Some medical sources are saying that the mortality rate from COVID-19 is below 1%. Some are saying it is about 0.1%, which is of the same order as the flu mortality rate. Until now, I have thought that a mortality rate of 0.1% was unlikely. My off-the-cuff reasoning was that we have not seen refrigeration trucks parked outside hospitals for bodies for flu, which we have seen for COVID-19.
There is growing evidence that a high percentage of people that have been infected with COVID-19 either had no symptom or only minor symptoms. Consequently, it seems likely that the number of people who have been infected with COVID-19 is far larger than previously thought. If so, it may be that the COVID-19 mortality rate is far lower than previously thought. A COVID-19 mortality rate comparable to the flu, about 0.1%, may be in the ballpark.
So, how can a COVID-19 mortality rate of about that for the flu be reconciled with the refrigeration trucks for COVID-19 and the lack thereof for the flu? Easy, a sufficiently higher rate of spreading, either due to the availability of flu vaccine or that COVID-19 is more contagious than flu. In either case, the same mortality rate leads to a higher peak infection level.
If the COVID-19 and flu mortality rates are comparable and we accept the latter without lockdowns, then shouldn’t we accept the former without lockdowns? Or, if not, should not our strategy be to protect only those who have a high mortality rate from COVID-19, e.g., old, diabetes, obese, so that total COVID-19 deaths are at about the same level as for the flu - and have no lockdowns?
Maybe it is time to eliminate lockdowns and to completely open the economy.
Tuesday, April 28, 2020
Monday, April 27, 2020
A sensible COVID-19 exit strategy
Finally, the people are coming around to what I proposed some time ago.
From Nic Lewis.
----------------------------------------
The current approach
A study by the COVID-19 Response Team from Imperial College (Ferguson et al. 2020[i]) appears to be largely responsible for driving UK government policy actions. The lockdown imposed in the UK appears, unsurprisingly, to have slowed the growth of COVID-19 infections, and may well soon lead to total active cases declining. However, it comes at huge economic and social costs, and substantial COVID-19-unrelated health costs.
Worse, the lockdown is merely a holding strategy, which offers no long term solution to the COVID-19 problem. The eventual total number of deaths for COVID-19 are not reduced relative to any less restrictive policy that likewise avoided the health system being overwhelmed. Deaths are merely spread over a longer period, assuming that eventually restrictions are lifted and people’s lives return to normal.
Vaccinating the population against COVID-19 is unlikely to be achieved for 15-18 months at best. A repurposed existing drug might be found to work on a shorter timescale, but a sensible strategy cannot rely on that hope. Developing and testing a successful new drug would likely take longer. Worse, there is no guarantee that a vaccine or drug effective against COVID-19 will be found in the foreseeable future.
Ferguson et al. illustrates an adaptive cyclical on-off triggering of suppression strategies – involving lockdown approximately two-thirds of the time – extending to the end of 2021. But by that time their model implies that under 2% of the population has been infected and acquired immunity, whereas 80+% of the population needs to have been infected in order to achieve herd immunity in the absence of any restrictions. It would take of the order of 70 years living under an on-off lockdown regime to achieve that level.
A sensible approach
Clearly, the Ferguson et al. illustrated on-off lockdown strategy is not appropriate. A more intelligent approach is needed. Fortunately, there is an obvious solution. The key is to remove restrictions from those segments of the population that are at low risk of death from COVID-19 infection. Age is a key factor here. However, another key factor is whether a person suffers from various chronic health conditions, the most prevalent of which are hypertension, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, atrial fibrillation, obstructive pulmonary disease, and renal failure (“relevant health conditions”).
Over half the population are under 70 years old and do not suffer from any chronic health conditions that are associated with a much elevated infection fatality rate (IFR). The IFR that I estimate for that segment of the population is only 0.03%. So is the estimated IFR for people under 30 years old who have one or more relevant health conditions.
