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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.”

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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When the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) first outlined its plan to regulate vaping equipment and nicotine e-liquids as “tobacco products” in 2014, it estimated that it would receive 25 applications a year. Since the vaping industry includes thousands of manufacturers, ranging from big companies like Juul to mom-and-pop shops that mix the e-liquids they sell, the implication was that FDA regulation would wipe out almost all of them. Today the deadline for submitting applications, which has been moved repeatedly by the FDA and the courts, finally arrived, and the outlook for small businesses, though still daunting and highly uncertain, is not quite as dire as the agency initially suggested.

Under the Family Smoking Prevention and Tobacco Control Act of 2009, which the FDA is using to regulate nicotine vaping products, the entire industry officially exists only by the agency’s sufferance. The law required FDA approval of all tobacco products that were not marketed prior to February 15, 2007, before the vaping industry emerged in the United States. Once the FDA decided to treat nicotine vapes as tobacco products, it was only the agency’s enforcement discretion (combined with the practical difficulties of eliminating an industry with millions of customers) that allowed them to remain on the market. For companies that managed to meet today’s deadline, that sufferance will now be extended for a year as the FDA considers their applications.

The requirements for a “premarket tobacco application” (PMTA)—a misnomer in this context, since all of these products are already on the market—initially seemed so cumbersome and expensive that only the largest manufacturers would survive. But as Vaping360 reports in a detailed summary of the current regulatory situation, a surprisingly large number of small manufacturers have submitted applications, hoping that the FDA will be patient and flexible enough for them to stay in business.

Under the Tobacco Control Act, the FDA is supposed to approve a PMTA only if it is “appropriate for the protection of public health,” taking into account “the risks and benefits to the population as a whole.” The FDA’s interpretation of that standard, which demands reams of data concerning not only the product’s specific properties but its anticipated impact on smoking and nicotine use, seemed beyond the means of small businesses to satisfy. Juul’s PMTA, for instance, included “detailed scientific data from over 110 studies totaling over 125,000 pages evaluating the product’s impact on both current users of tobacco products and nonusers, including those who are underage.”

But notwithstanding its doom-implying projections six years ago, the FDA has indicated that it will take into account the limited resources of small businesses, along with unanticipated obstacles such as the COVID-19 epidemic and (perhaps) a product testing bottleneck created by the limited number of FDA-accredited laboratories, in accepting and processing applications. Paraphrasing Amanda Wheeler, co-owner of the Arizona e-liquid company Jvapes, Vaping360 says “the FDA has received direction from the White House and HHS to try to accommodate the small vapor companies without abandoning its scientific standards.”

President Donald Trump has acknowledged the harm-reducing potential of e-cigarettes (as does the FDA) and, in the context of the FDA’s restrictions on flavored vaping products, promised to accommodate the interests of vapers and the companies that supply them while trying to reduce underage consumption. Last January, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, whose department includes the FDA, said the agency would “streamline approval” for small businesses.

What might that mean in practice? U.S. District Judge Paul Gramm—who has changed the PMTA deadline twice, moving it up to last May in response to a legal challenge by anti-vaping groups and granting a six-month reprieve in response to the COVID-19 epidemic—says the FDA has the discretion to make case-by-case exceptions for companies struggling to meet its requirements. The FDA has indicated that it may accept incomplete applications on the understanding that companies will fill in the gaps later. The FDA also could make other accommodations—for example, by accepting references to the existing scientific literature on the relative hazards of vaping and smoking rather than demanding new, product-specific research.

Although Grimm limited the grace period for companies that have met the PMTA deadline to one year, it seems quite unlikely that the FDA will be able to process all the applications in that amount of time. “Although we do not know how many applications will be submitted by the September deadline, we do know that there are over 400 million deemed products listed with FDA,” Mitch Zeller, director of the agency’s Center for Tobacco Products, said last month. “Even if applications are submitted for only a portion of those products, the likelihood of FDA reviewing all of these applications during the one-year review period is low, given that this would be an unprecedented number of applications and several orders of magnitude greater than anything the Agency has experienced.”

