Gro-Tsen Profile picture
22 Dec, 4 tweets, 1 min read
Tuberculosis kills roughly¹ as many people EVERY YEAR as covid-19 did in 2020. Yet the efforts deployed in fighting them are nowhere comparable.

1. Both counts are probably underestimations, so it's hard to say exactly, but the order of magnitude is around 1.5 to 2M people.
(And that is, of course, a very biased comparison because covid is emerging and TB is already endemic: if we did nothing about covid there is no question that in a few years it would resemble the common cold far more than TB in terms of numbers of deaths.)
There are of course many technical obstacles to developing a highly effective TB vaccine, but I find it hard to believe that if TB had been given every year even a small fraction of the attention that covid has been given this year, considerable progress wouldn't be made by now.
So all of us, and I include myself, who would be tempted to designate covid as the obvious ‘threat of the year’ at least in the ‘respiratory infectious disease’ category, would do well to examine our own biases in evaluating what is important to the mankind.

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More from @gro_tsen

24 Dec
@FanDeFUTGeek Les «astuces» ont en effet quelque chose d'horripilant, et leur culte taupin est malsain. Certaines sont en effet «introuvables», et il est alors normal de ne pas les trouver, d'autres sont devinables mais une bonne correction devrait expliquer comment on y pense. •1/8
@FanDeFUTGeek Malheureusement, il n'est sans doute pas évident de trouver des endroits où des exercices sont présentés avec non seulement une correction mais aussi une explication de comment on pouvait arriver à cette approche. •2/8
@FanDeFUTGeek À défaut, je dirais que plutôt que multiplier les exercices, il vaut mieux prendre le temps de regarder chacun de façon approfondie, surtout si la technique a semblé mystérieuse: dans quel cadre peut-elle resservir? que nous apprend-elle? comment peut-on la modifier? •3/8
Read 9 tweets
18 Dec
Je vais essayer de faire un petit peu de vulgarisation sur la difficulté d'interpréter causalement des statistiques de corrélation avec un exemple inventé tout simple. On cherche à savoir si les baguettes magiques étaient mieux avant. •1/19
Pour ça, on a fait des statistiques sur 100 bagues selon trois dimensions:
⁃ l'âge: la baguette est ancienne (A) ou récente (R);
⁃ la complexité: la baguette est simple (S) ou complexe (C);
⁃ si elle fonctionne bien (B) ou mal (M).
Ceci fait donc 2×2×2=8 possibilités. •2/19
Voici les statistiques qu'on a obtenues, sur un échantillon de 100 baguettes tirées au hasard:
⁃ ASM: 10
⁃ ACB: 30
⁃ ACM: 10
⁃ RSB: 10
⁃ RSM: 30
⁃ RCB: 10
(les deux autres possibilités, ASB et RCM, ne sont pas représentées). •3/19
Read 19 tweets
18 Dec
Le mec grâce auquel on a confiné 67M de Français pendant des mois parce qu'il était impensable que les gens réagissent comme des adultes explique maintenant que «c'est à vous de voir où vous voulez placer le curseur» pour Noël. 😒
Bordel, s'il y a UN moment où j'étais partisan de mesures strictes, c'était pour les fêtes de fin d'année (‌‌), mais comme le président de la République se fait pincer à faire des repas à N>6, on va nous expliquer qu'en fait c'est normal.
Et/ou parce que les Français trouvent plus important de pouvoir se retrouver deux soirs dans l'année à fêter en grands groupes que de ne pas être enfermés chez eux pendant des mois.
Read 4 tweets
17 Dec
Typography ∩ map porn: a map of Europe by dominant quotation mark styles: jakubmarian.com/map-of-quotati… (red: «x»; yellow: “x”; brown: „x“; green: „x”; blue: ”x”). I didn't realize there were so many.
I have to say, while I find all of «x», »x«, “x”, ‘x’ and „x“ (or even ‹x›, ›x‹ and ‚x‘ if anyone wants to use that), as well as "x" and 'x', equally fine, my sense of symmetry is greatly disturbed by styles such as „x” and ”x”. But it's a free world!¹

1. Restrictions apply.
At any rate, this certainly explains why Unicode characters for quotes (U+00AB LEFT-POINTING DOUBLE ANGLE QUOTATION MARK and so on) are NOT mirrored when used right-to-left, unlike parentheses.
Read 4 tweets
16 Dec
I really wish journalists would differentiate a «lockdown», where people are forbidden from leaving their homes (or a short radius around them) or moving around freely, and closure of businesses, which in my mind isn't a «lockdown».

[Screenshot from bbc.com/news/world-eur…‌] Image
(I'm not enthusiastic about closure of non-essential businesses either, but at least I think they don't reach the level of drasticness as putting tens of millions of people effectively in prison for months, which is hard to justify even to save maybe tens of thousands of lives.)
Of course, it's hard to find reliable info on what various countries have done, because apparently the only aggregate data source on stay-at-home orders is ourworldindata.org/grapher/stay-a… — which is so bad in its categories that it's essentially useless.
Read 5 tweets
11 Dec
🧵 A comparison between hydroxychloroquine and lockdowns. ⤵️

Recently I compared lockdown proponents with crackpots who believe 5G causes covid: I admit I shouldn't have written this. But the comparison with HCQ proponents, on the other hand, works very well. Thread: •1/36
Ⓐ So, first, in both cases we have something which is supposed to work against covid for a simple and not completely idiotic reason (i.e., the idea is, at least, worth considering!). •2/36
In the case of hydroxychloroquine (“HCQ” henceafter), the theory is that HCQ could serve as a zinc ionophore, transporting Zn²⁺ into the cytoplasm where it serves to inhibit viral ARN-replicase. •3/36
Read 36 tweets

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