I estimate that there are over 41 million people who are under 70 with no relevant health conditions, or have such conditions but are under 30. Allowing them to resume normal life, subject to some precautions, should lead to around 87% of them being exposed to COVID-19 and, if susceptible to it, infected, over the next few months. Because the IFR for these groups is very low, the resulting likely number of deaths would be relatively modest – slightly over 10,000. That would represent under 2% of the expected total deaths in the UK during 2020. And if the IFR estimates that Ferguson et al. are using turn out to be too high, as looks increasingly likely, there could be substantially fewer deaths.
Assuming that these 10,000 deaths were spread over six months, on average slightly over 2,000 ICU beds would be occupied. The extent of precautions taken could be varied over time to achieve an even ICU bed occupancy level. If it turned out that a significant proportion of the population was already not susceptible to COVID-19 infection, the number of deaths could be substantially lower.
During the period of about six months during which the non-vulnerable population was exposed to COVID-19 infection, vulnerable groups (people over 30 year olds with any relevant health condition, and all over 70 year olds) would need to remain fairly isolated from other people who remained susceptible to COVID-19. By the end of that period approximately 54% of the population would no longer be susceptible to COVID-19. That is sufficient to provide herd immunity if the reproduction ratio is below 1.5.
The fact that daily new cases of COVID-19 have not been increasing in Sweden since the end of March 2020 strongly suggests that the relatively limited measures taken there have reduced the reproduction ratio to well below 1.5, despite that being totally at variance with the much smaller reduction that the Imperial College Response Team’s modelling in another study (Flaxman et al 2020)[ii] implies. Therefore, weaker measures than those in force in Sweden at that time should be adequate to prevent any resurgence of COVID-19 infections in the UK if 54% herd immunity is achieved.
My proposed exit strategy would enable over 60% of the UK population to immediately resume something close to normal life, with the other, more vulnerable, groups being able to do so, subject to some precautions (which could be on an advisory rather than mandatory basis) within six months.
In contrast, the current policy in the UK, which aims for all parts of the population to avoid exposure to COVID-19, will – until and unless an effective vaccine is available – take multiple years to achieve a sufficient level of herd immunity for relatively limited measures to be effective in preventing a resurgence of infections.
The IFR estimates that I use are based on those given in another paper by the same team at Imperial (Verity et al.2020 [iii]), on which the Ferguson et al. assumptions were based, and on other published findings. The ICU bed occupation estimates that I use are based on the assumptions in Ferguson et al. Further details of my results and the data and assumptions involved are available here.
From Nic Lewis.
----------------------------------------
The current approach
A study by the COVID-19 Response Team from Imperial College (Ferguson et al. 2020[i]) appears to be largely responsible for driving UK government policy actions. The lockdown imposed in the UK appears, unsurprisingly, to have slowed the growth of COVID-19 infections, and may well soon lead to total active cases declining. However, it comes at huge economic and social costs, and substantial COVID-19-unrelated health costs.
Worse, the lockdown is merely a holding strategy, which offers no long term solution to the COVID-19 problem. The eventual total number of deaths for COVID-19 are not reduced relative to any less restrictive policy that likewise avoided the health system being overwhelmed. Deaths are merely spread over a longer period, assuming that eventually restrictions are lifted and people’s lives return to normal.
Vaccinating the population against COVID-19 is unlikely to be achieved for 15-18 months at best. A repurposed existing drug might be found to work on a shorter timescale, but a sensible strategy cannot rely on that hope. Developing and testing a successful new drug would likely take longer. Worse, there is no guarantee that a vaccine or drug effective against COVID-19 will be found in the foreseeable future.
Ferguson et al. illustrates an adaptive cyclical on-off triggering of suppression strategies – involving lockdown approximately two-thirds of the time – extending to the end of 2021. But by that time their model implies that under 2% of the population has been infected and acquired immunity, whereas 80+% of the population needs to have been infected in order to achieve herd immunity in the absence of any restrictions. It would take of the order of 70 years living under an on-off lockdown regime to achieve that level.
A sensible approach
Clearly, the Ferguson et al. illustrated on-off lockdown strategy is not appropriate. A more intelligent approach is needed. Fortunately, there is an obvious solution. The key is to remove restrictions from those segments of the population that are at low risk of death from COVID-19 infection. Age is a key factor here. However, another key factor is whether a person suffers from various chronic health conditions, the most prevalent of which are hypertension, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, atrial fibrillation, obstructive pulmonary disease, and renal failure (“relevant health conditions”).
