Dissident Veteran For Peace

I complain about the routine dishonesty of mainstream and Left media outlets because they are my main sources of news and commentary. However, I have zero illusions about the routine accuracy and integrity of Right media outlets.

A case in point is a recent article by Jordan Davidson on the site of The Federalist titled: "Major Study Finds Masks Don't Reduce COVID-19 Infection Rates". In the body of Davidson's article it is claimed: "A high-quality, large-scale Danish study finds no evidence that wearing a face mask significantly minimizes people's risk of contracting COVID-19." 

However, right in the Danish article's abstract the authors, Bundgaard et al., state: "Although the difference observed was not statistically significant, the 95% CIs are compatible with a 46% reduction to a 23% increase in infection."

Davidson writes: 

After a month, 42 of the mask-wearers in the study (1.8 percent) were infected with the virus while 53 of the non-mask-wearers (2.1. percent) were infected with the virus. Statistically, this is not a significant difference between the two groups, suggesting these infection differences were a product of chance, say the study authors.

Echoing similar misinformation from the New York Times, Davidson again misleads her readers by misrepresenting the meaning and importance of a lack of statistical significance.* In fact, Bundgaard et al. use the word "chance" exactly nowhere in their article. They actually describe their findings as "inconclusive" rather than attributable to mere "chance".

In the "Discussion" section of the Bundgaard et al. article it says:

The findings ... should not be used to conclude that a recommendation for everyone to wear masks in the community would not be effective in reducing SARS-CoV-2 infections, because the trial did not test the role of masks in source control of SARS-CoV-2 infection. [emphasis added]

In other words, Davidson did exactly what the authors said she shouldn't do based on their work.

In the "Discussion" the authors again note that one of several limitations of their study was that it made "no assessment of whether masks could decrease disease transmission from mask wearers to others." In other words, the study offers no evidence about whether masks do or don't prevent COVID-19 infected mask wearers from infecting other people.

Moreover, as Bundgaard et al. indicate in their "Intervention" section, they were testing the effects of "no mask recommendation" versus "a recommendation to wear a mask". They were not testing masks or mask wearing per se. Also, only "46% of participants wore the mask as recommended" but Bundgaard et al. did not exclude from their results people in the mask recommendation group who were "predominantly" but not fully compliant with the mask recommendation. Only the 7% whose compliance was characterized as "not as recommended" were excluded.

In short, the Danish study says what pretty much any sensible person already realized—masks alone are not a silver bullet but there is evidence that they do help reduce the spread of COVID-19 from infected people to non-infected mask wearers.

Liar, manipulators, and incompetents working in the media depend upon the fact that most people will never question their reporting or never question it enough to do their own research. It also bears remembering that reporters and editors are also fallible humans—not every error or falsehood reported is deliberate. In any case, when it comes to important matters never blindly trust a media outlet (or a politician) to be accurate or honest.

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* A note on "statistical significance": Davidson is not alone in botching the reporting on "statistical significance" the Danish authors do it, too. In 2019's, "Moving to a World Beyond 'p < 0.05' " the editors of the journal of the American Statistical Association write:

... it is time to stop using the term "statistically significant" entirely. Nor should variants such as "significantly different," "p < 0.05," and "nonsignificant" survive, whether expressed in words, by asterisks in a table, or in some other way.

Regardless of whether it was ever useful, a declaration of "statistical significance" has today become meaningless. Made broadly known by Fisher's use of the phrase (1925), Edgeworth's (1885) original intention for statistical significance was simply as a tool to indicate when a result warrants further scrutiny. But that idea has been irretrievably lost. Statistical significance was never meant to imply scientific importance, and the confusion of the two was decried soon after its widespread use (Boring 1919). Yet a full century later the confusion persists.

They also offer this guidance:

• Don't base your conclusions solely on whether an association or effect was found to be "statistically significant" (i.e., the p-value passed some arbitrary threshold such as p < 0.05).
• Don't believe that an association or effect exists just because it was statistically significant.
• Don't believe that an association or effect is absent just because it was not statistically significant.
• Don't believe that your p-value gives the probability that chance alone produced the observed association or effect or the probability that your test hypothesis is true.
• Don't conclude anything about scientific or practical importance based on statistical significance (or lack thereof).

Labels: COVID-19, critical thinking, health, media, science, statistics

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Labels: COVID-19, health, medicine, science, statistics

ALL MODELS ARE WRONG BUT SOME ARE USEFUL

     Now it would be very remarkable if any system existing in the real world could be exactly represented by any simple model. However, cunningly chosen parsimonious models often do provide remarkably useful approximations. For example, the law PV = RT relating pressure P, volume V, and temperature T of an "ideal" gas via a constant R is not exactly true for any real gas, but it frequently provides a useful approximation and furthermore its structure is informative since it springs from a physical view of the behavior of gas molecules. For such a model there is no need to ask the question "Is the model true?". If "truth" is to be the "whole truth" the answer must be "No". The only question of interest is "Is the model illuminating and useful?"

