The Dilettante abides
The Dilettante abides
An interesting piece in The Guardian this morning, by Michael Safi (based in Beirut), Theo Merz (Moscow) and Helen Davidson (Taipei). “Why home-produced Covid vaccine hasn’t helped India, Russia and China rollouts.” As vaccinations rates soar in Israel, the UK,…
David Wallace Wells writes in New York Magazine’s Intelligencer: …[O]f the trio of long-awaited coronavirus vaccines, the most promising, Moderna’s mRNA-1273, which reported a 94.5 percent efficacy rate on November 16, had been designed by January 13. This was just…
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…
Politically, Alexander Lukashenko is a walking corpse, a zombie. No wonder he can’t help spilling blood, even from beyond the grave. Have a look at the short videos posted by @nexta_live, the most popular Belarusian Telegram channel (it has 1.4…
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…