Over half the population are under 70 years old and do not suffer from any chronic health conditions that are associated with a much elevated infection fatality rate (IFR). The IFR that I estimate for that segment of the population is only 0.03%. So is the estimated IFR for people under 30 years old who have one or more relevant health conditions.
I estimate that there are over 41 million people who are under 70 with no relevant health conditions, or have such conditions but are under 30. Allowing them to resume normal life, subject to some precautions, should lead to around 87% of them being exposed to COVID-19 and, if susceptible to it, infected, over the next few months. Because the IFR for these groups is very low, the resulting likely number of deaths would be relatively modest – slightly over 10,000. That would represent under 2% of the expected total deaths in the UK during 2020. And if the IFR estimates that Ferguson et al. are using turn out to be too high, as looks increasingly likely, there could be substantially fewer deaths.
Assuming that these 10,000 deaths were spread over six months, on average slightly over 2,000 ICU beds would be occupied. The extent of precautions taken could be varied over time to achieve an even ICU bed occupancy level. If it turned out that a significant proportion of the population was already not susceptible to COVID-19 infection, the number of deaths could be substantially lower.
During the period of about six months during which the non-vulnerable population was exposed to COVID-19 infection, vulnerable groups (people over 30 year olds with any relevant health condition, and all over 70 year olds) would need to remain fairly isolated from other people who remained susceptible to COVID-19. By the end of that period approximately 54% of the population would no longer be susceptible to COVID-19. That is sufficient to provide herd immunity if the reproduction ratio is below 1.5.
The fact that daily new cases of COVID-19 have not been increasing in Sweden since the end of March 2020 strongly suggests that the relatively limited measures taken there have reduced the reproduction ratio to well below 1.5, despite that being totally at variance with the much smaller reduction that the Imperial College Response Team’s modelling in another study (Flaxman et al 2020)[ii] implies. Therefore, weaker measures than those in force in Sweden at that time should be adequate to prevent any resurgence of COVID-19 infections in the UK if 54% herd immunity is achieved.
My proposed exit strategy would enable over 60% of the UK population to immediately resume something close to normal life, with the other, more vulnerable, groups being able to do so, subject to some precautions (which could be on an advisory rather than mandatory basis) within six months.
In contrast, the current policy in the UK, which aims for all parts of the population to avoid exposure to COVID-19, will – until and unless an effective vaccine is available – take multiple years to achieve a sufficient level of herd immunity for relatively limited measures to be effective in preventing a resurgence of infections.
The IFR estimates that I use are based on those given in another paper by the same team at Imperial (Verity et al.2020 [iii]), on which the Ferguson et al. assumptions were based, and on other published findings. The ICU bed occupation estimates that I use are based on the assumptions in Ferguson et al. Further details of my results and the data and assumptions involved are available here.
Wednesday, April 22, 2020
Benefits vs. Costs and COVID-19
Walter Williams gets it right yet again.
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One of the first lessons in an economics class is everything has a cost. That’s in stark contrast to lessons in the political arena where politicians talk about free stuff. In our personal lives, decision-making involves weighing costs against benefits. Businessmen make the same calculation if they want to stay in business. It’s an entirely different story for politicians running the government where any benefit, however minuscule, is often deemed to be worth any cost, however large.
Related to decision-making is the issue of being overly safe versus not safe enough. Sometimes, being as safe as one can be is worthless. A minor example: How many of us before driving our cars inspect the hydraulic brake system for damage? We’d be safer if we did, but most of us just assume everything is OK and get into our car and drive away. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that 40,000 Americans lose their lives each year because of highway fatalities. Virtually all those lives could be saved with a mandated 5 mph speed limit. Fortunately, we consider costs and rightfully conclude that saving those 40,000 lives aren’t worth the costs and inconvenience of a 5 mph mandate.
With the costs and benefits in mind, we might examine our government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The first thing to keep in mind about any crisis, be it war, natural disasters or pandemics, is we should keep markets open and private incentives strong. Markets solve problems because they provide the right incentives to use resources effectively. Federal, state and local governments have ordered an unprecedented and disastrous shutdown of much of the U.S. economy in an effort to slow the spread of the coronavirus.
