NEW: Covid cases, hospitalisations & deaths on the rise again across Europe, with rates of all three metrics surpassing the UK in many countries
Starting in the west: Belgium, Netherlands & Germany in particular experiencing sharp increases in not only cases but ICU & deaths too
And the picture worsens as we move further east.
In central Europe, cases were a fraction of UK levels over summer, but have now rocketed past, with ICU occupancy and deaths also climbing fast.
Vaccine coverage is generally lower here than in western Europe.
In eastern Europe, the situation is dire.
Romania, Bulgaria & Latvia all set new records for daily deaths in recent weeks, and deaths are 10x current UK levels.
In much of western Europe it can feel like the pandemic is an echo of its past self. Try telling that to the east
If we extend our gaze even further east, *11 countries* have set new records for Covid deaths in the last few weeks.
It genuinely stops you in your tracks. Think back to December 2020, and a dozen countries are now going through that or worse, a year after vaccines came on line.
An important nuance to what we’re now seeing in western Europe:
Earlier waves over summer were mainly confined to the young since older groups were protected by the vaccine, but the current wave is rippling through all age-groups, hinting at waning immunity.
This is remarkably similar to what we saw in Israel in the summer, when — just like in western Europe now — around 5 months had passed since most older adults’ second dose.
Of course one difference here is that vaccine coverage in western Europe is now at similar levels in all age-groups, and we would expect that alone to reduce the youth-skewed case distribution.
Nonetheless, seeing strong rises across all age-groups is a problem.
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Recent results from major international tests show that the average person’s capacity to process information, use reasoning and solve novel problems has been falling since around the mid 2010s.
What should we make of this?
Nobody would argue that the fundamental biology of the human brain has changed in that time span. People’s underlying intellectual capacity is surely undimmed.
But there is growing evidence that the extent to which people can practically apply that capacity has been diminishing.
For such an important topic, there’s remarkably little long-term data on attention spans, focus etc.
But one source that has consistently tracked this is the Monitoring The Future survey, which finds a steep rise in the % of people struggling to concentrate or learn new things.
NEW: The actions of Trump and Vance in recent weeks highlight something under-appreciated.
The American right is now ideologically closer to countries like Russia, Turkey and in some senses China, than to the rest of the west (even the conservative west).
In the 2000s, US Republicans thought about the world in similar ways to Britons, Europeans, Canadians.
This made for productive relationships regardless of who was in the White House.
The moderating layers around Trump #1 masked the divergence, but with Trump #2 it’s glaring.
In seven weeks Trump’s America has shattered decades-long western norms and blindsided other western leaders with abrupt policy changes.
This is because many of the values of Trump’s America are not the values of western liberal democracies.
NEW: updated long-run gap in voting between young men and women in Germany:
The gender gap continues to widen, but contrary to what is often assumed, young men continue to vote roughly in line with the overall population, while young women have swung very sharply left.
My wish for the next election is that poll trackers look like the one on the right 👉 not the left
This was yet another election where the polling showed it could easily go either way, but most of the charts just showed two nice clean lines, one leading and one trailing. Bad!
Pollsters and poll aggregators have gone to great lengths to emphasise the amount of uncertainty in the polls in recent weeks...
But have generally still put out charts and polling toplines that encourage people to ignore the uncertainty and focus on who’s one point ahead. Bad!
The thing about human psychology is, once you give people a nice clean number, it doesn’t matter how many times you say "but there’s an error margin of +/- x points, anything is possible".
People are going to anchor on that central number. We shouldn’t enable this behaviour!
We’re going to hear lots of stories about which people, policies and rhetoric are to blame for the Democrats’ defeat.
Some of those stories may even be true!
But an underrated factor is that 2024 was an absolutely horrendous year for incumbents around the world 👇
Harris lost votes, Sunak lost votes, Macron lost votes, Modi (!) lost votes, as did the Japanese, Belgian, Croatian, Bulgarian and Lithuanian governments in elections this year.
Any explanation that fails to take account for this is incomplete.