Data Analysis, Surprising and Not

Posted on by

Surprising news from The New York Times:

— Actual Coronavirus Infections Vastly Undercounted, C.D.C. Data Shows —

The prevalence of infections is more than 10 times higher than the counted number of cases in six regions of the United States.

The analysis is part of a wide-ranging set of surveys started by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to estimate how widely the virus has spread. Similar studies, sponsored by universities, national governments and the World Health Organization, are continuing all over the world….

“This study underscores that there are probably a lot of people infected without knowing it, likely because they have mild or asymptomatic infection,” said Dr. Fiona Havers, who led the C.D.C. study. “But those people could still spread it to others.”

She emphasized the importance of hand-washing, wearing cloth masks and social distancing to stop the spread of the virus from people without symptoms. [Getting tested is an excellent idea too, even if you have no symptoms.]

The numbers indicate that even in areas hit hard by the virus, an overwhelming majority of people have not yet been infected, said Scott Hensley, a viral immunologist at the University of Pennsylvania….

“Many of us are sitting ducks who are still susceptible …,” he said.

Not surprising news (not surprising at all) from The Washington Post:

Three serious research efforts have put numerical weight — yes, data-driven evidence — behind what many suspected all along: Americans who relied on Fox News, or similar right-wing sources, were duped as the coronavirus began its deadly spread.

Dangerously duped.

The studies “paint a picture of a media ecosystem that amplifies misinformation, entertains conspiracy theories and discourages audiences from taking concrete steps to protect themselves and others,” wrote [The Post’s] Christopher Ingraham in an analysis last week.

Here’s the reality, now backed by numbers:

Those who relied on mainstream sources — the network evening newscasts or national newspapers that President Txxxx constantly blasts as “fake news” — got an accurate assessment of the pandemic’s risks. Those were the news consumers who were more likely to respond accordingly, protecting themselves and others against the disease that has now killed more than 123,000 in the United States with no end in sight.

Those who [like the “Leader of the Free World”] relied on Fox or, say, radio personality Rush Limbaugh, came to believe that vitamin C was a possible remedy, that the Chinese government created the virus in a lab, and that government health agencies were exaggerating the dangers in the hopes of damaging Txxxx politically, a survey showed….

“That’s the real evil of this type of programming,” Arthur West of the Washington League for Increased Transparency and Ethics, … told the Times of San Diego. “We believe it delayed and interfered with a prompt and adequate response to this coronavirus pandemic.”

Unquote.

Mass manslaughter, anyone?

Maybe It’s All Jelly

Posted on by

From The New York Times:

It would be one thing to concede that science may never be able to explain, say, the subjective experiences of the human mind. But the standard take on quantum mechanics suggests something far more surprising: that a complete understanding of even the objective, physical world is beyond science’s reach, since it’s impossible to translate into words how the theory’s math relates to the world we live in.

[Angelo] Bassi, a 47-year-old theoretical physicist at the University of Trieste, in northeastern Italy, is prominent among a tiny minority of rebels in the discipline who reject this conclusion. “I strongly believe that physics is words, in a sense,” he said across the picnic table. [He makes] a case for what a vast majority of his colleagues consider a highly implausible idea: that the theory upon which nearly all of modern physics rests must have something wrong with it — precisely because it can’t be put into words.

Of course, much about quantum mechanics can be said with words. Like the fact that a particle’s future whereabouts can’t be specified by the theory, only predicted with probabilities. And that those probabilities derive from each particle’s “wave function,” a set of numbers that varies over time, as per an equation devised by Erwin Schrödinger in 1925. But because the wave function’s numbers have no obvious meaning, the theory only predicts what scientists may see at the instant of observation — when all the wave function’s latent possibilities appear to collapse to one definitive outcome — and provides no narrative at all for what particles actually do before or after that, or even how much the word “particle” is apropos to the unobserved world. The theory, in fact, suggests that particles, while they’re not being observed, behave more like waves — a fact called “wave-particle duality” that’s related to how all those latent possibilities seem to indicate that an unobserved particle can exist in several places at once….

Bassi’s research is focused on a possible alternative to quantum mechanics, a class of theories called “objective collapse models”…. And [he is] now leading the most ambitious experiment to date that could show that objective collapse actually happens….

The hard part [was making sure the new theory didn’t] contradict any of quantum mechanics’ many unerring predictions. The trick, it turned out, was to endow fundamental particles with some funky new properties.

“You should remove the word ‘particle’ from your vocabulary,” Bassi explains. “It’s all about gelatin. An electron can be here and there and that’s it.”

In this theory, particles are replaced by a sort of hybrid between particles and waves: gelatinous blobs that can spread out in space, split and recombine. And, crucially, the blobs have a kind of built-in bashfulness that explains wave-particle duality in a way that is independent of human observation: When one blob encounters a crowd of others, it reacts by quickly shrinking to a point.

“It’s like an octopus that when you touch them: Whoop!” Bassi says, collapsing his fingertips to a tight bunch to evoke tentacles doing the same.

If objective collapse were to be confirmed, … the way the world works will once again be expressible in words. “Jelly that reacts like an octopus” will be the new “particles subject to forces.” New, exotic phenomena will be identified that could spawn currently inconceivable technologies. Schrödinger’s cat will live or die regardless of who looks or who doesn’t. Even the unpredictability of the subatomic world could turn out to be illusory, a false impression given by our ignorance of octopoid innards.

The Economy, the Virus and Us

Posted on by

Annie Lowery of The Atlantic says that economists have four major concerns regarding the US economy.

(1) The household fiscal cliff:  Government stimulus payments have kept the economy in fairly good shape this spring, despite massive unemployment. However, the stimulus is supposed to end a month from now. Republicans don’t favor renewing it. That will mean  “millions of families just keeping their head above water will sink”. Consumer spending will plummet.

