"I can tell you firsthand here in downtown DC where we work, right here around our bureau, just in the past six months, you know, there were two people shot, one person died..."

"... literally two blocks down here from the bureau. It was within the last two years that I actually was jumped walking just two blocks down from here. And then, just this morning, one of my co-workers said her car was stolen, a block away from the bureau. We can talk about the numbers going down, but crime is happening every single day because we’re all experiencing it firsthand, working and living down here...."

Said ABC News anchor Kyra Phillips, quoted in the NY Post.

But the numbers!

"Last weeks Job’s Report was RIGGED, just like the numbers prior to the Presidential Election were Rigged. That’s why, in both cases..."

"... there was massive, record setting revisions, in favor of the Radical Left Democrats. Those big adjustments were made to cover up, and level out, the FAKE political numbers that were CONCOCTED in order to make a great Republican Success look less stellar!!! I will pick an exceptional replacement. Thank you for your attention to this matter. MAGA!"

Writes Trump, at Truth Social.

The NYT presentation of this news story is: "Trump to Appoint New Top Labor Official Within Days/President Trump fired the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Friday after the agency released dour monthly jobs data."

Mr. Trump fired the top labor official in charge of compiling statistics on employment, Erika McEntarfer, on Friday after the B.L.S. released monthly jobs data showing a significant slowdown in hiring. Mr. Trump accused Ms. McEntarfer, without evidence, of rigging the numbers.

There's that phrase, "without evidence."

The NYT is carrying on the old tradition of promoting alcohol as good for your brain.

 I was surprised to see this in the NYT: "17 Ways to Cut Your Risk of Stroke, Dementia and Depression All at Once/A new study identified overlapping factors that affect your odds of developing these brain diseases late in life":

The factors that protect against brain disease

The study, which looked at data from 59 meta-analyses, identified six factors that lower your risk of brain diseases:

Low to moderate alcohol intake (Consuming one to three drinks a day had a smaller benefit than consuming less than one drink a day.)...

So the best thing for your brain is consuming a low amount of alcohol. Second best is a moderate amount of alcohol (1 to 3 drinks a day). And third best might be no alcohol or a high amount of alcohol. We're not told.

I thought the idea that alcohol is good for your brain had been debunked, but here we have a study that "looked at data from 59 meta-analyses." Isn't that the kind of study that in the past has purported to show that alcohol is good for you and that had been debunked?

The article begins: "New research has identified 17 overlapping factors that affect your risk of stroke, dementia and late-life depression, suggesting that a number of lifestyle changes could simultaneously lower the risk of all three." I'm extremely skeptical about a study like that. 17 overlapping factors? 

"The FBI crime statistics Biden is pushing are fake. They’re fake just like everything else in this administration."

Said Donald Trump, quoted in "Trump’s sledgehammer message to Philadelphia is light on facts, heavy on fear/The former president used his first rally in the city of brotherly love to tie violent crime with illegal immigration, despite the evidence against this."

Why does Trump say the FBI is getting it wrong? I found this from last April in the Washington Examiner: "Bad data from the FBI mislead about crime."

"The grand perception of psychoanalysis, for the dramatist, is that all actions are performed FOR A REASON..."

"... and that one may reason backward from the action, however absurd or self-destructive, to a cause. The determination may be arbitrary, or indeed wrong, but it may be made. Further, that, for the dramatist, the process may be reversed, the cause postulated first, and its development to a conclusion graphed—at which point (in the tragedy only; and in the drama previously) the cause of the progression is clear." 

Writes David Mamet, in "Everywhere an Oink Oink: An Embittered, Dyspeptic, and Accurate Report of Forty Years in Hollywood" (commission-earned link).

I'm interested in the thought processes of psychoanalysts and dramatists, but that discussion of the study of causation made me think of the testimony of Abraham Wyner at the ongoing Mark Steyn trial. 

"Fixating on the R number isn’t real science/The pandemic response should be based on judgment, not a figure that’s only an educated guess."

Writes Ed Conway at The London Times. 

Science is a discipline predicated on constant doubt and reassessment and contemplating the evidence through alternate prisms...Taking a number, stripping it of context and uncertainty and using it to justify policy is something else altogether. 

