I am not the least bit interested in litigating Roe v. Wade or its implications, but two quick points here. 1) When traditional methods used in US & UK missed >50% maternal mort. & UK is *still* reporting low num to OECD, we should be even more cautious about making direct comparisons to countries w/ worse capacity & investment here
cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr…

npeu.ox.ac.uk/assets/downloa…

The idea that the obesity epidemic started in 1980 is poorly evidenced and runs contrary to a lot of evidence. The non-linear relationship between body fatness and BMI will tend to make observed obesity rates accelerate even if mean body fat increases at a constant rate and the variance remains constant (BF variance v. likely has increased, but less than BMI would naively suggest)

US covid-19 death rate in one-year age-increments On a linear scale, since some people asked. The rates amongst the elderly make differences amongst those ~<40 basically invisible.

The case fatality rate in the UK continues to decline. Still falling

There has been substantial convergence of covid-19 deaths. In heatmap form with exponential color steps

Some early and somewhat unintuitive results from something I've been working on. the distribution of people in gridded population cells by country (~1 km^2) I think I estimated this correctly (if the data is basically correct), but Germany is somewhat surprising

I just created a primer to summarize my research on health care (the many ways in which conventional wisdom is wrong). Much of this content was previously spread across several posts, and some of it is new.

randomcriticalanalysis.com/why-convention… Health care is a national 'necessity' they say....

@jdcmedlock @Noahpinion @UnhWut @gl0balism To be clear, my argument isn't that obesity and related metabolic conditions drive costs between countries (even if it clearly predicts some within countries), but that it produces a lot of excess mortality and generally reduces physical health and well-being. @jdcmedlock @Noahpinion @UnhWut @gl0balism My argument is the real income of HH is essentially the sole determinant of spending in the long run. Tho prices explain little, aging & other available indicators of population health do not appear to be robust, significant independent determinants of overall spending levels.

@lymanstoneky @Noahpinion @mileskimball Thank you. My argument is high (disposable) incomes lead to high quantities per capita and higher real prices (Baumol effect), but it's mostly quantities. Reliable domestic and intl price indices suggest prices don't rise that much faster than incomes. @lymanstoneky @Noahpinion @mileskimball The prices people cite for international comparisons are invariably sourced from the International Federation of Health Plans (IFHP), a payer trade group. They're fairly opaque on the particulars, but the details they do provide makes it apparent their methods are unreliable.

@RAVerBruggen @alv9n Part of the problem here is a fundamental lack of appreciation from what we would expect to find even if students were perfectly randomly distributed, i.e., zero segregation as measured by entropy indices and the like. @RAVerBruggen @alv9n In *most* states, the weighted black exposure to white students isn't more than maybe 10 percentage points from what we would expect to find if black and white students were randomly distributed in schools across the entire state.