Key question with Omicron wave is whether severe disease — hospitalisations & ICU — decouples from cases.
In the UK it has, but there are signs the US decoupling is weaker, perhaps due in part to lower vax rates.
Track it here for every state:
Here’s a quick recap of how to read these charts:
Black dotted line is peak level for each metric before Omicron arrived.
Crossing that line means a new record has been set in recent days.
I’ve put a little coloured circle below the name of each state to indicate new records.
For example, almost all states in the north-east have set new records for cases in recent days.
New Jersey, Maryland and DC have also seen hospitalisations hit an all-time high, and the latter two are now also at record Covid ICU occupancy.
In Florida on the other hand, Delta wave was so fierce that relative to that, Omicron hospitalisations are so far less than half as high
But as you can hosp & ICU are still rising steeply. Anything close to Delta peak here would be a sign that the US is faring much worse than UK
Here’s the full graphic again for all states
And if you want to drill down into more detail on the precise hospital situation at the local level, I recommend this brilliant tracker from @bhrenton and @jeremyfaust
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.