise kept the same totals for the major-party candidates from 2016, suddenly the Democrat is winning 50.2 percent of the popular vote, and the Republican is 4.47 million votes behind. And oh yeah, at least two-thirds of the third party vote goes POOF!

That’s not how life works in the real world, of course, but there’s plenty of other supporting evidence for the theory that the indie vote will collapse, in ways not friendly to the incumbent. To wit:

* The 2018 midterm congressional elections, which featured the highest voter turnout in a century, surpassed almost all expectations for Democrats while being strikingly brutal for third-party and independent candidates.

* Exit polls of Johnson and Stein voters in 2016, while showing a much higher propensity for just sitting out any contest without smaller-party alternatives, nonetheless tilted more positively toward Hillary Clinton. “[We] asked voters [who] they would have cast ballots for if there were only two candidates (Clinton and Trump),” CBS News wrote at the time. “A quarter of Johnson voters said Clinton, 15 percent said Trump, and 55 percent said they would not have voted. Numbers were similar for Stein voters, with about a quarter saying they would have chosen Clinton, 14 percent saying Trump, and 61 percent saying they would not have voted.”

* One of the main reasons why the 2020 race has been so unusually stable, especially compared to 2016, with very few polling zig-zags and a steady Biden lead, is that the number of undecided voters has been much lower. The electorate is engaged (by the derision of the other candidate/party as much as anything) and knows who it’s voting for.

* Four years ago this week, even in the immediate wake of the “Aleppo moment,” Gary Johnson was polling nationally at 9 percent. The 2020 Libertarian nominee, Jo Jorgensen, has polled between 1 percent and 3 percent in each national survey (and all but a couple of state polls), for the past month.

* Meanwhile, Jorgensen has led or been tied with all other non-major candidates—the Green Party’s Howie Hawkins, the Constitution Party’s Don Blankenship, rap superstar Kanye West—in every poll taken since August. Support for third-party candidates in 2020 has yet to exceed a combined 5 percent; in 2016 the combined vote for candidates not named Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton was 5.73 percent.

* And don’t forget that polling almost always exaggerates third-party support by at least one-third; Johnson’s final-day polling last time was 4.8 percent, and he ended up with just under 3.3 percent.

* Unlike the Libertarians, who again managed to get on all 50 state ballots plus the District of Columbia, the Green Party is lagging in ballot access in 2020, with just 30 states plus D.C. so far, compared to 44 in 2016.

* According to the Washington Post‘s David Weigel, “At the start of August, Jorgensen had raised less than $1.4 million, on track for far less than the $12 million the Johnson/Weld ticket raised in 2016. A spokesman for Hawkins said he had raised ‘over $300,000’ for his Green Party bid, less than 10 percent of what Stein raised by the end of her 2016 campaign.”

* Third-party presidential totals are cyclical—spike years (1992, 1968, 1948) tend to be followed by a comparative collapse, particularly if the two-party contest was close. Last election was the biggest third-party year since 1996, and the most controversial election since 2000 (which also saw a steep dropoff in third-party enthusiasm four years later). The fundamentals are just bad this year, which is one of many reason that—as predicted—no big-name outsiders swooped in for the Libertarian and Green nominations, nor mounted anything like an organized independent run.

The expected third-party contraction, and projected benefit to Biden, does not mean that Jo Jorgensen or maybe even a lower-polling candidate won’t beat the margin of victory in a battleground state, including one that may go for Trump. Just today, the Libertarian pulled 4 percent in a Marquette University Law School poll of Wisconsin, site of the narrowest Trump victory in 2016.

But if the president truly believes that the 2020 defectors from the Johnson/Bill Weld ticket (including Weld himself) are “all Republican voters,” let alone that “they have to vote for us,” he is in for a rude surprise come November.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/2Zpfraq
via IFTTT

There are few things scarier than an overreaching government. Perhaps to get into the holiday spirit then, Los Angeles has decided to ban trick-or-treating this year.

Late Tuesday, news broke of public health guidelines issued by the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health (LADPH) that ban door-to-door trick-or-treating, Halloween parties where non-members of a household will be present, and haunted houses.

The order, dated from last week, nevertheless allows for online Halloween parties (fun!), drive-in scary movie nights, and Halloween-themed car parades. The county’s new guidelines also graciously permit people to still decorate their homes and yards.

“Since some of the traditional ways in which this holiday is celebrated does not allow you to minimize contact with non-household members, it is important to plan early and identify safer alternatives,” reads the text of the order.

Health officials told The Los Angeles Times that trick-or-treating, in particular, was not going to be allowed “because it can be very difficult to maintain proper social distancing on porches and at front doors.”

Violation of the county’s Public Health Officer order, which was last updated on September 4, is punishable by both fines and imprisonment.

It’s not clear whether those penalties apply to violations of the new Halloween guidelines, or how the county intends to enforce its prohibition on trick-or-treating. Reason requested clarification from LADPH, and will update with any response we receive.

Halloween stoked panic among public health authorities and the general public long before coronavirus. That includes the regular fears about drug- and razor-laced candies, offensive costumes, and sex offenders out on the prowl.

The LAPHD has historically issued warnings about the high-sugar content of Halloween candies, alongside gentle reminders that participating households can hand out plenty of other fun things besides sweets.

Even in a time of rampant public health restrictions, Los Angeles’ crackdown on Halloween seems unnecessarily restrictive. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine a pre-pandemic activity more suited to the requirements of social distancing than trick-or-treating.

The activity occurs outside, where we know the risk of coronavirus transmission is much lower. Everyone is already wearing masks. Curbside pickup, whereby a bowl of candy and maybe a note asking trick-or-treaters to take only one piece, is already a common practice.

On top of that, children, the primary trick-or-treating participants, are at the lowest risk of developing serious COVID-19 symptoms, although they can still spread the disease.

Plenty of people who are at higher risk of serious illness or death from COVID-19 might not want disease vectors showing up at their doorstep. Fortunately, the accepted Halloween tradition of leaving your porch light off if you don’t want to be bothered on that night can help those people too.

Recommending best practices for trick-or-treating seems like a more proportional approach to the transmission risk that Halloween poses. Instead, the county is embracing the most authoritarian possible response to the holiday. Spooky.

from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3k4Q7yG
via IFTTT