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Nate Silver Profile picture
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14 Apr, 3 tweets, 1 min read
I guess I'm old-fashioned but I tend to think that when your first instinct is to attack someone's credentials, you don't have a good argument, especially when it comes to complex multidisciplinary policy questions that it's good to have different perspectives on.
Also, the most important aspect of whether the the decision to suspend the J&J vaccine is correct is the effect it will have on public opinion about the vaccines, so having a background in studying public opinion is pretty relevant.
I also have a lot of fairly unique first-hand experience in trying to communicate complex statistical information under intense public scrutiny. I'm all for expertise but these are incredibly complicated questions and it should be defined broadly and not narrowly.

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Nate Silver Profile picture
13 Apr
I disagree. Say there's a 1 in 100 chance someone acquires COVID because of a delayed vaccine (maybe conservative in the US where spread is still quite high) and a 1 in 150 chance they die from it. That's a 1 in 15,000 chance vs. 1 blood clot death in 7,000,000 doses so far.
Now of course there's a lot of stuff we haven't considered. But it cuts in both directions. The incidence of blood clot deaths may be higher that indicated so far given we're not systematically monitoring for them. OTOH, we also have to consider the base rates in the population.
We also have to consider that the person who gets COVID because of a delayed vaccine will pass her case along to an average of 1 other person given where Rt is in the US right now. So the death rate is actually twice as high as I indicated above.
Read 4 tweets
Nate Silver Profile picture
13 Apr
It's also a high-stakes test for the FDA, and they failed it, because of course lots of people are going to take away the latter message.
There's also data on this based on decreased public confidence in the AstraZeneca vaccine in Europe following similar pauses there. So the FDA can't even use the excuse of flying blind.

politico.eu/article/trust-…
Also, part of the reason media coverage may be confused is that the FDA's reasoning isn't super logical. It probably isn't rational to pause administration of a vaccine that's already been given out 7 million times for "extremely rare" events in the middle of a deadly pandemic.
Read 5 tweets
Nate Silver Profile picture
9 Apr
This is a long, interesting thread on how much more transmissible B.1.1.7 (aka "the UK variant") really is.
One thing I'd add is that contact-tracing data from the UK found an advantage of ~33% (as compared to the 50-70% that you sometimes see cited elsewhere) and I can imagine contact-tracing is more robust than methods based on statistical extrapolation.
assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/upl…
As a non-expert on this stuff, I don't necessarily trust my judgment to sort out competing expert claims.

However, I do find it interesting when there's a range of expert opinion and only a certain portion of that range tends to make it into popular media coverage about COVID.
Read 5 tweets
Nate Silver Profile picture
8 Apr
There are a lot of ways to lose a midterm—getting crushed among independents, for instance.

But one way is with a low turnout from your base (e.g. Dems in 2010) and I tend to think that won't be a problem for Dems in 2022 because their voters will see the stakes as existential.
By "existential" mean that many Democrats will think that "democracy itself is on the line" between the Big Lie (and the fact that Congressional majorities could make it easier for the GOP to overturn the 2024 election) and the increased attention to voting rights.
Why the minority party tends to gain at the midterms is a complicated question, but much of it is simply that voters want to check the party in power. However, if the minority party could use a good midterm to permanently entrench itself, the calculation is a lot different.
Read 4 tweets
Nate Silver Profile picture
3 Apr
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.
Read 4 tweets
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

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