The economist Friedrich Hayek had a word for it, “scientism”, a kind of bastardisation of science which amounted to “the pretence of knowledge”. He was writing in the mid-20th century about socialist governments attempting to engineer economic planning by assuming complex society could be distilled into a few key metrics, but since then scientism has only grown. 

It came of age with Robert McNamara, US secretary of defence under Kennedy, whose data obsession meant the White House paid far more attention to the body count in Vietnam than more subjective questions like: have we any chance of winning this war? But, as the American historian Jerry Muller wrote in The Tyranny of Metrics, McNamara was only bringing to the Oval Office what had long been the mantra at business schools and management consultancies: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”...

Wikipedia has an article, "The McNamara Fallacy." It features this quote from Daniel Yankelovich, "Corporate Priorities: A continuing study of the new demands on business" (1972):

The first step is to measure whatever can be easily measured. This is OK as far as it goes. The second step is to disregard that which can't be easily measured or to give it an arbitrary quantitative value. This is artificial and misleading. The third step is to presume that what can't be measured easily really isn't important. This is blindness. The fourth step is to say that what can't be easily measured really doesn't exist. This is suicide. 

That article has a great "See also" list: Allegory of the cave. Goodhart's law, Newton's flaming laser sword, Occam's razor, Streetlight effect, Truth, Verificationism, Verisimilitude. I can't read — or even link — all of that right now, but I am interested in Newton's Flaming Laser Sword:

In its weakest form it says that we should not dispute propositions unless they can be shown by precise logic and/or mathematics to have observable consequences. In its strongest form it demands a list of observable consequences and a formal demonstration that they are indeed consequences of the proposition claimed.

And who even thought about looking up "Truth" in Wikipedia? But that's a subject for a separate post, because it charmingly converges with something else I've been planning to blog about.

"The decision to buy a handgun for the first time is typically motivated by self-protection. But..."

"... it also raises the purchasers’ risk of deliberately shooting themselves by ninefold on average, with the danger most acute in the weeks after purchase, scientists reported on Wednesday. The risk remains elevated for years, they said," the NYT reports.

Thanks, scientists, but did you exclude the people who bought guns because they'd already formed an intention to shoot themselves? Or maybe it's just the NYT that wrote it that way, making it sound as though there are a lot of people who buy a handgun for self-defense and then somehow — once they've got that handgun — embark for the first time into suicidal ideation.

Of course, it's easy to see that people who have a gun are more likely to shoot themselves than people who don't have a gun, but they're talking about first-time handgun owners. So the comparison is first-time handgun owners and longterm handgun owners? NO!

The study tracked nearly 700,000 first-time handgun buyers, year by year, and compared them with similar non-owners, breaking out risk by gender. Men who bought a gun for the first time were eight times as likely to kill themselves by gunshot in the subsequent 12 years than non-owners; women were 35 times as likely to do so.

Well, the non-owners number would be extremely small, so 8 times that and even 35 times doesn't sound so big.

Toward the end of the article, there's a reference to "so-called reverse causation." That's the situation that I mentioned, above, that the handgun was bought for the purpose of suicide, but the researchers had no way to tell the difference between these people and those who bought the handgun for self-protection (and the protection of others).

I got the feeling the article was written to inspire readers not to arm themselves lest the gun would change them into a person who'd commit suicide. This is the message that if you don't want to die, don't arm yourself because you'll be arming your most-likely murderer: YOU!

"I thought he was just saying he reads the Bible. In there, it says we're all sinners. 100% not very good people."

I comment at Facebook, where my son John put up a link to "Biden claims '10 to 15 percent' of Americans are 'just not very good people'" (Fox News).

John's comment was: "A basket of deplorables, if you will."

The full quote from Biden:

“Do we really think this is as good as we can be as a nation? I don’t think the vast majority of people think that. There are probably anywhere from 10 to 15 percent of the people out there who are just not very good people, but that’s not who we are. The vast majority of the people are decent. We have to appeal to that and we have to unite people -- bring them together. Bring them together.”

Here's what I was remembering:



"The president held up a Bible at St. John's Church yesterday. I just wish he opened it once in a while.... instead of brandishing it...."

