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3 Apr, 4 tweets, 2 min read
Good to see that COVID deaths in the US, after a hiccup, have resumed a decline, even as cases tick up again. ourworldindata.org/covid-deaths
Since deaths lag cases, maybe they'll start rising again. Or maybe not since we've vaccinated lots of seniors. I'm too chickenshit to make concrete predictions lol. But the fact that deaths are still declining *for now* seems like important context if you're writing about surges.
I also think people should be wary about drawing parallels to past surges. There might seem to be a certain inevitability: cases rise slowly at first, then quickly, then deaths rise too. But those came in a world without 3+ million vaccine doses being delivered daily.
Keeping my fingers crossed but the case rise has started to flatten back out into more of a plateau over the past several days. Maybe the vaccine surge came just in time. Still big problems in some states like Michigan.

ourworldindata.org/coronavirus/co…

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More from @NateSilver538

Nate Silver Profile picture
2 Apr
In many respects I find the COVID situation less worrying in NYC than in other places like Michigan.

In NYC, cases steady, hospitalizations & deaths declining. You'd like to see cases declining too; Hopefully that happens soon as more people get vaxxed.

www1.nyc.gov/site/doh/covid…
There was a lot of confusion caused by the fact that NYC didn't report data for several days, which created the misleading impression of a huge spike when it reported the backlogged data. News organizations should have done a much clearer job of flagging this.
On the other hand, there's a fairly rapid acceleration in cases in Western New York (i.e. Buffalo, etc.) That's going to affect the statewide numbers if it continues. forward.ny.gov/covid-19-regio…
Read 4 tweets
Nate Silver Profile picture
31 Mar
So here's how this came out. I have no idea about the "right" answer—I'd probably have chosen the popular 41K-65K bucket if forced to pick—but I'm glad there are sizable numbers in all 4 buckets because I don't trust highly confident predictions about COVID trajectories.
On the one hand, the case for optimism is sort of obvious. At some point, barring immune-escape variants, it seems likely we'll hit a threshold where rising levels of vaccination/immunity simply wins out over other factors, as in Israel right now.
But I wonder if people are underestimating the lags. It takes ~2 weeks from your 1st shot to have much protection at all & 5-6 wks to count as "fully vaccinated" with a 2-dose vaccine. Plus there are reporting lags. A "new" case today may actually have been acquired 1-2 wks ago.
Read 4 tweets
Nate Silver Profile picture
31 Mar
At some point if there's excess demand for vaccine in urban areas and excess supply in rural areas, that starts to reflect a policy failure of federal and state allocation formulas.
Most of this is presumably vaccine hesitancy being greater in rural (i.e. generally redder) areas. But I suspect also there are asymmetries caused by more people coming from the country to the city for vaccines than the other way around.
Example of that in New York, for instance:

amny.com/news/several-s…
Read 4 tweets
Nate Silver Profile picture
25 Mar
Our new pollster ratings are up!

They've been updated to reflect the results of the 2020 general election + the GA runoffs.

Also a shiny new interactive. Fivey Fox makes a cameo appearance.

Here's the link. I'll discuss some key findings in this 🧵.

projects.fivethirtyeight.com/pollster-ratin…
Note that we now have pages for individual pollsters. So you can see exactly which polls made it into the rating for each polling firm. Basically this means every poll within 3 weeks of an election since 1998!

projects.fivethirtyeight.com/pollster-ratin…
Or if you want to go even deeper, you can find the entire database on GitHub. We strongly encourage people to use this database for academic research, etc. A LOT of hours of gone into building and maintaining it.

github.com/fivethirtyeigh…
Read 17 tweets
Nate Silver Profile picture
24 Mar
NYC's COVID data has been screwed up lately so here's what the state's data shows for NYC:

Cases (7-day average)
Current: 3921
1 week ago: 3854
2 weeks ago: 3797
3 weeks ago: 3999

Positive test rate (7-day avg)
Current: 4.3%
1 week ago: 4.3%
2 weeks ago: 3.9%
3 weeks ago: 4.2%
On the one hand, I'm pretty sure that sites showing a decline in NYC (the NYT shows this, for example) are wrong. They're filling in missing city data with state data for the city. But that state data isn't apples-to-apples; it doesn't include probably cases, for instance.
On the other hand, I'm seeing a lot of loose talk about a "spike" in NYC when, no, that isn't really justified either. For better or worse, the numbers have settled into a plateau, which is also the case throughout the Northeast. beta.healthdata.gov/Health/COVID-1…
Read 8 tweets
Nate Silver Profile picture
1 Mar
I, too, wish states kept restrictions in place for another few weeks until we're more caught up on vaccinations etc. But I think it's worth thinking about why states (recently including lots of blue states/cities) are opening up despite the CDC and others encouraging them not to.
Two obvious points. First, governors don't think of public health officials as having balanced all equities and considered all costs/benefits. They think of them as one side of "the argument", advocating for a position, with business owners, "citizens", etc. on the other side.
Second, they probably think of public health officials as *always* wanting to keep *everything* closed without clear timelines. Now, the rationale is about new variants. I (Nate) think that + timing of vaccines is a good rationale! But governors may see this as moving goalposts.
Read 4 tweets

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