I feel certain I saw an almost identical comment from an “expert” in relation to bar closures in the US. Perhaps my memory deceives me, but I’m sure it was word-for-word.
Are these people unconsciously repeating each other’s opinions? The circle of anointed COVID experts must be a fairly small one, and they surely get together for alcohol-free Zoom meetings.
These ‘experts’ and ‘Chief Health Officers’ particularly in Australia, don’t seem like people who have many social skills, empathy, or even have much fun.
Yes, I suspect these people just want everyone else to be as isolated and miserable as they are.
btw, did you notice this?
""We’ll be out of the danger period when it comes middle spring because we just spread less often because probably we’re outside more … "
In other words, it’ll spread less if we release the lockdown.
That is a spurious spurious correlation, because
(a) it doesnt use a scatter plot. Its just a couple of (probably freehand) wiggly lines, with meaningless interpolation, and
(b) the r value reported is approximately 0.6, which is approximately fuck all;
But if they were significantly correlated, then they’d be significantly correlated. There’s no such thing as a spurious significant correlation.
But perhaps its meant to be funny.
I think you’ve misunderstood it. The correlation presumably refers to a separate plot of annual drownings vs annual Nicolas Cage movies, and they’ve just shown the two curves over time for clarity.
It is supposed to be funny, but I didn’t think it was funny either (the concept has been thoroughly overdone).
I thought it VERY scientific AND mildly amusing!
Spot on.
Walensky said the US was seeing an average of 26,000 new coronavirus cases a day – a seven-day average that is 70% higher than last week. Hospitalizations and deaths are also seeing increases – about 36% and 26%, respectively, with Walensky noting this was another “critical moment” in the outbreak.
Congrats.
Still worth to keep an eye on Nicolas Cage, just in case.
How dare you question a graph!
+30% of a very small number is still a very small number. And in any case the statement is completely false. Deaths in the US are at the lowest level ever, and have been resolutely flat (around 300/day, ie., about twice as high as background suicide deaths) for a month.
More cases are vaccinated than unvaccinated at the moment in the UK. Does this mean that the vaccine makes you more susceptible to covid?
This is a joke!!! I know that the vaccinated group is bigger.
This means that the hospitalizations should be peaking though if most of the hospitalizations are in the unvaccinated, like they have been saying.
If vaccines work, then there should be absolutely no need to worry about case numbers wiggling up and down. And yet the fearmongering continues.
However as I illustrated with the US case, in the other thread, vaccination rates have only a modest correlation with the present level of deaths, State-to-State (the US is a very useful testbed because of differences in State policies). Crudely speaking, a 0.2-0.3 correlation implies that the difference in vaccination rates explains only ~25% of the variance in death rate; the reason for the other 75% is unknown.
It looks particularly interesting on a scatterplot (the dots are the 50+ States):
Even though I’ve always been slightly suspicious of vaccines as a magic bullet, I was genuinely surprised how little difference it makes whether you have 40% vaxed or 80%.
There are no “curves”. The data could be plotted as a histogram, or at a stretch with linear interpolation, while recognising the interpolation has no real meaning. Its very unlikely there is any data to justify curves for Cage.
At best its an illustrative attempt to make uncorrelated data look correlated, at which it fails. IIRC its part of a series of examples but I can’t remember if they are all similar, and can’t be bothered to look it up.
The “correlation is not causation” thing is hardly news, and is often illustrated in basic statistics courses by the (IIRC strong) correlation between ice cream sales and drownings, which are both causally related to nice weather but not causally related to each other.
Maybe this is a tone deaf riff on that.
Listen, the message from that graph is really a warning:
Cage has at least 4 movies out this year. Be smart and avoid pools for 2021.
The CECC must have also seen that graph. Otherwise, why are all the pools closed?
Long covid seems to be a real problem .
While one of the purposes of this thread is to have a good whinge about humbuggery, I was hoping it might get a bit more constructive. Viz., if such a problem exists, then what are we supposed to do about it?
Governments seem to have lost interest in their standard solution for everything (“tax it and set up a working group”) and have become enamored with a new Swiss Army knife (lockdowns). If - for the sake of argument - there is such a thing as “long COVID”, then what are we supposed to do about it? “Prevent anybody from ever getting COVID” seems to be a suboptimal proposition, at best.
Could be that the solution(s) have been worse than THIS disease. I find that quite plausible, though I don’t pretend to have fully evaluated the evidence.
But what of the next one? Is there a threat level that would justify these responses, or are (say) mass graves always an acceptable price for freedom?
Kind of a moot point, since we wont know what the threat level is until after taking the casualties.
Said this a few days ago. Long covid is the narrative in the news designed to persuade the young who don’t want the ‘clotshot’ that they need it to prevent long covid.
Where is the data that suggests having a jab can stop ‘long covid’?
AFAIK there’s almost no data on vaccines at all. The pharma companies simply aren’t doing any followup studies on the vast majority of the participants in this experiment; they’re relying on the yellow card system (and similar) to catch safety issues - which is, as we all know, an absolutely foolproof way of making sure safety issues aren’t spotted.