Source: G. E. P. Box., "Robustness in the Strategy of Scientific Model Building" in Robert L. Launer; Graham N. Wilkinson, Robustness in Statistics, Academic Press (New York, 1979), pp. 202–203.

Labels: critical thinking, quotations, science, statistics

Don't be deceived, COVID-19 is more lethal and more infectious than the normal annual influenza outbreaks. As one example, in roughly three weeks COVID-19 has already killed almost as many people in the Seattle area (King, Snohomish, and Pierce counties) alone as have died so far from the flu (lab-confirmed cases) in the entire State of Washington during the 2019-2020 flu season and COVID-19 shows no sign of slowing down yet. In part, this is because almost no one has any natural or vaccine-induced immunity to COVID-19 as it is "novel" and there is no vaccine for it.

Everywhere that COVID-19 has infected large numbers of people it has quickly overwhelmed the local health care system. That means the death toll from COVID-19 is added on to the existing, more routine causes of death from heart disease, cancer, influenza, accidents, etc. and the rapid influx of those sick from this new disease impairs the health care system's capacity to manage more typical cases of disease and trauma.

If unchecked by effective public health measures or natural immunity COVID-19 has exponential growth rates of infection and death (see also here and here and here) although the death curve is much flatter because the disease does not kill at nearly the same rate as it infects or sickens people. As of today, the global COVID-19 fatality rate (deaths divided by aggregate confirmed infections) is about 4.1%.

We know that the actual fatality rate is probably significantly lower than 4.1% because not everyone who has been infected has been tested. In South Korea, where there are high rates of testing and a very successful public health response, the fatality rate is about 1.2%. By contrast, the US 2018-2019 influenza fatality rate was about 0.1%. (There are a lot of factors, such as quality of the health care system, mean population age, smoking rates, etc., that influence fatality rates.)

Below, from the University of Washingon Novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) Infection Map, are two images (click to enlarge) showing the exponential growth of COVID-19 infections and deaths in the US and Italy.



The graphic below demonstrates that exponential growth of infection and death from COVID-19 can be arrested. South Korea had its first confirmed COVID-19 death on February 21 and in about three weeks it had stopped the initial exponential growth of infections. The number of COVID-19 deaths there is currently 102. China, too, after early missteps has reportedly stopped local transmission of COVID-19 altogether.



We did have earlier warnings to alert us to the potential of a dangerous viral pandemic. In addition to the Spanish Flu (1918; 25,000,000 - 100,000,000 deaths), there was the Asian flu (1957; 1,000,000 - 2,000,000 deaths), Hong Kong flu (1968; 1,000,000 - 4,000,000 deaths), SARS-CoV (2002; 774 deaths), H1N1 flu (2009; 151,000 - 575,000 deaths), and MERS-CoV (2012; 862 - 912 deaths). MERS is notable because it has a high fatality rate (~37%) and continues to infect and kill people every year. With few exceptions, the media, public health community, and politicians of all political stripes failed to alert Americans to the very real dangers of a viral pandemic and the country is, thus, woefully unprepared.

Unfortunately, I am afraid the progression of the COVID-19 in the US will likely resemble Italy's trajectory more closely than South Korea's or China's. I hope I will be proven mistaken in this.

American individualism is, in many ways, pathological and more communal attitudes and behavior are not necessarily antithetical to freedom or a healthy individualism. Whatever their downside, a more community-oriented culture was one factor that evidently contributed to the successful Chinese and South Korean responses to COVID-19.

If competently led, adequately staffed, and sufficiently provisioned, I think America's decentralized health care system could have responded in a coordinated and effective manner. This was not the case, however, and one result has been the very slow roll out of widespread COVID-19 testing that would have enabled the early isolation of infected people. The US also has a warped, hollowed out industrial base that has left it dependent on the importation of key health care supplies—masks, drugs, reagents, gloves, ventilators, etc.—that were seemingly not stockpiled and/or aren't being distributed in sufficient quantities.

Chinese health officials were able to successfully confine the COVID-19 outbreak to primarily one region of the country and then bring the resources of the rest of the country to bear in order to tamp down the disease. Unfortunately, for reasons described above, the US has failed to keep the outbreak of disease concentrated in one or two regions.

The result is that the COVID-19 is now, apparently, spreading exponentially in every US state. The first US death from COVID-19 was on February 29, 2020. Since that time Washington has had 82 more deaths, New York 43, California 24, Louisiana and Georgia 14 each, New Jersey 11, and Florida 10. COVID-19 deaths have been reported in several other states, too. The wide geographic dispersion of infections in the US will likely make it immensely difficult to bring COVID-19 under control quickly. Again, I hope I am proven wrong in this.