To "brandish" is "To flourish, wave about (a sword, spear, dart, club, or other manual weapon) by way of threat or display, or in preparation for action" (OED).

"Brandish" is a key word in the Bible — Ezekiel 32:10:

I will make many peoples appalled at you, and the hair of their kings shall bristle with horror because of you, when I brandish my sword before them. They shall tremble every moment, every one for his own life, on the day of your downfall....

The hair of their kings shall bristle with horror...

(Source: "Trump boarded Air Force One in high winds — and the photos of his hair are mesmerizing.")

Did Sweden make the right call, keeping open despite the pandemic?

The NYT analyzes the details.

Sweden has had 27% "excess deaths," while Britain has had 67% (the worst in Europe). But maybe Sweden shouldn't be compared to Britain. Italy, Spain, Belgium, and France have all also done worse than Swedent, but Sweden is worse than the other Scandinavian countries. Denmark has 6% excess deaths, Norway 5%, and Finland 0%. (What's the U.S. percentage? I don't think the article says.)

Swedish officials chose not to implement a nationwide lockdown, trusting that people would do their part to stay safe. Schools, restaurants, gyms and bars remained open, with social distancing rules enforced, while gatherings were restricted to 50 people....

“Once you get into a lockdown, it’s difficult to get out of it,” Sweden’s state epidemiologist, Anders Tegnell, said. “How do you reopen? When?”

Instead of imposing strict lockdowns, public health officials said that Swedes could be relied on to go out less and follow sanitation guidelines. That proved to be true: As a whole, Swedes visited restaurants, retail shops and other recreation spots almost as little as residents of neighboring countries, according to Google mobility figures....

You can't really ask what if we had done that, because we're Americans, and we would have done things our way if the government had left us to make our own choices about going out and about and getting close to other people in the workplace and the schools. And we'd have been doing it within the physical conditions of our country:

Sweden’s low density overall and high share of single-person households — factors it shares with its Scandinavian neighbors — set it apart from other Western European countries. In Italy, the virus tore through multigenerational households, where it easily spread from young people to their older relatives.

And although Sweden is not a particularly young country in comparison with its Western European peers, it has a high life expectancy and low levels of chronic diseases, like diabetes and obesity, that make the virus more lethal.

So Sweden performed an experiment, and we can look at the results, and it's a challenge to analyze the results and not come up with the answer that you want — either we should have done that too or it would never have worked here. There's also the compromise position: We should have used the Swedish approach in the sparsely populated parts of the country and the mandatory lockdown in the dense places — New York, Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, etc.

And what about that difference in "chronic diseases, like diabetes and obesity"? I see that 13% of the Swedish population is obese and 40% of Americans are obese — the worst in the world [ADDED: or the worst in the set of countries the NYT chose to compare in this article].

People who are obese know they are obese. They could be given the advice to do more self-isolation, but if it's 40% of us, what can we do? Can the workplaces and schools remain open with 40% of them advised to stay home? Actually, that's a way to do social distancing: You have only 60% occupancy of these spaces — distance created. Keep places open but expect the obese to stay home. It's pretty awkward to give that advice, though. So much easier to tell everyone to stay home. Except the part where the economy crashes and we're all plunged into a depression.

Testing... your intelligence.

Not providing context on the increase in testing is such a basic error, and has been so widespread, that it's revealing about the media's goals. It's more interested in telling plausibly-true stories ("narratives") that sound smart to its audience than in accuracy/truth per se. https://t.co/abYbgkVFbj

— Nate Silver (@NateSilver538) May 7, 2020

"It’s a Bayesian thing. Part of Bayesian reasoning is to think like a Bayesian; another part is to assess other people’s conclusions as if they are Bayesians..."

"... and use this to deduce their priors. I’m not saying that other researchers are Bayesian—indeed I’m not always so Bayesian myself—rather, I’m arguing that looking at inferences from this implicit Bayesian perspective can be helpful, in the same way that economists can look at people’s decisions and deduce their implicit utilities. It’s a Neumann thing: again, you won’t learn people’s 'true priors' any more than you’ll learn their 'true utilities'—or, for that matter, any more than a test will reveal students’ 'true abilities'—but it’s a baseline."