There’s a strictly health-related downside to the shutdown of the U.S. economy ignored by our leadership that has been argued by epidemiologist Dr. Knut Wittkowski, formerly the head of the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Research Design at Rockefeller University in New York City. Wittkowski argues that the lockdown prolongs the development of the “herd immunity,” which is our only weapon in “exterminating” the novel coronavirus — outside of a vaccine that’s going to optimistically take 18 months or more to produce. He says we should focus on shielding the elderly and people with comorbidities while allowing the young and healthy to associate with one another in order to build up immunities. Wittkowski says, “So, it’s very important to keep the schools open and kids mingling to spread the virus to get herd immunity as fast as possible, and then the elderly people, who should be separated, and the nursing homes should be closed during that time, can come back and meet their children and grandchildren after about 4 weeks when the virus has been exterminated.” Herd immunity, Wittkowski argues, would stop a “second wave” headed for the United States in the fall. Dr. David L. Katz, president of True Health Initiative and the founding director of the Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center, shares Wittkowski’s vision. Writing in The New York Times, he argued that our fight against COVID-19 could be worse than the virus itself.
The bottom line is that costs can be concealed but not eliminated. Moreover, if people only look at the benefits from a particular course of action, they will do just about anything, because everything has a benefit. Political hustlers and demagogues love promising benefits when the costs can easily be concealed. By the way, the best time to be wrong and persist in being wrong is when the costs of being wrong are borne by others.
The absolute worst part of the COVID-19 pandemic, and possibly its most unrecoverable damage, is the massive power that Americans have given to their federal, state and local governments to regulate our lives in the name of protecting our health. Taking back that power should be the most urgent component of our recovery efforts. It’s going to be challenging; once a politician, and his bureaucracy, gains power, he will fight tooth and nail to keep it.
--------------------------------------------------
One of the first lessons in an economics class is everything has a cost. That’s in stark contrast to lessons in the political arena where politicians talk about free stuff. In our personal lives, decision-making involves weighing costs against benefits. Businessmen make the same calculation if they want to stay in business. It’s an entirely different story for politicians running the government where any benefit, however minuscule, is often deemed to be worth any cost, however large.
Related to decision-making is the issue of being overly safe versus not safe enough. Sometimes, being as safe as one can be is worthless. A minor example: How many of us before driving our cars inspect the hydraulic brake system for damage? We’d be safer if we did, but most of us just assume everything is OK and get into our car and drive away. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration estimates that 40,000 Americans lose their lives each year because of highway fatalities. Virtually all those lives could be saved with a mandated 5 mph speed limit. Fortunately, we consider costs and rightfully conclude that saving those 40,000 lives aren’t worth the costs and inconvenience of a 5 mph mandate.
With the costs and benefits in mind, we might examine our government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The first thing to keep in mind about any crisis, be it war, natural disasters or pandemics, is we should keep markets open and private incentives strong. Markets solve problems because they provide the right incentives to use resources effectively. Federal, state and local governments have ordered an unprecedented and disastrous shutdown of much of the U.S. economy in an effort to slow the spread of the coronavirus.
There’s a strictly health-related downside to the shutdown of the U.S. economy ignored by our leadership that has been argued by epidemiologist Dr. Knut Wittkowski, formerly the head of the Department of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Research Design at Rockefeller University in New York City. Wittkowski argues that the lockdown prolongs the development of the “herd immunity,” which is our only weapon in “exterminating” the novel coronavirus — outside of a vaccine that’s going to optimistically take 18 months or more to produce. He says we should focus on shielding the elderly and people with comorbidities while allowing the young and healthy to associate with one another in order to build up immunities. Wittkowski says, “So, it’s very important to keep the schools open and kids mingling to spread the virus to get herd immunity as fast as possible, and then the elderly people, who should be separated, and the nursing homes should be closed during that time, can come back and meet their children and grandchildren after about 4 weeks when the virus has been exterminated.” Herd immunity, Wittkowski argues, would stop a “second wave” headed for the United States in the fall. Dr. David L. Katz, president of True Health Initiative and the founding director of the Yale-Griffin Prevention Research Center, shares Wittkowski’s vision. Writing in The New York Times, he argued that our fight against COVID-19 could be worse than the virus itself.
