Fewer than 500 American children have died of COVID-19
Find more statistics at Statista There are 258 confirmed deaths of COVID-19 for children. This is probably an underestimate, but I doubt it’s a two-fold underestimate. There are 74 million […]
On COVID-19 origins and conspiracies
At NRO Jim Geraghty has a piece, The Wuhan Lab-Leak Hypothesis Goes Mainstream, where he links to the piece in New York Magazine, The Lab-Leak Hypothesis: For decades, scientists have […]
Selection in E Asians due to coronavirus epidemics
The above map shows cumulative coronavirus cases. One of the things that I’m still confused by are some geographic patterns. For example, Thailand with 70 million people has had fewer […]
Totally Under Control—A Review
Alex Gibney’s Totally Under Control revisits a time, the legacy of which still haunts us. Spanning the period between January of 2020 and late spring of 2020, his new documentary traces the rise of the pandemic which has become a defining feature of our time. A New York Times headline on January 21st read “China Confirms New Coronavirus Spreads From Humans to Humans.” The full horror of mass deaths and economic lockdown hadn’t dawned on the world yet. Even in Wuhan there wasn’t full comprehension of what was to come. Nevertheless, the next day President Donald Trump was asked if he was worried about the pandemic and responded that “We have it totally under control.” Obviously, Trump was wrong. Totally Under Control is squarely focused on the bungling, mismanagement, and incoherence of the Trump administration. Gibney’s documentary is fundamentally a chronicle of the lopsided match between the COVID-19 pandemic and the Trump administration. As a point of contrast, Gibney focuses on the coherent and concerted efforts of America’s Pacific Rim ally, South Korea. The comparison …
Alex Gibney’s Totally Under Control revisits a time, the legacy of which still haunts us. Spanning the period between January of 2020 and late spring of 2020, his new documentary traces the rise of the pandemic which has become a defining feature of our time. A The pareto principle and stochasticity in COVID-19
Most of you know difference between parameters such as mean and standard deviation. Or, that distributions have variable dispersion or multi-modalities. Standard stuff. In relation to COVID-19 it was clear early on that “superspreader events” were critical. That in fact, these events were driving the pandemic in some deep way, with there being huge variance […]
A possible reason for inter-regional differences in COVID-19 prevalence?
There have been striking differences in COVID-19 severity/penetration by region. There are all sorts of reasons posited. This post from Derek Lowe at In The Pipeline, New Data on T Cells and the Coronavirus, suggests a possibility: And turning to patients who have never been exposed to either SARS or the latest SARS CoV-2, this […]
Using 23andMe/Ancestry/Family Tree DNA to identify risk allele for respiratory failure with COVID-19
Several people have asked about the risk haplotype in the post below. If you have been genotyped on Ancestry, 23andMe, and Family Tree DNA (unless you are on 23andMe after summer of 2017) there is one SNP in high LD with the causal variant you can look up. It’s rs10490770. The risk allele is C […]
Neanderthal introgression at COVID-19 severity locus at high frequency in South Asians
To review, as most of you know about ~2% of the ancestry outside of Africa is attributable to ancestry form Neanderthals. The fraction is a bit higher in East Asia, a bit lower in Europe, and lower still in the Near East. That being said, a disproportionate fraction of the Neanderthal ancestry is found in […]
A risk factor for COVID-19 in South Asians
The major genetic risk factor for severe COVID-19 is inherited from Neandertals: A recent genetic association study (Ellinghaus et al. 2020) identified a gene cluster on chromosome 3 as a risk locus for respiratory failure in SARS-CoV-2. Recent data comprising 3,199 hospitalized COVID-19 patients and controls reproduce this and find that it is the major …
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Late spring in the age of coronavirus
I haven’t posted on COVID-19 in a while. What’s there to say? The last month or so has been a great muddle. We soldier on, without purpose or direction. At least here in the United States of America. In regards to the pandemic, we’re in, all I can say is that I feel a sense […]
Not too many young are dying from COVID-19
When does COVID-19 get more dangerous than the flu? The CDC has some deaths listed for COVID-19. It also has deaths recorded for influenza. These are not perfect records, but, they give us a general comparative sense. The total count in their data for the column I’ve plotting is about half of or so of […]
India’s COVID-19 heterogeneity
Find more statistics at Statista
The role of obesity in the COVID-19 crisis
There has been a fair amount of anecdotal and a bit of statistical evidence that obesity is somehow associated with individuals who have worse progression of COVID-19. The data out of China I saw wasn’t significant statistically speaking. The problem? There didn’t seem to be enough obese people in their samples. Then anecdotes and some […]
COVID-19, another panic?
Michael Fumento became prominent with his provocative book, The myth of heterosexual AIDS. On the whole I think Fumento’s point, that HIV-AIDS was not a major issue outside of “at-risk” groups in the United States, was the correct one. I grew up as part of a generation that was taught about HIV-AIDS in a very […]
Learning from variation in Northern Italy in response to COVID-19
One of the major issues when discussing pretty much anything is the tendency to aggregate nations into a single unit and then compare to other nations that are not comparable. For example, the United States is a federal republic of 330 million people. New York state is not Washington state. And neither is Texas. The […]
Perhaps the Chinese government is not covering up the number of Covid-19 cases?
A big debate on the internet is whether China is covering up the number of cases of Covid-19 in Hubei, and more specifically Wuhan. Right now JHU says that China has 82,000 confirmed cases, as opposed to 300,000 in the USA. Both are underestimates, but there are those who believe that the Chinese death toll […]
COVID-19 and its environmental conditions
A friend of mine recently quipped that everyone seems to act like probability can be assigned two values 0 or 1. The same sort of logic seems to apply when it comes to talking about the environmental parameters which might affect the progress of COVID-19, such as temperature, humidity, and density. Many people seem to […]
Browncast episode 88: Phillipe Lemoine, covid-19 “optimism”
Another BP Podcast is up. You can listen on Libsyn, Apple, Spotify, and Stitcher (and a variety of other platforms). Probably the easiest way to keep up the podcast since we don’t have a regular schedule is to subscribe to one of the links above! You can also support the podcast as a patron. The primary benefit now is that you get the …
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