Category Archives: COVID-19

Meet your sparring partner

(Credits: Professor Wendy Barclay of Imperial College London and Professor Tom Burgoyne of University College London)

Posted in COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2 | Leave a comment

ICL’s Gast, Openshaw, Riley, Barclay on COVID-19 by SARS-CoV-2 : Disease, transmission, variants, and all that

Posted in COVID-19, epidemiology, ICL, SARS-CoV-2 | Leave a comment

The engagement with SARS-CoV-2: Where we stand in the United States, in curated numbers

From the COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic Monthly, a 23rd December 2020 report: California is out of control. As I’ve noted elsewhere and the COVID Tracking Project reminds, sourcing cases, deaths, positive test rate, and hospitalization data is tricky. … Continue reading

Posted in actuarial statistics, American Statistical Association, coronavirus, COVID-19, pandemic, Rebekah Jones, risk, SARS-CoV-2 | Leave a comment

Six Principle Plays in Denialist Playbook

It’s all about advancing anti-science and doubts about science, as well as confusing the public for ideological and financial gain. (h/t Scientific American)

Posted in American Association for the Advancement of Science, an ignorant American public, anti-intellectualism, anti-science, Ben Santer, climate denial, climate science, Climate Science Legal Defense Fund, COVID-19, denial, Desmog Blog, science, science denier, science education, secularism, Skeptical Science | 3 Comments

Phase Plane plots of COVID-19 deaths with uncertainties

I. Introduction. It’s time to fulfill the promise made in “Phase plane plots of COVID-19 deaths“, a blog post from 2nd May 2020, and produce the same with uncertainty clouds about the functional trajectories(*). To begin, here are some assumptions … Continue reading

Posted in American Statistical Association, Andrew Harvey, anomaly detection, count data regression, COVID-19, dependent data, dlm package, Durbin and Koopman, dynamic linear models, epidemiology, filtering, forecasting, Kalman filter, LaTeX, model-free forecasting, Monte Carlo Statistical Methods, numerical algorithms, numerical linear algebra, population biology, population dynamics, prediction, R, R statistical programming language, regression, statistical learning, stochastic algorithms | Tagged | Leave a comment

“No, COVID-19 Is not the Flu”

Q&A with Andrew Pekosz, PhD, Johns Hopkins University: Q: What would you say to someone who insists to you that COVID-19 is “just the flu”? A: Since December 2019, COVID-19 has killed more people in the U.S. than influenza has … Continue reading

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Für alle ohne maske

h/t Professor Christian Robert.

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‘The virus is their new hoax’

And note that the variant of SARS-CoV-2 which has taken over the world is a more virulent, more damaging, and more infectious variant of the virus which infected Wuhan. We visualized COVID’s spread across every US state and county. Check … Continue reading

Posted in American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Statistical Association, an ignorant American public, climate disruption, coronavirus, COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2 | Leave a comment

Has maintaining economic growth been worth it?

From Our World in Data article “No sign of a health-economy trade-off, quite the opposite“. Have the countries experiencing the largest economic decline performed better in protecting the nation’s health, as we would expect if there was a trade-off? The … Continue reading

Posted in coronavirus, COVID-19, economics, epidemiology, pandemic, policy metrics, politics, SARS-CoV-2 | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

“Inferring change points in the spread of COVID-19 reveals the effectiveness of interventions”

J. Dehning et al., Science 369, eabb9789 (2020). DOI: 10.1126/science.abb9789 Source code and data. Note: This is not a classical approach to assessing strength of interventions using either counterfactuals or other kinds of causal inference. Accordingly, the argument for the … Continue reading

Posted in American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Statistical Association, Bayesian, Bayesian computational methods, causal inference, causation, changepoint detection, coronavirus, counterfactuals, COVID-19, epidemiology, SARS-CoV-2, state-space models, statistical series, time series | Leave a comment

COVID-19 statistics, a caveat : Sources of data matter

There are a number of sources of COVID-19-related demographics, cases, deaths, numbers testing positive, numbers recovered, and numbers testing negative available. Many of these are not consistent with one another. One could hope at least rates would be consistent, but … Continue reading

Posted in coronavirus, count data regression, COVID-19, descriptive statistics, epidemiology, pandemic, policy metrics, politics, population biology, population dynamics, quantitative biology, quantitative ecology, sampling, SARS-CoV-2, statistical ecology, statistical series, statistics | 2 Comments

First substantial mechanism for long term immunity from SARS-CoV-2 : T-cells

M. Leslie, “T cells found in COVID-19 patients ‘bode well’ for long-term immunity“, Science, doi:10.1126/science.abc8120. A. Grifoni, et al, “Targets of T cell responses to SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus in humans with COVID-19 disease and unexposed individuals“, Cell, 14th May 2020. J. … Continue reading

Posted in American Association for the Advancement of Science, coronavirus, COVID-19, epidemiology, SARS-CoV-2 | Tagged | Leave a comment

Dissection of the Dr Judy Mikovits’ claims in AAAS Science

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/05/fact-checking-judy-mikovits-controversial-virologist-attacking-anthony-fauci-viral h/t Dr Katharine Hayhoe @LinkedIn The Chronic Fatigue Syndrome retraction notice. Excerpt: Science asked Mikovits for an interview for this article. She responded by sending an empty email with, as attachments, a copy of her new book and a … Continue reading

Posted in American Association for the Advancement of Science, coronavirus, COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, science, Science magazine | 3 Comments

“Seasonality of COVID-19, Other Coronaviruses, and Influenza” (from Radford Neal’s blog)

Thorough review with documentation and technical criticism of claims of COVID-19 seasonality or its lack. Whichever way this comes down, the links are well worth the visit! Will the incidence of COVID-19 decrease in the summer? There is reason to … Continue reading

Posted in COVID-19, differential equations, diffusion, diffusion processes, epidemiology, Lotka-Volterra systems, meteorology, pandemic, population biology, population dynamics, Radford Neal, SARS-CoV-2, statistics | Leave a comment

Phase plane plots of COVID-19 deaths

There are many ways of presenting analytical summaries of new series data for which the underlying mechanisms are incompletely understood. With respect to series describing the COVID-19 pandemic, Tamino has used piecewise linear models. I have mentioned how I prefered … Continue reading

Posted in coronavirus, COVID-19, functional data analysis, pandemic, penalized spline regression, phase plane plot, SARS-CoV-2, splines | 14 Comments

Machiavelli

It’s right out of Machiavelli’s The Prince. #covid_19 #coronavirus Even for the Trump administration, it is odd they are pushing #Hydroxychloroquine and #Azithromycin so hard, against medical advice and evidence. I’ve thought about this and, given the growing animosity between … Continue reading

Posted in American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Statistical Association, anti-science, coronavirus, COVID-19, Machiavelli, SARS-CoV-2 | Leave a comment

New COVID-19 incidence in the United States as AR(1) processes

There are several sources of information regarding Covid-19 incidence now available. This post uses data from a single source: the COVID Tracking Project. In particular I restrict attention to cumulative daily case counts for the United States, the UK, and … Continue reading

Posted in coronavirus, COVID-19, epidemiology, pandemic, regression, SARS-CoV-2 | 1 Comment