(2) The great business die-off:  “This steep decline in consumer spending will hasten mass business failure… An estimated 100,000 small companies have shut permanently. On top of that, numerous businesses—airlines, restaurants, live-events businesses, hotels, private schools, oil and gas companies—face severe and stubborn slumps….Economists expect that 42 percent of people recently let go will not return to their former employers.

(3) The state and local budget shortfall:  Every state except Vermont is required to balance its budget, but “sales taxes, real-estate-transfer taxes, income taxes, fines and fees—they are all collapsing, leaving local governments with a budget gap expected to total $1 trillion next year. Without help from Washington, this will necessarily mean massive service cuts and job losses: namely, an estimated 5.3 million job losses.

(4) The lingering health crisis:  “The catastrophe of the American government’s management of the … pandemic …  has led to the unnecessary deaths of tens of thousands of people…. The country is reopening with the disease still spreading and maiming and killing, as several states experience a dramatic surge in caseloads. Never getting the pandemic under control means never unleashing the economy…. Ending the pandemic would have been the single best thing the federal government could have done to preserve the country’s wealth, health, and economic functioning. The Txxxx administration, in its hubris, obstinacy, and incompetence, failed to do it.”

“Congress could extend unemployment insurance, offer new help to flailing businesses, send monthly cash grants to poor families, offer fiscal relief to the states, and implement a nationwide test-and-trace program.” Or things may get a lot worse.

From Stat News:

The “respiratory” virus that causes Covid-19 made some patients nauseous. It left others unable to smell. In some, it caused acute kidney injury….The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention constantly scrambled to update its list [of symptoms] in an effort to help clinicians identify likely cases.

[But] in late January, … scientists in China identified one of the two receptors by which the coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, enters cells. It was the same gateway, called the ACE2 receptor, that the original SARS virus used. Studies going back some two decades had mapped the body’s ACE2 receptors, showing that they’re in cells that line the insides of blood vessels — in what are called vascular endothelial cells — in cells of the kidney’s tubules, in the gastrointestinal tract, and even in the testes.

Given that, it’s not clear why the new coronavirus’ ability to wreak havoc from head to toe came as a surprise to clinicians. Since “ACE2 is also the receptor for SARS, its expression in other organs and cell types has been well-known”….

The assumption that infection would first and foremost cause respiratory symptoms was misplaced. In the week before they were diagnosed, Covid-19 patients were 27 times more likely than people who tested negative for the virus to have lost their sense of smell. They were only 2.6 times more likely to have fever or chills, 2.2 times more likely to have trouble breathing or to be coughing, and twice as likely to have muscle aches. For months, government guidelines kept people not experiencing such typical signs of a respiratory infection from getting tested.

Faced with a disease the world had never seen before, physicians are learning as they go. By following the trail of ACE2 receptors, they are more and more prepared to look for, and treat, consequences of SARS-CoV-2 infection well beyond the obvious.

Will Republicans Dump Him Now?

Posted on by

Resignation would be good. Impeachment would take too long.

From The New York Times:

Russia Secretly Offered Afghan Militants Bounties to Kill U.S. Troops, Intelligence Says

The Txxxx administration has been deliberating for months about what to do about a stunning intelligence assessment.

Deliberating or hoping nobody would find out? Wow.

Just Another Thursday

Posted on by

Last night, the Txxxx administration asked the Supreme Court to abolish the Affordable Care Act, even though “Obamacare” has allowed millions of us to get health insurance  and even though, according to the internet, we’re in the midst of a pandemic.

From NBC News:

The Trump administration is asking the Supreme Court to wipe out Obamacare, arguing that the individual mandate is unconstitutional and that the rest of the law must be struck down with it.

The late-night brief, filed Thursday in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic, carries major implications for the presidential election. If the justices agree, it would cost an estimated 20 million Americans their insurance coverage and nullify protections for pre-existing conditions.

The Trump administration’s brief comes as the U.S. has recorded more than 120,000 deaths from COVID-19, with nearly 2.5 million confirmed cases. On Wednesday, the nation hit a new record for the highest daily total of new infections reported with more than 45,500.

In a similar vein, the McSWeeney’s site has a list of 759 offenses committed by the president. It’s called:

LEST WE FORGET THE HORRORS: A CATALOG OF TRUMP’S WORST CRUELTIES, COLLUSIONS, CORRUPTIONS, AND CRIMES.

They’ve color-coded the list:

 – Sexual Misconduct, Harassment, & Bullying
 – White Supremacy, Racism, & Xenophobia
 – Public Statements / Tweets
 – Collusion with Russia & Obstruction of Justice
 – Trump Staff & Administration
 – Trump Family Business Dealings
 – Policy
 – Environment

It doesn’t appear you can search the list by clicking a category. More importantly, the list doesn’t include many cruelties, collusions, corruptions and crimes perpetrated by the terrific people who work for the president. (There have been many crimes, etc.)

But they do offer a link where you can get help registering to vote. It’s a government site, so it’s odd that the administration hasn’t shut it down. Their voter suppression task force must be asleep.

Finally, way back in 1979, Senator Edward Kennedy had trouble answering an interview question: “Why do you want to be president?” His stumbling performance was one of the factors that ended his campaign to replace President Jimmy Carter as the Democratic nominee. (YouTube has a brief history lesson.) Carter subsequently lost to Ronald Reagan, who began ruining the country shortly thereafter.

I bring this up because our president was asked a similar question last night: “What are your top priority items for a second term?” Here’s what he said:

EbZ53wQWkAExka2

What a guy! What a president!

Remember to register and vote. You can see if you’re registered here and start getting registered if you’re not.