From "Reverse-engineering priors in coronavirus discourse" by Andrew (at Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science,) via "What’s the Deal With Bayesian Statistics?" by Kevin Drum (at Mother Jones).

Both of these posts went up yesterday, that is, 2 days after I said, "Shouldn't we talk about Bayes theorem?" I'm not saying I caused that. I'm just saying maybe you should use Bayesian reasoning to figure out if I did. I will stand back and say, this is not my field. I'm only here to encourage it.

"[T]he mortality rate among patients over age 65 exceeded 26 percent, and almost all patients over 65 who needed mechanical ventilation during that period died."

According to a new JAMA article (which studied coronavirus patients in Northwell Health hospitals "in and around New York City"), reported in "Do You Want to Die in an I.C.U.? Pandemic Makes Question All Too Real/Sobering statistics for older patients sharpen the need to draw up advanced directives for treatment and share them with their families" (NYT).

A new study in JAMA Internal Medicine questioned 180 patients over age 60 with serious illnesses; most said they would trade a year of life if that meant they could avoid dying in an I.C.U. on life support.... “Many older patients we’ve encountered with Covid-19 have opted not to undergo ventilation and an I.C.U.,” Dr. White said. “No one should impose that on a patient, though if there’s true scarcity, that may arise. But patients might choose it for themselves.”...

While you're thinking about that, here's the ad the NYT served up for me in the middle of the article:



"More than 20% of Americans think vampires are real/More than 25% think climate change is not"... therefore you might want to donate $1,000 to the World Health Organization. We're supposed to worry that a fifth to a quarter of Americans are so science-ignorant that we should give money to an organization that may or may not represent good science. How would I know? Well, one thing is: I'm wondering if it is really true that 20% of Americans think vampires are real, because if they don't, then the organization is passing on fake statistics and that's evidence against its dedication to good science!

Here's a study from last year (at YouGov) that says 13% of Americans believe in vampires — 14% of Republicans and 8% of Democrats. And here's an IPSOS survey from last year that said "Almost half of Americans believe that ghosts are real (46%), and a third believe that aliens visit earth (32%), while only a small amount believe in vampires (7%) and zombies (6%)."

For $1,000, you need to do better with the statistics. And now I'm wondering about the value of the statistics about how likely you are to die if you're over 65 and end up on a ventilator. Just as the World Health Organization wants its donations, the health care system would benefit if you decline its services and accept home-based death.

"Density alone doesn’t seem to account for the scale of the differential between New York’s fatality rates and those of other cities."

"New York has twice the density of London but three times the deaths, and the differential is even higher [comparing NYC to] cities such as San Francisco and Los Angeles. Deaths have occurred disproportionately in poorer areas, where the incidence of long untreated morbidities such as heart disease and diabetes have contributed significantly. But the same is true in all other cities. The high dependence on mass transit also seems to be a factor. In other major cities, car commutes are much more common. As Joel Kotkin, a scholar of cities at Chapman University in California, says, it may be the lethal convergence of all three factors. 'If you put together density, levels of poverty and reliance on a mass-transit system, you have a hat trick,' he told me.… But even that may not explain the extent of New York’s unique catastrophe. Around the world, the highest death rates have occurred where hospital systems were overwhelmed in the early stages of the crisis. This is especially true in northern Italy. Anecdotally, at least, it seems that the same happened in New York: Large numbers of sick people never got to hospitals, arrived too late or, in the impossible circumstances that medical personnel were confronted with, were given ineffective treatment.… It will be a while before we get a proper understanding of what went so tragically wrong...."

From "The Covid-19 Catastrophe Unfolding in New York Is Unique" (Wall Street Journal), quoted at my son John's Facebook page.

John writes:

I'm not sure this is a logical argument:

"Density alone doesn’t seem to account for the scale of the differential between New York’s fatality rates and those of other cities. New York has twice the density of London but three times the deaths, and the differential is even higher for cities such as San Francisco and Los Angeles."

Doesn't that assume there's a linear relationship between density and infection rates, and isn't that not necessarily the case?

