Yeah, the claim that ranked choice voting is the reason that (some) pollsters are sitting out the NYC race strikes me as total bullshit, more or less. Rather, it's likely a fairly hard race to poll and they're afraid of being wrong. But that has very little to do with RCV.
There's also been quite a bit of polling in the NYC mayor's race, just not much of it from the traditional "gold standard" firms. The same was true in the Georgia Senate runoffs and guess what happened? The polling did very, very well there.
If pollsters want to sit out high-profile races that's their prerogative. It may align with their incentives. Pollsters get a ton of crap when they're "wrong" but little credit when they're "right" and that's a deterrent to doing more polling.
Don't give me this RCV BS though.
If you're absolutely terrified of RCV then just do a first-past-the-post poll where you ask just about first preferences and compare it actual first preferences. That's *lame* and less useful than an RCV poll would be, but at least it removes the excuse that RCV is too hard.
p.s. Wouldn't surprise me if RCV polling is actually easier in the long run, at least in the sense of a poll predicting the right winner. It's arguably a more robust system given that a candidate needs to have broad support rather than e.g. flukishly winning with 21% of the vote.
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Basically what I want to know is: what would experts say if you gave them truth serum? Given that many experts are now publicly entertaining the possibility of a lab leak when that would be a somewhat inconvenient conclusion, I assume their private belief might be higher.
But IDK ^^^ that's liable to be a pretty unreliable heuristic (trying to triangulate private beliefs from carefully-worded public statements).
Assuming nearly all are vaccinated by this point—which I assume is a fairly safe assumption (the survey is limited to the US)—my takeaway is that epidemiologists are extremely risk-averse, much more so than public health guidelines say they need to be.
They're also stricter than they themselves think they need to be. 94% say it's safe for vaccinated people to gather indoors with other vaccinated people in some capacity. But a majority of them aren't doing so, personally. A quarter aren't even meeting friends *outdoors* yet.
Yeah, there isn't a perfect baseline here. In theory, the survey tries to get around it by asking not only what they've done but also what they "would have done if necessary". Might have better if they had 3 categories (have done / would do / wouldn't do).
If the FDA decision makes people more worried about the vaccines, then of course they'll say it was responsible to pause administration of a vaccine they're now worried about. But it's also going to make it harder to get people to take the vaccine.
Meanwhile, the number of vaccinations has begun to decline and there are widespread reports of open availability all across the country.
Zero people wearing face shields or eye protection. One person double-masking (might have missed one or two others). A smattering of N95s.
I'm not judging anyone on their facial coverings... but I think this reveals a disconnect in who is reading these columns.
The people who are so risk-averse as to be reading articles about what precautions they should take *even after vaccination* are probably not getting on flights in the first place. They probably don't need to be told to be more cautious. In many respects they may be too cautious!
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.
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.
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.