Will summer weather slow down the spread of coronavirus? A pair of MIT postdocs have taken a first, very simple stab at answering that question. Their paper is here. They counted up new cases in different countries or US states in 10 day chunks. Then they made a histogram of new cases versus temperature. 90% … Continue reading Coronavirus and the Weather
[5/6/20 update] Remdesivir The big news since my last update was, of course, the NIH study of Remdesivir. Get the results straight from the horse's mouth here. This isn't a scientific paper, just a press release, but a press release from the NIH carries a lot more weight than a press release from a company … Continue reading Coronavirus Treatments
[Update on 3/21/20] Italy: 12 days into their national lockdown, the number of new diagnoses continues to increase. I'm still cautiously optimistic that the true number of new infections peaked on March 9th or 10th. And I still expect the fatalities per day to trend upwards until April 3rd before dropping sharply. New York: The … Continue reading Comparing COVID-19 Growth Rates
There are a lot of epidemiological models flying around right now. They make predictions for what will happen if we enact this or that intervention, or none at all. These models are extremely useful. But they don’t answer the basic question: what is going to happen? They only tell us what to expect conditional on … Continue reading Coronavirus Superforecast
This model is the best one to date describing the basic mechanics of how coronavirus spreads and the effect of different containment measures. I’ll use it as a backdrop for understanding what’s going on, what we should expect to happen, and the likely effects of different interventions. Instead of trying to piece together a clean … Continue reading Base Coronavirus Model
A new study proves that health insurance makes people live longer. It isn’t just an observation that proves a correlation. It’s an experiment that proves a causal relationship. In 2017, the IRS wanted to send letters to 4.5 million households that had paid a tax penalty under Obamacare for not getting health insurance. The letters … Continue reading Health Insurance Saves Lives
Eating red meat is correlated with increased mortality, to the tune of one hour of life per serving. That got me wondering if even a little bit of red meat is bad for you. Maybe there’s some lower threshold where we don’t have to worry about it. It turns out that earlier this year a … Continue reading Harm from Low Level Meat Consumption
Research papers that report differences in mortality between groups almost always report relative risk of all-cause mortality. A few papers report changes in absolute risk with a statement like "+10 per 1000 persons." But how can we convert a number like that to what we actually care about: life expectancy? Intuition suggests that if you … Continue reading Converting Mortality to Life Expectancy
This week, the Annals of Internal Medicine published five new research papers and a commentary arguing that red and processed meat aren’t bad for you. The authors argued that the quality of evidence is low to very low and that the impacts, if they do exist, are small to very small. Other public health scientists, … Continue reading How Not to Get the Meat Sweats
2019 has been an abundant year for observational studies of diet soda. Three new papers have re-analyzed data from four gigantic, long-term, prospective observational trials of nutrition and health. Three of the four trial cohorts ended up showing a correlation between consuming more than two diet sodas per day and an increase in the risk … Continue reading Diet Soda Is Fine
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