California Literary Review: What coronavirus costs to the Italian cultural heritage.. “Given that Italy’s is generally considered the world’s richest cultural heritage, maintenance of its historic monuments and museum, with exhibits dating from the early Neolithic era through today’s avantgarde, is costly. But with international tourism virtually at the end for an indefinite period because … Continue reading California Literary Review: What coronavirus costs to the Italian cultural heritage.

Institute of Cancer Research: Scientists bring together world’s coronavirus research in ‘intelligent’ online database. “Scientists have created a dynamic database driven by artificial intelligence which is collecting together the world’s research on coronavirus in a single online space. The new resource will make freely available vast amounts of data on the biology and treatment of … Continue reading Institute of Cancer Research: Scientists bring together world’s coronavirus research in ‘intelligent’ online database

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: ‘We have to test more people’: Wisconsin expands coronavirus testing for African American, Latino and tribal communities. “All African Americans, Latinos and tribal community members in Wisconsin will have access to free COVID-19 testing under a plan announced Thursday by Gov. Tony Evers. Evers’ plan is an effort to combat the staggering … Continue reading ‘We have to test more people’: Wisconsin expands coronavirus testing for African American, Latino and tribal communities (Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)

Jerusalem Post: Meet the 107-year-old woman who survived the coronavirus and Spanish flu. “After Marilee Shapiro Asher was admitted to the hospital in mid-April sick with COVID-19, her daughter got a call from the doctor telling her she ought to get down there right away. Her mother likely had only 12 hours to live. ‘Well, … Continue reading Jerusalem Post: Meet the 107-year-old woman who survived the coronavirus and Spanish flu

Early on when the corona pandemic did start in China, the Johns Hopkins University (JHU) did start to build a dashboard to monitor the number of infected cases and the number of patients that died from the disease. The numbers are certainly taken with great care, but as soon as the virus spread outside China […]

Josh Spiegel talks about the Coronavirus and unleashes a torrent of blame on China and its eating habits.

Confused about Coronavirus? You’re not alone. Josh Spiegel gives many examples of the mixed messages that have been circulating.

The Guthrie's plans for three shows would be the briefest season in its 60-year history. Among the cuts: "A Christmas Carol."

The number of cases of coronavirus in Maryland continues to rise.

He talked to C4 about the "confusing" and unprecedented dual elections ahear.

Kweisi Mfume returns to Washington in chaotic times.

The number of cases of coronavirus in Maryland continues to rise.

Bracing the nation for a death toll that could exceed 100,000 people, President Trump on Sunday extended restrictive social distancing guidelines through April.

The Maryland Department of Health on Sunday announced five new deaths as a result of COVID-19.

The number of cases of coronavirus in Maryland continues to rise.

Flavio Bartmann writes: Over the last few days, as COVID-19 posed some serious issues for policy makers who, both in the US and elsewhere, have employed statistical models to develop mitigation strategies, a number of non-statisticians have criticized the use of such models as useless or worse. A typical example is this article by Victor […]

I’d still go with this article by Ed Yong, which covers biology, epidemiology, medicine, and politics. Here’s one bit: In 2018, when writing about whether the U.S. was ready for the next pandemic, I [Yong] noted that the country was trapped in a cycle of panic and neglect. It rises to meet each new disease, […]

Josh Rushton writes: I’ve been following your blog for a while and checked in today to see if there was a thread on last week’s big-splash Stanford antibody study (the one with the shocking headline that they got 50 positive results in a “random” sample of 3330 antibody tests, suggesting that nearly 2% of the […]

  This post is by Phil Price, not Andrew. I’m going to say right up front that I’m not going to give sources for everything I say here, or indeed for most of it. If you want to know where I get something, please do a web search. If you can’t find a source quickly, […]

In comments, Joshua Ellinger points to this news article headlined, “Hundreds of thousands in L.A. County may have been infected with coronavirus, study finds,” reporting: The initial results from the first large-scale study tracking the spread of the coronavirus in [Los Angeles] county found that 2.8% to 5.6% of adults have antibodies to the virus […]

