Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
Slate ran an interview yesterday with a healthcare worker in South Dakota focused on the Covid crisis and Covid denialism in the state. Having skimmed it, I believe the stressed-out nurse who said that sufferers denied having Covid “until their…
A nurse in South Dakota says some of her patients refuse to believe they are infected with Covid-19 until their dying breath – literally. Some would rather be told they had the flu, pneumonia, even lung cancer (!) – anything…
Shaun Walker, the Guardian‘s man in Moscow (again), tweeted yesterday: Quite odd how Muscovites, who in normal times are super fastidious about hygiene (washing hands regularly, avoiding dirt etc) are mask averse. 600 Covid cases a day in Moscow and…
There’s new evidence that an outbreak of an infectious disease closely and suspiciously resembling Covid-19 occurred in Wuhan months before the officially recognized beginning of the coronavirus epidemic. Satellite images of hospital parking lots in Wuhan as well as internet…
Earlier this week, Mikhail Tamm, a Russian physicist and statistician, explained (in Russian) why the number of deaths in Moscow in April is a far better estimate of coronavirus mortality than the official rate: Ten days ago [the number of…
From today’s issue of The Telegraph: Russia boasts one of the world’s lowest Covid-19 mortality rates, but new figures released by Moscow authorities suggest that hundreds of coronavirus deaths could have gone unreported. Scientists and doctors say the low death…
Covid-19 data from Russia is a mixed bag: the number of new cases identified per day seems to have plateaued – well, almost – but the death count remains so suspiciously low that it’s impossible not to doubt the top…
My impression, admittedly superficial, from the ongoing debate on the severity of the Covid-19 pandemic is that statisticians with a professional interest in the distribution of extrema (“extreme value distributions”) understand the downside risks well and, as a result, support…
When in late March Vladimir Putin visited a Moscow hospital wearing a hazmat suit, he got ridiculed by Russian viewers for more than one reason. First, the full-body protective gear was obviously overkill. Unless his immune system had been damaged…
Prof. John Ioannidis of Stanford says the early estimates of the coronavirus’s deadlines were greatly exaggerated. It would be good news if demonstrably true, which it neither is nor can be, as the professor admits: “I love models… I do…
Suppose the number of people infected grows exponentially with time as . Consider two cases: in the first, the true rate is less than r by δ percent; in the second, it is greater than r by δ percent. The…
The Guardian reports from Moscow: Moscow woke up to a mandatory lockdown on Monday, as the 12.5 million residents of the Russian capital were told to stay indoors in order to slow the spread of coronavirus. The restrictions are some…