I'm going through this paper by Johns Hopkins economists, that assesses the efficacy of lockdown in the US and Europe - and concludes it was essentially useless.
The study is a meta-analysis, combining other previous between-country comparisons. To produce the combined estimate, they take 18,000 studies, exclude all but a handful and then pool their findings.
Looking at the weighting, it actually seems to be based almost entirely on one study. So rather than being a meta-analysis it is really a recapitulation of that study, by Chisadza et al
The other odd thing is that study itself comes to a very different conclusion about the efficacy of lockdown.
The JH study does mention they have a difference of opinion. But, it does seem odd - if indeed this study is the sole basis for their study - that they differ so widely.
It also struck me as strange to exclude the other data from other regions that is in the chisadza paper. If your meta analysis includes other papers, then obviously you have to take the relevant bit of each. But if the meta analysis is just a reanalysis, why lose info?
(unless I've misunderstood in particular what the weighting means which - again - I may well have. This thread is me thinking aloud, hoping for answers!)
I spoke to the author of the paper on whose research this entire meta-analysis was based. She said: "They already had their hypothesis. They think that lockdown had no effect on mortality, and that’s what they set out to show in their paper."
A couple of studies from high impact journals that somehow didn’t make the cut, when the authors decided of 18,000 papers effectively just one met their exacting standards:
From Nature Human Behaviour
"The social distancing and movement-restriction measures discussed above can therefore be seen as the ‘nuclear option’ of NPIs: highly effective but causing substantial collateral damage"
Limiting gatherings to fewer than 10 people, closing high-exposure businesses, and closing schools and universities were each more effective than stay-at-home orders, which were of modest effect in slowing transmission.
This is the tale of a little frog who could. That frog's name was Rosie the Ribeter. And she could jump over 2 metres. And the problem was, according to science, she shouldn't have. In a minor way, Rosie changed science. In a major way, she showed what svcience was about.
1/x
The world's professors had reached agreement on how far a bullfrog could jump. It was a little over 1m.
They reached this conclusion by scaring frogs, then seeing how far they jumped.
They did this because they studied muscles, and frogs were a model organism for muscles.
No one told this to Rosie.
One day, Professor Tom Roberts was reading the Guinness Book of Records and he came across Rosie.
As a biomechanician he scared frogs all day (basically). He knew how they jumped. He knew Rosie must be faking it. But he looked further.
President Carter's greatest legacy could well have come after his presidency.
When he left office, he decided to eradicate a disease. In the 1980s, millions of people a year were infected with guinea worm - a horrible parasite. 1/x
You get infected from drinking contaminated water, the parasite grows inside you, then emerges - a metre long. It is horribly painful and debilitating.
Carter first saw a guinea worm on a trip to Africa, post-presidency...
“We were in a clearing in the jungle … and I saw a pretty young woman standing there holding a baby in her right arm.” He went to ask its name.
"It was not a baby but her right breast, which was more than a foot long, and it had a Guinea worm emerging from the nipple”
I am now going to begin a periodic thread of castles on rightmove I would like to buy that I consider underpriced. I reserve the right to include non-castles if they, say, have their own chapel with frescoes, or several suits of armour. 1/
The man was Hans Ferdinand Mayer, a German businessman with the sort of boringly-corporate job that rarely invited further questions. He had arranged his work trip here, in the months before the invasion of Norway, especially.
He put on gloves, went upstairs, and began to type.
It seems unlikely that any of those in the lobby that night noticed him. Less likely still that they realised they had witnessed perhaps the most significant act of treachery of the war.
Mayer was head of the Siemens research laboratory, and he hated the Nazis.
On the longest night of the year, I'm thinking of a mad Dane called Thomas Sneum, 83 years ago, 1,000ft up above the North Sea, climbing out onto the wing of his antique biplane.
In a war notable for daring escapes, his strikes me as among the most daring - and consequential 1/
Sneum was a Danish air force pilot. And he was not a sensible man.
When war broke out, he ran to his plane and was furious to find Denmark had surrendered. His plane, a biplane, had already been disabled.
This saved his life - it was no match for an Me109. But he was cross
His first scheme was to kill Himmler with a longbow. He spent days practicing shooting birds out of the sky in preparation for a visit by the SS chief.
80 years ago, a great armada left Britain for France. In the sky, swarms of planes took off in the gloaming, bound for the Reich.
Both were the result of months of planning, carrying technology years in development.
And they're not what you are thinking of. 1/x
The boats weren't going to Normandy. The planes were not dropping paratroopers behind the beaches. In fact, they were dropping scarecrows.
Churchill famously said "In wartime, truth should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies"
This was the final bodyguard.
Over the preceding months, 1,668 sorties had been launched against coastal radar. The cost had been eye-watering, and the bravery humbling. On one occasion, a doomed plane rammed the radar: