What's wrong with this notion? Many things: First, it seems to be based on the very recent increase in cases that has been happening mostly in French-speaking Brussels and Wallonia. Before that, Flanders had actually been more affected (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_…).
So, Yascha is looking only at the current pattern, but not at the dynamics. Second, he singles out one variable that might explain the pattern ("cultural attitudes") and claims that's it. That's generally speaking wrong. What about commuting? French-speaking Belgians commute...
...mostly in the French-speaking parts. So some infections introduced into Wallonia and Brussels are very likely to spread only within these areas because almost no one would carry them over to Flanders. That's not culture but potentially very important. Third, Flanders had a bad
...first wave, as I said. So it might be more cautious now as a result than Wallonia and Brussels. Then the important variable wouldn't be culture but severity of the first wave. "Culture" is what's left after taking everything else into account, this hasn't been done here.

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More from @AndreasShrugged

10 Oct
Notion: Gap between excess deaths and confirmed Covid-19 deaths could be "lockdown deaths". Let's test this: (a) States with lockdown but low Covid should have excess deaths from lockdown (b) States without lockdown but Covid shouldn't have excess deaths unexplained by Covid.
For (a), New York had a long lockdown with stay-at-home orders extending into June. But as New York suppressed the virus, both Covid-19 deaths and other excess deaths fell down a cliff simultaneously. So that part of the lockdown deaths theory doesn't hold up. ImageImageImage
For (b), Arkansas adopted only mild measures, no SAH orders. But as Covid-19 deaths went up (blue), also other excess deaths (green) went up above average (orange line). CDC estimates non-Covid excess deaths are 158-1203, compared to 1500 Covid-19 deaths. So (b) doesn't hold up. Image
Read 5 tweets
19 Aug
Two months later and we can apply @nataliexdean's thread to Europe, too: Germany is back to reporting more than 1,000 new daily cases on average, while the median age of cases has dropped to a new low of 32 years (German source: @rki_de situation reports).
The COVID-19 incidence among the two oldest age groups has not risen (yet), as this @rki_de graph shows (h/t: @christoph_rothe). Also number of patients in intensive care is low and stable so far. Image
Part of the increase in cases due to testing? Yes - testing in Germany has just hit a fresh high of 875,000 tests per week. But cases have mostly been rising stronger than testing, pushing the positivity rate from 0.59% to 0.99% temporarily, last week at 0.96%.
Read 7 tweets
12 Aug
Let's see if I got this right: In 2016, the DNC rigged the primaries to shove an unelectable candidate onto the presidential ticket. The reasons they gave for voting for Hillary were: Trump is bad, she would be the first female president. Epic fail. Now...
...in 2020, they've shoved an electable candidate onto the presidential and an unelectable candidate onto the VP ticket. The reasons they are giving for voting Biden are: Trump is still bad, the VP that you didn't want to see as presidential nominee will take over on Day 1, and..
...she would be the first female black President. Am I missing something or is this once again a giant middle finger into the face of the electorate, oozing corruption and manipulation, which was a major reason for why Trump got elected in the first place?
Read 4 tweets
31 Jul
In this clip, @ChrisCuomo claims the US is handling the pandemic worse economically because US GDP ("growth"?!) contracted by 33% while Germany's GDP contracted by 10% in Q2/2020. This comparison is incorrect and misleading. The 33% are an annual rate, the 10% a quarterly change.
This is apples-to-oranges. The annual (or annualized) rate presumes that the contraction would be the same for the entire year as from Q1 to Q2. So if the quarterly change from Q1 to Q2 is bad, the annualized growth rate will look terrible because you compound bad contractions.
The German -10.1% contraction simply compares Q2 to Q1 in 2020. What's the corresponding % for the US? It's -9.5% (you can find that easily at the NYT)! So when comparing apples-to-apples, the US economy contracted LESS than the German one from Q1 to Q2!
Read 6 tweets
17 Jul
TGIF, finally time to debunk: No, the survival rate of COVID-19 isn't 99.96% according to the most recent evidence! The survival rate in % is 100 minus infection fatality rate. The infection fatality rate (IFR) isn't 0.04% for the general population, it's rather 10 times as high.
The @CDCgov looks at some scenarios and says their Current Best Estimate for the IFR is 0.0065 - which is 0.65%. This puts the survival rate at 99.35%. The number of deaths would be more than 16 times as high as if the survival rate were 99.96%. cdc.gov/coronavirus/20…
A shortcoming of reporting a single IFR for the total population is that in case of COVID-19, the IFR differs a lot by age. In Geneva (CH), it's estimated to be <0.01%...for people below age 50! For people age 65+, the credible interval is 4.3% to 7.4%. thelancet.com/pdfs/journals/…
Read 4 tweets
13 Jul
Latest #coronavirus hoax is a @Medium story whose author claims "It is likely that a large number of the daily reported infection numbers are purely due to viral debris." One question sufficient to debunk it: Why then are infections rising in the U.S. but not in Western Europe?
His theory goes that immunity is already wide-spread and PCR tests are just reporting a lot of false positives due to viral debris. If this was true, this should happen everywhere where the virus has been around for a while - like Western Europe. But it's not happening there.
Within the US, New York should be reporting a lot of false positives due to viral debris, as it's still testing a lot, if the theory were true - but it isn't; new cases in NY are low. The theory also doesn't square with hospitalizations rising in states with high reported cases.
Read 6 tweets

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