By the end of next week we may start to see how effective efforts to flatten the curve have been in Washington state. However, even if they have been effective the state has already fallen far short in comparison to South Korea. Consider the table below based on the 2018 populations.


So what is to be done? For those on the medical front lines of the struggle and those directly supporting them the path is pretty clear. The rest of us need to support those folks and each other. Don't panic, don't hoard. Don't worry about getting sick but do take scientifically supported steps to help prevent it.

For those who are able to do so, physical distancing and staying home as much as possible is probably the most critical task now. If you're not concerned about your own well-being then think about the others you might expose if you do get sick or the health resources you might take up that could have been used by someone who had a heart attack or a child hit by a car.

See also: "A Few Thoughts on COVID-19 - Part II"

Labels: COVID-19, government, health, medicine, politics, science, statistics

In "The Magic Jew in the Village" I wrote about how author David J. Smith apparently cooked-the-books to ensure there would be at least one Jew in If The World Were A Village. Recently, I watched the 1970 film Patton and a similar occurrence caught my eye. At about 36:53 into the film General George S. Patton, played by George C. Scott, is shown visiting an American military cemetery in North Africa. As the camera pans right, Scott walks left and pauses just behind a Star of David grave marker. In the entire cemetery scene I counted three Stars of David and sixteen crosses. That would indicate that 15.8% of the graves belonged to Jewish soldiers. How plausible is such a percentage?

Well, Patton led US troops in 1942 and 1943. So, the closest US census data is from 1940. In 1940, the low estimate for the US Jewish population was 4,770,000 and the overall US population was 134,146,298. Thus, the low estimate for the percentage of the US population that was Jewish in 1940 was 3.6%. According to the Jewish Virtual Library, 550,000 Jews "served in every branch of the armed forces of the United States" during World War II and "11,000 Jews were killed, 7,000 in combat." According to a 2010 report prepared by the Congressional Research Service, "American War and Military Operations Casualties: Lists and Statistics," 16,112,566 US military personnel served in WW II with 405,399 total deaths, including 291,557 battle deaths.

Therefore, Jews comprised 3.4% of US military personnel in WW II and suffered just 2.7% of total deaths and 2.4% of combat deaths. The data indicate then that Jews served in the US military in WW II in numbers roughly proportionate to their share of the US population but they died in disproportionately lower numbers compared to non-Jews. Thus, we conclude that there are good grounds for believing there are magic—i.e. contrived, fabricated—Jews in that cemetery scene in Patton. This conclusion is further bolstered when we look at actual photos from the only American military cemetery in North Africa (see images below) where you see nothing like 15.8% of the graves being marked with Stars of David. What else would you expect from Hollywood?

Labels: Hollywood, Jews, military, statistics, War

The image below (click to enlarge) is from "Transparency: America's Wealthiest Religions. An earlier "tranparency" gives the following proportions of the US population in 2008:

• Baptist 15.8%
• Jewish 1.2%
• Catholic 25.1%
• Generic Christian 14.2%
• Muslim 0.6%
• Mainline Christian 12.9%

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Labels: class, religion, statistics, United States

So, I was watching If The World Were A Village last week and when they got to the discussion of religion they said there would be one Jew in the village and then cut to an image of a Jewish man lighting a menorah. The animated film If The World Were A Village is an adaptation of an illustrated children's book of the same title by David J. Smith. The conceit of both is a village of 100 people proportionately representing the world's population.

Now, I don't look for these things but learning about the plight of Palestinians has sensitized me to lies and distortions about Jews and Judaism. And, thus, the bullshit alarm went off when I saw the segment with the Jew in the village. So, I wondered where did this misinformation come from? I checked out the book and found that it was not an invention of the film makers--it came from the 2002 book by Smith.

In the book Smith claims (p. 12) that "Whenever possible, the most current statistics have been used." One of Smith's sources was the CIA World Factbook. The problem is that source estimates that only 0.23% of the world's population is Jewish. This is consistent with the Jewish and world population estimates by the quasi-governmental (Israeli government, that is) Jewish People Policy Planning Institute (2006) and the UN (2005), respectively. Their estimates are 13,085,000 Jews and 6,514,751,000 people, which works out to 0.20%. From another of Smith's sources, infoplease.com, we can calculate a 1990 estimate of 0.34%.

All of which means that the Jew in Smith's village is a magic Jew--the real number being multiplied by three to five to make sure we have at least one Jew in the village. Why is that?

Update: Left out of the village are, among others, practitioners of Chinese traditional religion (394 million) and Sikhs (23 million).

Labels: critical thinking, Jews, religion, statistics