My question is about the comparison of New York to northern Italy, where hospitals were overrun. Were NY hospitals overrun? I thought they weren't.  I think the 3 factors named — density, reliance on mass-transit, and the bad health conditions represented by the term "poverty" — are enough to explain what happened. These things are interactive. Shouldn't we talk about Bayes theorem?

"Stay-at-home orders have nearly halted travel for most Americans, but people in Florida, the Southeast and other places that waited to enact such orders have continued to travel widely..."

"... potentially exposing more people as the coronavirus outbreak accelerates, according to an analysis of cellphone location data by The New York Times. The divide in travel patterns, based on anonymous cellphone data from 15 million people, suggests that Americans in wide swaths of the West, Northeast and Midwest have complied with orders from state and local officials to stay home. Disease experts who reviewed the results say those reductions in travel — to less than a mile a day, on average, from about five miles — may be enough to sharply curb the spread of the coronavirus in those regions, at least for now."

From "Where America Didn’t Stay Home Even as the Virus Spread" (NYT). Graphs and maps at the link. Lots of bright red in the south, where the worst places have people averaging "travel" of over 3 miles a day.



It's interesting that our phone data is being used this way, but what's the problem if people are going out for a 3-mile walk? The data the NYT is using may have a rough correlation to whether people are getting together in groups, but I know I go out and get in an average of 3.5 miles, and I'm not doing anything that's not within Governor Evers's rules, which say:

Individuals may leave their home or residence... To engage in outdoor activity, including visiting public and state parks, provided individuals... [at all times as reasonably possible maintain social distancing of at least six (6) feet from any other person]. Such activities include, by way of example and without limitation, walking, biking, hiking, or running. Individuals may not engage in team or contact sports such as by way of example and without limitation, basketball, ultimate frisbee, soccer, or football, as these activities do not comply with Social Distancing Requirements. Playgrounds are closed.

To get to a state park, you've got to drive your car, but that's just you in your car. You're not exposing yourself or others when you're in that interior space. Does the NYT really want to promote the idea that we're covidiots if we don't stay inside our homes?

ADDED: From the comments over at the NYT:

I'm a Fed, but live in rural Oklahoma. I normally travel 33 miles each way to work in Oklahoma City M-F, but we're on telework order, so that part is down to zero. However, most of you can't imagine the distances we have out here. The nearest decent grocery store is 16 miles away, and a Walmart is about 22. So, if we go out food shopping once every two weeks, that could be 44 miles for that alone. The maps therefore are missing once critical element (which is admittedly VERY hard to compute), and that would be "Average Essential Travel Distance". That should be the denominator in a ratio, with the numerator being "Average Miles Traveled". To be fair, I do statistics for a living, and I wouldn't even begin to know how to estimate that denominator, other than to ask a sample of individuals to take a guess at it.

But most of the commenters over there are picking up the message that I think the NYT intended to send: The people who vote for Republicans are ignorant and/or unwilling to act for the good of the whole.

Data from internet-connected thermometers show that social distancing may be working.

From "Restrictions Are Slowing Coronavirus Infections, New Data Suggest/A database of daily fever readings shows that the numbers declined as people disappeared indoors" (NYT):

The company, Kinsa Health, which produces internet-connected thermometers, first created a national map of fever levels on March 22 and was able to spot the trend within a day. Since then, data from the health departments of New York State and Washington State have buttressed the finding, making it clear that social distancing is saving lives.

Kinsa’s thermometers upload the user’s temperature readings to a centralized database; the data enable the company to track fevers across the United States.... Kinsa has more than one million thermometers in circulation and has been getting up to 162,000 daily temperature readings since Covid-19 began spreading in the country....

Kind of an invasion of privacy — voluntary self-invasion by the users of the thermometers — but this is really interesting. Here's the trend in my county:



Here's Manhattan:



The blue line is where Kinsa would expect the trend to be in a normal flu season. When the orange line goes red, that's "atypical" in that it doesn't correspond to the usual pattern of the flu, so it might be inferred that's the coronavirus.

