Ay @GregSankey@KevinFWarren I can't speak for all the athletes but if I could, I think they'd tell me they wanted you to speak to the presidents to tell them #WeWantToPlay
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Three important pieces posted this past week detailing the incentives to overcount deaths associated with COVID-19. The first published in @Newsweek by @DrJBhattacharya and I. Nearly 450,000 Americans have received funeral expense reimbursement.
A COVID diagnosis makes hospitals eligible for 20% addon payments by CMS for Medicare patients (simply testing + when admitted for any reason). Further, when having COVID on the death certificate, families are eligible for funeral expense reimbursement by FEMA.
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Befuddling NFL officiating in last few minutes of this game:
* Int. grounding called on JB, but not on PM on 2nd & 4 throw that didn't get back to LOS
* Late hit called on PM, but not on JB throw
* Missed hold & block in back on punt
* Two missed holds on PM scramble
To me, I credit Mahomes for making plays, but this game was won by the KC d-line taking advantage of the Cincinnati injuries up front. But the one-sided officiating was shocking.
They sure had a selective memory of the rules regarding late hits:
As some still try to fearmonger on new variants, rise in cases, etc., we are reminded it's baseless.
Here is ave. inpatient census (with) COVID-19 by week (1st axis), w/ave ICU, multiple cause of death & underlying cause (2nd axis). Notice the separation since spring of 2022.
Blue = inpatient beds used for suspected/confirmed COVID
Orange = ICU census w/confirmed COVID
Gray = all deaths with COVID on death certificate
Yellow = all deaths where COVID was listed as primary (underlying) cause.
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Data sources: HHS Reported Inpatient Impact and Hospital Capacity timeseries used for hospital and ICU census where the daily average was used for corresponding weeks.
CDC Wonder MMWR weeks used for weeks ending for multiple and underlying cause of death
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"He led with his shoulder!" many college football fans quipped about an argument of potential targeting.
This thread exposes why people saying that don't understand the targeting rules in college football. To be fair, I don't think the officials apply it evenly, either.
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If you want to follow along, here is a link to the 2022 NCAA official rules book. You can find the targeting of a defenseless player rule on FR-93 (p. 96 of the PDF) in Rule 9, Art. 4
This is a color-coded visualization of risk ratios by month and age group compared to 15-24 used as the reference (how many more times likely a group is likely to see COVID-19 mortality in a month based on per capita rates).
Method: each age group uses April 1, 2020 census estimates as base population and monthly mortality is CDC Wonder underlying cause of death from NCHS.
Per 1M monthly average for 15-24 (1.67 deaths per million) is used as reference. Color scales are set at 30/50/70 percentile.
The reason I do not use younger age groups than 15-24: the mortality is so low in a month, that mortality is often suppressed for privacy reasons by CDC. In other words...it's too low to accurately calculate mortality rates. But you already knew children were at low-risk!
Note that these numbers assume someone is unvaccinated when vaccination status is unknown (as sometimes records don't immediately reflect it upon death).
IRR show a decrease in mortality rates, especially older ages. But the idea that they are preventing all disease is false
This is to say that all those 115,000 were to be assumed unvaccinated, when in reality some were vaccinated but the records did not yet reflect it. This happens frequently and it exaggerates the IRR.