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

[David Eric Smith]

For whatever reason, the santafe mailer and my Mac mail seem unwilling to download messages over some period, so this is a reply to SteveS, but without the original text (which I could see on the phone).

For me (over-interpreting), the data in the Lancet studies are of two things:  The protectiveness is some kind of proxy for the effectiveness of government in setting policy, the functionality of the society, and various natural situation variables like population density, time inside poorly-ventilated spaces, etc.  The reporting efficacy is a measure of how well the medical system is designed and supported, and in how far it can function without being corrupted by government interference.

So, for instance, Brazil did a bad job protecting (though not _so_ much worse than most US states), as we knew, but their medical system did a tolerable job reporting.  Bolsonaro didn’t care enough about the statistics to keep the doctors and public health people from mostly doing their jobs.  Interestingly, De Santis and Kemp were sort of in a similar category.

On another vertex of the square, we have Belarus where they did a pretty-bad job of protecting and a willfully horrible job of reporting, so they go into the failed-state category with places like Yemen and Syria.

Fascinating to me, S. Korea comes out golden, in having done a pretty good job protecting and a better-than-even job of reporting.  In comparison, Japan did a considerably worse job of protecting and a rather bad job of reporting (under by 6, which is getting into the authoritarian-state regime).  The latter lends itself to the interpretation that the LDP government, in context of a largely-politically-passive society and a quite vertical medical industry, were capable of and exercised quite a lot of interference.  It’s a shame.  It also reminds me of a conversation I had with a young S. Korean student at a poster session somewhere decades ago: her poster was on “why is S. Korean industrial production just was good in quality as Japanese, but gets systematically much less credit and reputation for it?”  

One that I _really_ wanted to know was how close to reality the Chinese reported statistics were.  They are supremely capable of interference, but in this case, not much worse than many places in using it on this particular statistic.  Now I can go back to cautiously using some of their statistics to getting a rough idea what might be going on.

Some of the North Africans (I think Algeria?, the natively Berber areas) turned out to do quite a find job.  I noticed this one, because in terms of climate targets and actually meeting them, the same governments are among the best-in-class in the world, and show much more genuine commitment to things they say than N. America and most of Europe do.

Fingerprints, fingerprints….

Eric



> On Apr 27, 2022, at 12:45 AM, Steve Smith <sasmyth at swcp.com> wrote:
> 
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