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19 Feb, 5 tweets, 3 min read
A very interesting paper on global excess mortality during COVID-19 from @hippopedoid

"...suggests that the world’s COVID-19 death toll may be at least 1.6 times higher than the reported number of confirmed deaths"
medrxiv.org/content/10.110…
Basically, they predicted excess mortality based on previous years using a linear forecast, and capturing seasonal and other variation in mortality
This came up with some very interesting results. For example, here are the excess mortality curves for Australia/New Zealand with #ZeroCovid
Compare them to two countries with massive COVID-19 outbreaks - Mexico and Russia
Anyway, the paper is worth a read, but the idea that there could be nearly double the number of COVID-19 deaths in the world compared to the confirmed reported ones is quite staggering

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More from @GidMK

Health Nerd Profile picture
19 Feb
The key issue with the Great Barrington Declaration and similar efforts was never about the policy per se, it was the absurd pretence that we could have enormous COVID-19 outbreaks without cost

This was clearly never true
We had more than sufficient evidence by mid-2020 (and earlier) that large COVID-19 outbreaks come with an associated cost. People desperately wanted this to be untrue, despite the very clear reality
And so we got all this obvious misinformation, like the idea that the whole pandemic was just down to false positive results, or that we were all already immune to COVID-19 anyway
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Health Nerd Profile picture
14 Feb
This vitamin D/COVID-19 study has gone viral, because the results appear to be impressive and people love promoting vitamin D

Unfortunately, the study itself is...problematic

Some peer-review on twitter 1/n
2/n The study itself is here papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…

At first glance, it appears to be a randomized controlled trial comparing calcifediol (vitamin D metabolite) to a control for severe COVID-19 with amazing outcomes (60% mortality reduction 👀)
3/n So, if you only glance at the abstract, you get the picture of an amazing positive result for vitamin D

But reading further, the problems start almost immediately
Read 28 tweets
Health Nerd Profile picture
11 Feb
I love this so I made a few more

WAR OF THE FOOTSOLDIERS: all non-pawn/king pieces are replaced with pawns
CHESSCKERS: you now need to 'hop' over a piece to take it. Captures can be prevented by positioning pieces behind other pieces
CHESSGEONS AND DRAGONS: roll a d20 to move your piece - 1-10 = no movement, 11-15 = move as normal, 16-20 = move twice

All pieces must have names. When taking a piece, describe the epic battle
Read 4 tweets
Health Nerd Profile picture
11 Feb
A lot of people have been talking about it, so I thought I might do a bit of a thread on plausible reasons for the decline in COVID-19 cases in places where behaviour hasn't changed much recently 1/n
2/n The basic background is that there are some places across the world where there hasn't been a reportedly huge behavioural change since Nov/Dec last year where cases are dropping, sometimes quite quickly

So what's causing this?
3/n The explanation proposed by some has been that these places have reached "herd immunity", essentially a threshold where enough people have been infected and recovered such that the disease can no longer spread
Read 20 tweets
Health Nerd Profile picture
9 Feb
This stuff is fascinating. Pay to low-income workers would increase by $509 billion under the bill, but the CBO has assumed that this is a fixed system and that higher wages -> higher prices -> less spending -> fewer jobs
Even more interesting is when you really dig into the weeds. For example, half of all those 'lost' jobs are estimated to be from teens working at the minimum wage
This is a problem that is quite easily solvable. In Australia we have age-adjusted minimum wages for precisely this reason
Read 4 tweets
Health Nerd Profile picture
8 Feb
Always remember the Golden Rule of international comparisons: the most common explanation for a difference between two places is to do with DATA COLLECTION
For example, maternal mortality. Commonly used as a proxy for the wellbeing of a healthcare system

Also, notoriously complex to measure. Here's some examples from the UK, US, and Australia on the measurement
And those are just the top-line statements! The true divergence between the recording across healthcare systems can be massive, because everything from death certificates to doctors' training differs
Read 5 tweets

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