[FRIAM] Lancet article on how well countries appear to have protected and appear to have reported
Steve Smith
sasmyth at swcp.com
Tue Apr 26 11:45:24 EDT 2022
I don't feel qualified to understand much of this study nor how good of
science it is, but taking it at face value, I find it fascinating that
the gist of the introduction is that the attribution of death to
COVID-19 is likely under-reported rather than over-reported as many of
the wingnuts who started with "no worse than the flu", then segued to
"democrat hoax" to "chinese plot" to "fauci funded chinese plot".
While I suspect the anecdotes they parlayed had *some* real and honest
examples to draw from anecdotes are so easy to manufacture, clone,
magnify that they were suspect from the beginning.
EricS's point that (proper/complete?) statistical analysis lags
(trickles in) is important and something I've been trying to understand
for myself in my own personal understanding of large, sweeping changes
in our socioeconomicpolitical landscape. I'm exhausted from hearing
the never-ending micro-analysis of each tranche of factoids that hit the
media (currently the txt messages surrounding Jan 6 2021), but
nevertheless unable to look away for very long. And yet I
believe/trust that hindsight, filtered through more thorough analysis
will outline a much better picture than in-the-moment knee-jerk analysis
possibly can. I vaguely/acutely remember everyone I knew hanging on
each day's "new cases" and "hospitalizations" and "deaths" during the
first 3-6 months, even as I knew that a more complete contextualized
analysis of those numbers would not be out for weeks or even months.
it was a time of a certain kind of hypervigilance. I had a similar
period during the opening weeks of the Russian Invasion of Ukraine where
I went searching for Ukranian webcams and watched them in the
background, imagining that I would see something there that would give
me more useful information than what I was getting from the incessant
streams of mainstream media and social media reports/opinions.
The ability of one person to distribute their attention across many
orders of magnitude in time/space/link-distance seems limited by our
genetics. We were "designed" to notice things within our hearing and
sight and olfactory range and socially we might have
magnified/distributed that by being part of a "tribe" and augmented it
by hanging out with other creatures (herd animals, pack familiars,
birds) that we could trust to alert us to things outside of our
sensitivity or distance ranges. By the time of the early empires we
had bureaucracies, frontier scouts, messengers to bring and synthesize
events for us from many days or weeks travel away. We also developed
specialized logos to gather/study/analyze/report these things through
unique lenses. The Enlightenment brought a more formalized/normalized
approach to all of this while the Age of Exploration expanded the scope
and shortened the time-lag. The Age of Communication and Transportation
once again expanded and shrank it all at once.
In my own lifetime, space-science and digital comm/storage/computation
radically leveraged all that came before it, yet I am still no more able
as an individual than most any of those forebearers going back into deep
pre-history, to sort it all out.
One of my current ponderings is whether the global
data/information/knowledge/wisdom synthesis capability of humanity as a
collective is developing fast enough to keep up with the implied
(destructive or at least dangerously disruptive) effects of the advances
implied above. On a good day I believe we might be winning the Red
Queen's Gambit, but then I turn on the news or have a serious chat with
Joe Sixpack and feel as if I've fallen under the wheels of her bus.
Tx to EricS (and others here) articles like this (making studies like
this more accessible to the educated layman) are a boon, but remind me
of the dynamic-range limitations we all suffer under.
On a complementary topic, I recognized early on that the global
diversity of culture and political style/will meant that we would
eventually have a huge amount of data on how different approaches to
this class of pandemic would work and in principle, the more enlightened
public health systems (even the bureaucratic globalized WHO) could learn
very important epidemiological things from it. A meta-immune system
responding to the mis/dis/mal-information that came along with the
epidemiological facts of the disease spread itself.
DaveW made a point early on that the pandemic was entirely (mostly?) one
of mis/dis/mal-information. I believe he was proven wrong about that as
it unfolded but the suspicion that it might be otherwise was not
entirely unmotivated or irrelevant.
> Note the mention of racial differences in Vitamin D deficiency.
>
> ---
> Frank C. Wimberly
> 140 Calle Ojo Feliz,
> Santa Fe, NM 87505
>
> 505 670-9918
> Santa Fe, NM
>
> On Mon, Apr 25, 2022, 11:19 PM Marcus Daniels <marcus at snoutfarm.com>
> wrote:
>
> Interesting latitude is a predictive variable..
>
> https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7319635/
>
>> On Apr 25, 2022, at 9:31 PM, David Eric Smith
>> <desmith at santafe.edu> wrote:
>>
>> This came to me over another channel; nice to have:
>>
>> https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(21)02796-3/fulltext
>> <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwww.thelancet.com%2fjournals%2flancet%2farticle%2fPIIS0140-6736%2821%2902796-3%2ffulltext&c=E,1,h7wGi7AsxArjZbhRLTUyK3_gChBRNJ-OX8KaCaRyF_fPDUTjvJZuPIgULI5QFQu2l1BDZUGPebHpp1hCMueuqQfLq0nKMmGHAoUdMNg1FGWCCFiRxY3y9g,,&typo=1>
>> Table with summary values:
>> https://www.thelancet.com/action/showFullTableHTML?isHtml=true&tableId=tbl1&pii=S0140-6736%2821%2902796-3
>> <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwww.thelancet.com%2faction%2fshowFullTableHTML%3fisHtml%3dtrue%26tableId%3dtbl1%26pii%3dS0140-6736%252821%252902796-3&c=E,1,C2k7yG9jZhpsy7KvkwQbdGbkqP_NlYRzv-PDXO249sH2kQD9qv4H-NDd-t1gRysJNRwADN1dI3yQ02vbQ1y-scljdVADM7OpP1zfrjNASrx8kJNb&typo=1>
>>
>> Eventually, statistical analyses trickle in…
>>
>> Eric
>>
>>
>>
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