[FRIAM] Lancet article on how well countries appear to have protected and appear to have reported

Tue Apr 26 16:36:43 EDT 2022

I wondered two things in reading this article.

First, the numbers make me want to look twice.  The Ireland-Singapore comparison says a factor of 86 difference in case-fatality-rate (if I don’t mis-remember).  There was some similarly wild number for Napoli-Milano, from 2 month’s difference per year in non-cloudy days.  Yet the latitude dummy variable explains 0.16 of the variation in CFR among countries that were chosen to all report fairly reliably.  I don’t see any factors like 86 in the excess-death numbers in the Lancet article.  _Maybe_ a number that wide between S. Korea and Russia — the only other candidates being those that did such a good job of protection that their excess deaths were negative and we can’t estimate Covid CFR from them without controlling for the specific other things people didn’t die of (in Iceland, maybe paragliding over volcanos).  So, is it sensible that the author suggests eye-popping fractions are expressive of the mechanistic difference, yet the regression differences are rather modest?  I can believe that both numbers are true, but maybe not that both are reflections of some common mechanism.  The alternative that worries me is that a small number of the samples are having an excess effect on the correlation, though R^2 should be taking account of that.

I guess with time I should be able to answer my own question above, but I am too slow and I can’t justify it right now.

This study also made me recall a lovely case study done many years ago, to calibrate vitamin-D supplementation for dark-skinned people in high northern latitudes.  I have South-Indian friends in Ireland and Sweden, who were worried about how to raise kids without bone fragility, and apparently mental health is an equally strong effect.

Anyway, hard to control for how many differences there might be among long-distance immigrants.  This study found sibling pairs (or manbe even twins; I don’t remember) from Jamaica of whom one had relocated to some sunless place like Scotland and the other stayed south, and got enough pairs to get statistical power.  With the natural incidence of severe Covid, no hope of getting a sample in the intersection with those much tighter restrictions.

Eric

> On Apr 26, 2022, at 9:15 PM, Frank Wimberly <wimberly3 at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 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 <mailto:marcus at snoutfarm.com>> wrote:
> Interesting latitude is a predictive variable..  
> 
> https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7319635/ <https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwww.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov%2fpmc%2farticles%2fPMC7319635%2f&c=E,1,ROEDbmFyoj1D7pOFoCv8PbAMLl1gSUiRJnH1yrzyc2uYqtovifYq427y33Gv_uPgYBQO8qNAyO55td7FSlqDJhewbmtWt_nBE_d_PaxecPW1fUyA&typo=1>
> 
>> On Apr 25, 2022, at 9:31 PM, David Eric Smith <desmith at santafe.edu <mailto: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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