Last time I showed excess deaths for the period from the beginning of the pandemic to the end of 2022 for OECD. For this post I am running the approximately same analysis for US states. I am using CDC numbers (https://data.cdc.gov/NCHS/AH-Quarterly-Excess-Deaths-by-State-Sex-Age-and-Ra/jqg8-ycmh) for this. These data end third quarter of 2022, i.e. a few months at…
Excess Deaths 2020-2022
I read a blog post which looked at excess deaths in OECD countries from the beginning of the pandemic until present. The author made the claim, and showed with arithmetic, that Sweden, with its far less aggressive approach to the pandemic, actually did the best of all OECD countries. I sent it to a colleague…
Required Fields are Bad Data Fields and Free Text Fields are Privacy Problems
See Title. That's it...I was just thinking recently about things that were blindingly obvious that I always had difficulty convincing customers and project leads of. I have worked on many medical software projects that had a front end GUI patient data entry aspect and inevitably the lead would have a hugely unnecessary number of data…
How are we doing?
Many people are upset about how vaccination has been going. We started off strong and then peaked early and it looks like 20-30% of people just don't care enough to get vaccinated and never will so we are all doomed. Thing is, the 50% plus of the population that is vaccinated skews heavily towards the…
Underpants Gnomes!
For one glorious week in sunny Los Angeles, the fully vaccinated (such as I) could enter a store to purchase dog food, or a restaurant to purchase a fish burrito, without wearing a mask. Those examples are the only things I was able to do before the indoor mask mandate for everyone, both virtuous and…
Did Lockdowns Help?
Analysis of the effect of severity of containment policy This one will be a bit short. No one seems to care much about COVID-19 policies. Rather, no one really cares if they worked or not unless the answer supports the policy and judgement of their team. Sad decade for fans of critical thinking and problem…
Is COVID-19 as Terrifying as we Think?
originally published April 8th 2020 Fear of the novel corona virus certainly has ramped up quickly. During a normal flu season people look at me like I’m a lunatic for asking if we can please not shake hands. Now when I’m out walking on a windy day, people in masks give me a wide berth…
Study of Contact Traces in Taiwan
originally published May 4th 2020 Humans, myself certainly included, have terrible instincts for probability and statistics. Evolution has gifted us with programs to deal with specific situations rather than a general aptitude for determining actual likelihood that X will occur given Y. The human brain apparently has two natural states when it comes to disease…
Which States Policies Were Best (and Do Masks “Work” Part Deux)
A few months ago I published an analysis about whether generalized mask wearing "worked". That analysis showed, to my surprise, that if a state population consistently wore masks at a rate greater than the median, they would slow the speed of spread over time by about half versus states that had below median mask usage.…
Is COVID-19 almost “over”?
When is all this nonsense going to be over? Don't you want to know? Everyone wants to get back to normal and, with several highly effective (per initial trials) vaccines beginning distribution, we can kinda, sorta, if we squint real hard, see an end. Maybe soon? When this started it seemed like it wouldn't be…
Erik on Medical Informatics... 