Archive for The Guardian
northern gannets rock
Posted in Kids, pictures, Travel with tags Bass Rock, Edinburgh, Firth of Forth, fou de Bassan, ISBA 2018, North Berwick, northern gannets, Scotland, Scottish Seabird Centre, Tantallon Castle, The Guardian, wildlife photography on May 9, 2021 by xi'an
on Astra and clots
Posted in Books, Kids, pictures, Statistics with tags Astra, AstraZeneca, causality, COVID-19, David Spiegelhalter, deep vein thrombosis, evidence, hydroxychloroquine, margarine, The Guardian, United Kingdom, University of Oxford, vaccine on March 16, 2021 by xi'an
A tribune this morning in The Guardian by David Spiegelhalter on having no evidence that the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine causes blood clots.
“It’s a common human tendency to attribute a causal effect between different events, even when there isn’t one present: we wash the car and the next day a bird relieves itself all over the bonnet. Typical.”
David sets the 30 throboembolic events among the 5 million people vaccinated with AstraZeneca in perpective of the expected 100 deep vein thromboses a week within such a population. Which coincides with the UK’s Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency statement that the blood clots are in par with the expected numbers in the vaccinated population. (The part of the tribune about the yellow card reports, based on 10 million vaccinated people, reiterates the remark but may prove confusing to some!) As for hoping for a rational approach to the issue, … we would need a different type of vaccine, far from being available! As demonstrated by the decision to temporarily stop vaccinating with this vaccine, causing sure additional deaths in the coming weeks.
“Will we ever be able to resist the urge to find causal relationships between different events? One way of doing this would be promoting the scientific method and ensuring everyone understands this basic principle. Testing a hypothesis helps us see which hunches or assumptions are correct and which aren’t. In this way, randomised trials have proved the effectiveness of some Covid treatments and saved vast numbers of lives, while also showing us that some overblown claims about treatments for Covid-19, such as hydroxychloroquine and convalescent plasma, were incorrect.”
when G stands for gaffe [and Guardian]
Posted in Statistics with tags gaffe, homophobia, International Women's Day, La Manif pour Tous, medically assisted procreation, reproductive rights, The Guardian on March 13, 2021 by xi'an
race against COVID [mural]
Posted in Books, Kids, pictures, Running, Travel with tags Africa, COVID-19, Kenya, mural, Nairobi, pandemic, The Guardian, weekend edition on March 7, 2021 by xi'an
Xs Xplain’d
Posted in Statistics with tags coronavirus epidemics, COVID-19, David Spiegelhalter, demographics, excess deaths, mortality chart, Our World in Data, pandemic, The Guardian, UK, USA on January 31, 2021 by xi'an
David Spiegelhalter is starting a column in The Guardian about COVID-19, the first installment being about excess death statistics. Arguing rightly that it is “fairer to look at what has happened to the total number of deaths”, since this is an objective quantity (in countries with trustworthy death statistics). The discussion on how many of the excess deaths can be attributed to the pandemic is somewhat confusing, though, as little can be said with enough confidence, between the positive impact (flu deaths have plummeted, 30% less traffic deaths in France, &tc.) and the negative impact (stress, harsher economic or social conditions, &tc.) A worthy warning: the deficit in “other” deaths during the second wave is partly due to the extra deaths during the first wave, esp. for fragile and elderly persons.