It is not surprising that many vaping companies have chosen to give up rather than invest time, money, and effort in a process that might (or might not) give them a one-year reprieve and might (or might not) keep them in business longer than that. As Vaping360 notes, if you run a vape shop that sells house-mixed e-liquid or offers a wide range of brands that may no longer be available, you are apt to think twice about signing a new three-year lease in the face of all this regulatory uncertainty. But for the intrepid companies that are trying to navigate the PMTA process, the outlook seems a bit more hopeful than it did a few years ago.

One reason to be hopeful is that the FDA does not have the enforcement capacity to track down unapproved products, which include a vast range of foreign-made devices and parts as well as a bewildering variety of e-liquids, and remove them from the market. People will continue to vape, and manufacturers will continue to supply them, legally or not. If the FDA does not want its regulatory system to become a laughable pretense, it will need to come to terms with that reality.

Consider the issue of flavored e-liquids, which anti-vaping politicians and activists portray as an intolerable threat to the youth of America. If the FDA gives in to their demands and refuses to approve flavored products, which are overwhelmingly preferred by former smokers, it will simply expand a black market over which it has no control. That would not be good for the agency’s reputation or the “public health” it is supposed to be protecting.

While the FDA deserves a lot of blame for creating an opaque, complicated, and intimidating regulatory process, the root of the problem is the standard decreed by Congress. The FDA is required to consider “the population as a whole,” including nonsmokers (especially teenagers) who may start vaping as well as smokers who replace conventional cigarettes with a much less hazardous alternative. That assessment requires predictions and value judgments that invite arbitrary regulation.

It is not enough to demonstrate that the benefits of vaping products outweigh the risks for the millions of Americans who use them instead of smoking. Manufacturers are also supposed to show that the benefits for those consumers outweigh the risks for everyone else, a collectivist calculus that is impossible to perform in any rigorous or objective way. That situation, which Congress created, makes the entire industry subject to the whims of bureaucrats who may or may not prove to be as pragmatic as vapers and the businesses that serve them are hoping.

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The University of Michigan-Dearborn’s Center for Social Justice and Inclusion states that its mission is to “celebrate the uniqueness” of each student and “remove barriers” to full participation in campus life. But this laudable goal would appear to be at odds with the actual practices of the center, which include hosting race-segregated virtual events.

This week, the center advertised an online discussion session for “students that do not identify as people of color”—white students, in other words. A separate event—for students who are black, indigenous, or people of color (BIPOC)—is also on the calendar.

The non-POC event is billed as “a space for students that do not identify as persons of color to gather and to discuss their experience as students on campus and as non-POC in the world.”

“Feel free to drop in and discuss your experiences as non-persons of color and hopefully brainstorm solutions to common issues within the non-POC community,” wrote the organizers. “The Cafe will be facilitated by a non-POC faculty/staff member to ensure that discussions are kept safe and respectful.”

Presumably, the BIPOC event is described similarly, but with a BIPOC moderator instead. (I can’t access the web page for this event: It’s as if UM-Dearborn’s website somehow knows I’m a white person.)

Update! Seems like @UM_Dearborn has two cafes. Competing cafes. I get the intention but this was not thought out and very lazy. pic.twitter.com/BqTFy8rXN6

— Abed A. Ayoub (@aayoub) September 9, 2020

Public university events that are specifically tailored to students of a specific race or gender sometimes draw legal challenges, since federal law generally prohibits discrimination in schools. The American Enterprise Institute’s Mark Perry, a professor at the University of Michigan’s Flint campus, filed a civil rights complaint against Michigan State University’s women-only study lounge, for instance, which prompted the university to open the space to all. Perhaps someone at Dearborn thought the solution to the potential legal problem of POC-only events was to also have whites-only events. I emailed the center to ask whether they had inadvertently reinstated the separate-but-equal doctrine, and will update this article if I hear back.

In any case, if students wish to freely associate into identity-based groups, that is their right. University administrators, though, should host discussions on issues of identity that are open to all students, regardless of their ethnicity. This is the best way to foster racial harmony on campus, and it’s consistent with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.

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