Kostya Medvedovsky writes: I wanted to direct your attention to the University of Texas COVID-19 Modeling Consortium’s new projections. They’re very similar to the IMHE model you’ve covered before, and had some calibration issues. However, per the writeup by Spencer Woody et al., they do three things you may be interested in: They fix an […]

Uros Seljak writes: You may be interested in our Gaussian Process counterfactual analysis of Italy mortality data that we just posted. Our results are in a strong disagreement with the Stanford seropositive paper that appeared on Friday. Their work was all over the news, but is completely misleading and needs to be countered: they claim […]

The following came in the email: I’m a reporter for **, and am looking for comment on the stats Gov Cuomo just released. Would you be available for a 10-minute phone conversation? Please let me know. Thanks so much, and here’s the info: Here is the relevant part: In New York City, about 21 percent, […]

Here are some things people have sent me lately. They are in no particular order, except that I put the last item last so we could end with some humor. After this, I’ll write a few more blog posts, then it’ll be time to do some real work. Table of contents 1. Suspicious coronavirus numbers […]

Raghu Parthasarathy writes: I’ve been frustrated by Covid-19 pandemic models, for the opposite reason that I’m usually frustrated by models in science—they seem too simple, when the usual problem with models is over-complexity. Instead of doing more useful things, I wrote this up here. In his post, Parthasarathy writes: Perhaps the models we’re seeing are […]

Last week we discussed the Santa Clara county study, in which 1.5% of the people tested positive for coronavirus. The authors of the study performed some statistical adjustments and summarized with a range of 2.5% to 4.2% for infection rates in the county as a whole, leading to an estimated infection fatality rate of 0.12% […]

This post is by Phil Price, not Andrew. There a couple of things that some people who comment here already know, but some do not, leading to lots of discussion in the comments that keeps rehashing these issues. I’m hoping that by just putting these here I can save some effort. 1. The ‘infection fatality […]

The talk will be sometime the morning of Wed 6 May in this seminar. Title: Some statistical issues in the fight against coronavirus. Abstract: To be a good citizen, you sometimes have to be a bit of a scientist. To be a good scientist, you sometimes have to be a bit of a statistician. And […]

The other day I wrote about the challenge in addressing the pandemic—a worldwide science/engineering problem—using our existing science and engineering infrastructure, which is some mix of government labs and regulatory agencies, private mega-companies, smaller companies, university researchers, and media entities and rich people who can direct attention and resources. The current system might be the […]

Seth Flaxman et al. have an updated version of their model of coronavirus progression. Flaxman writes: Countries with successful control strategies (for example, Greece) never got above small numbers thanks to early, drastic action. Or put another way: if we did China and showed % of population infected (or death rate), we’d erroneously conclude that […]

Joseph Candelora in comments pointed to this updated report on the Santa Clara study we discussed last week. The new report is an improvement on the first version. Here’s what I noticed in a quick look: 1. The summary conclusion, “The estimated population prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in Santa Clara County implies that the infection […]

tl;dr: Their 95% interval for the infection rate, given the data available, is [0.7%, 1.8%]. My Bayesian interval is [0.3%, 2.4%]. Most of what makes my interval wider is the possibility that the specificity and sensitivity of the tests can vary across labs. To get a narrower interval, you’d need additional assumptions regarding the specificity […]

1. The news! Zad’s cat, pictured above, is not impressed by this bit of cargo-cult science that two people sent to me: No vaccine or effective treatment has yet been found for people suffering from COVID-19. Under the circumstances, a physician in Kansas City wonders whether prayer might make a difference, and he has launched […]

Anthony Fowler wrote a wonderful op-ed. You have to read the whole thing, but let me start with his most important point, about “the temptation to overclaim” in social science: One study estimated the economic value of the people spared through social-distancing efforts. Essentially, the authors took estimates from epidemiologists about the number of lives […]

The University of Washington in Seattle is a big place. It includes the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), which has produced a widely-circulated and widely-criticized coronavirus model. As we’ve discussed, the IHME model is essentially a curve-fitting exercise that makes projections using the second derivative of the time trend on the log scale. […]