As of noon Wednesday, the company’s live map showed fevers holding steady or dropping almost universally across the country, with two prominent exceptions. One was in a broad swath of New Mexico, where the governor had issued stay-at-home orders only the day before, and in adjacent counties in Southern Colorado....

By Friday morning, fevers in every county in the country were on a downward trend, depicted in four shades of blue on the map.

“I’m very impressed by this,” said Dr. William Schaffner, a preventive medicine expert at Vanderbilt University. “It looks like a way to prove that social distancing works. But it does shows that it takes the most restrictive measures to make a real difference.”...

The turning point [in Manhattan] began on March 16, the day schools were closed. Bars and restaurants were closed the next day, and a stay-at-home order took effect on March 20. By March 23, new fevers in Manhattan were below their March 1 levels....

“People need to know their sacrifices are helping,” said Inder Singh, founder of Kinsa.... Mr. Singh said he had approached the C.D.C. about using his data as part of its own flu surveillance, but agency officers had insisted on him giving up the rights to his data if they did, and he refused....

Well, there's an issue. People are giving the company their data, and the company wants to own it, even when the fate of a nation is in the balance. Maybe Trump can iron out that kink. He seems to focus on the interface between government and private business. Anyway, it's great to get this view of things, and nice of people to sacrifice their privacy to produce this fantastic overview of the health of the country and the effectiveness of the social distancing measures.

Why is Germany's death rate from coronavirus so low — 0.5%?

NPR explains:

"I believe that we are just testing much more than in other countries, and we are detecting our outbreak early," said Christian Drosten, director of the institute of virology at Berlin's Charité hospital....

"We have a culture here in Germany that is actually not supporting a centralized diagnostic system," said Drosten, "so Germany does not have a public health laboratory that would restrict other labs from doing the tests. So we had an open market from the beginning."...

Only by testing everyone can you know the true death rate, so the more testing you do, the lower the death rate looks compared to other places that are not detecting the milder cases. The death rate in France is said to be 5% and in Italy, it's 10%. But what is it really?

"De Blasio’s senior staff in near revolt over his coronavirus response."

The NY Post reports.

When Mayor de Blasio dragged aides and members of his NYPD security detail to his Brooklyn YMCA Monday morning amidst the coronavirus outbreak, fellow fitness enthusiasts were coughing and sneezing — and a mentally ill person was walking around touching the equipment, a gym source said.

“It’s crazy that he made his staff and detail come with him to the gym and expose them like that,” the source said.

That scene lends insight into this: "Majority of NYC’s coronavirus cases are men between 18 and 49 years old."

But wait a minute. That headline is not right. The majority of cases are men (59%), and the majority of cases are people between the ages of 18 and 49 (54%). You can't combine these 2 facts that way! That's some serious innumeracy!

"Numbers today represent reality as of 3 weeks ago."

I'm passing along, with permission, something Freeman Hunt posted on Facebook.

A friend thought I should post something my husband wrote in a message. Here 'tis.

"Today Italy had 4207 new cases and 475 new deaths in 24 hours (and they are even admitting they can't count all deaths now).

"They went into lockdown 9 days ago when they had 1797 new cases and 97 deaths in a day.

"Even my friends who have been following this asked if this means the lockdown is not working. No, it is working, but the lag time on this disease is long. It can be 14 day incubation and then is about 10 days after symptoms start before people typically take a turn for the worse if they are going to. Death typically in the third week after symptom start.

"Which Country Has Flattened the Curve for the Coronavirus?"

Check out the collection of graphs at the NYT (no subscription needed).

The answer to the question is China (according to the data China reports). Also, South Korea.

Not us. Not yet.

"New C.D.C. data showed that nearly 40 percent of patients sick enough to be hospitalized were aged 20 to 54. But the risk of dying was significantly higher in older people."

A subheadline at the NYT (which should be accessible whether you have a subscription or not).

I'm questioning "sick enough." Perhaps the degree of sickness warranting hospitalization is lower for younger people. Should the care be used on the sickest people or on the ones most likely to benefit from care?

Anyway, it's important for people who are faced with the effort of social distancing to see that youth is not immunity. Though "20 to 54" is a big category. What about those under 40? Under 30?

Here's a closer look from the underlying CDC report (also on this table):