Category: Gordon Hull
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With reference to malaria tracking, I've tried to suggest some of the reasons we don't really know what "Covid cases" means, either insofar as that is measured by positive tests (because we don't know how many more cases there are beyond the tested ones, so tested cases is at best an rough guide to Covid…
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It’s fairly clear that one of the keys to living with Covid-19 is understanding the dynamics of transmission: absent something more nuanced than what we have, “stay 6 feet away from everyone at all times!” becomes the only public health advice that can be given. Getting past the initial maximin strategy requires better data on…
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As Daniele Lorenzini reminds us, the coronavirus pandemic exposes nothing if not the differential precarity of our biopolitics. Sure, biopolitics is about promoting life, but it’s also about deciding that some people can die in order that others may live. The most obvious candidates are “essential” workers in various parts of the supply chain who…
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Recall that before Covid (so about 300 years ago), there was an interesting copyright case percolating through the federal courts. The question concerned the Official Georgia Code Annotated (OGCA), which contains the text of the Georgia Code as well as various annotations. There were two potentially conflicting principles at work. On the one hand, the…
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Remdesivir has been one of the most closely watched potential therapies for COVID-19, and a couple of early cohort and observational studies have been encouraging. But apparently the first results from a randomized controlled trial in China indicate that it did not make a statistically significant difference. At least, it looks that way: results were…
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By now it should be apparent just how little we know about the coronavirus pandemic, from how to treat it to basic facts about what the “number of COVID cases” means. Even “deaths due to COVID” turns out to be difficult: both New York and UK have revised their numbers up to accommodate likely cases…
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President Nero wants you to know that the U.S. has conducted a bigly number of coronavirus tests, higher than he can count, and maybe even more tests than there were people at his inauguration! Anyway, the U.S. is still terrible at COVID testing, as the following chart from Vox reminds us: As the accompanying article…
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Cellphone tracking – whether through geolocation or something like detecting the proximity of bluetooth devices – has been getting a lot of attention for its potential to improve COVID surveillance. Given that there are estimates that a workforce of upwards of 100,000 people would be necessary to get a good contact-tracing regime going in the…
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UPDATE: Here's a nice piece that talks about the complexities of reducing restrictions, framing the overall need in terms of keeping R0 (the number of new infections a given case leads to) from rising much above 1. A new article in Science models our future under the new Coronavirus regime. It is not pretty. A…
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Why would you let a pandemic get in the way of voter suppression? Much better to use it as a tactic of voter suppression. At least, I can't see any other other coherent way to read the Wisconsin GOP and SCOTUS refusal to either delay Wisconsin's vote today, or allow absentee ballots to be delayed. …
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