The bottom line is that costs can be concealed but not eliminated. Moreover, if people only look at the benefits from a particular course of action, they will do just about anything, because everything has a benefit. Political hustlers and demagogues love promising benefits when the costs can easily be concealed. By the way, the best time to be wrong and persist in being wrong is when the costs of being wrong are borne by others.
The absolute worst part of the COVID-19 pandemic, and possibly its most unrecoverable damage, is the massive power that Americans have given to their federal, state and local governments to regulate our lives in the name of protecting our health. Taking back that power should be the most urgent component of our recovery efforts. It’s going to be challenging; once a politician, and his bureaucracy, gains power, he will fight tooth and nail to keep it.
Tuesday, April 21, 2020
Hypocrisy at the New York Times
John Lott gets it right at Real Clear Politics.
When I was young, the NYT was a newspaper. Now, it is just propaganda.
-----------------------------------
Hypocrisy in NYT’s Reporting on a COVID-Skeptic’s Death.
The New York Times thinks it nailed Fox News. Over the weekend, the Times ran a blistering story that blamed the death of Brooklyn bar owner Joe Joyce on skepticism of the coronavirus panic. Supposedly assured by President Trump and Fox News that there wasn’t a problem, Joyce made the fatal mistake of going on a cruise.
Times reporter Ginia Bellafante wrote:
“He watched Fox, and believed it was under control,” Kristen [Joyce’s daughter] told me. Early in March, Sean Hannity went on air, proclaiming that he didn’t like the way that the American people were getting scared “unnecessarily.” He saw it all, he said, “as like, let’s bludgeon Trump with this new hoax.”
Many in the media, such as CNN senior media reporter Oliver Darcy and reporters from the Washington Post, have seized on the Times story as proof of the harm from Fox News’ reporting. MSNBC’s David Corn wrote: “A beautifully written and sad story. It shows how Trump and Fox have killed Americans. It’s unforgivable.”
But there were big problems with Bellafante’s story. For one thing, Hannity’s on-air statement came eight days after Joyce’s cruise began on March 1, so it couldn’t have been a factor in his decision to go. Also, Bellafante misconstrues Trump’s use of the word “hoax.” Most glaring is the story’s sheer hypocrisy. Virtually all of the news media, including Ms. Bellafante herself, were claiming immediately before the cruise that there was little reason for Americans to alter their behavior because of the virus.
On Feb. 27, just three days before the cruise began, Bellafante tweeted: “I fundamentally don’t understand the panic: incidence of the disease is declining in China. Virus is not deadly in the vast majority of cases. Production and so on will slow down and will obviously rebound.”
The media has made a big play of Trump supposedly having “blood on his hands.” The basic claim is that he was in denial about the seriousness of the virus and delayed dealing with it. But after Trump banned travel from China on Jan. 31, the New York Times itself ran the headline “Beware the Pandemic Panic.” On Feb. 5, the Times mocked Trump’s travel ban as being “unjust” in an article headlined “Who Says It’s Not Safe to Travel to China?”
The United States was the first country to impose such travel restrictions on China, and did so in defiance of both the World Health Organization and much of the Democratic Party. Trump was ahead of the curve again when he imposed a travel ban on Europe on March 12. The New York Times has to rewrite history to make its case. Couldn’t the Times now find a reporter who had in fact seen this coming? That would at least reduce the glaring hypocrisy.
Democrats have seized on Trump’s use of the word “hoax” back in February, but the president was referring to the media criticism of his handling of the emerging pandemic. Fact-checkers have attacked this interpretation of the “hoax” comment, and even liberal-leaning PolitiFact dismissed as “false ” the notion that Trump used that word to describe the coronavirus. PolitiFact pointed out that “there was nearly a full minute between when the president said ‘coronavirus’ and ‘hoax.’” FactCheck.org also said that the claim was false.
The Times has pulled off an amazing trifecta. It links a segment from Sean Hannity with someone’s death, when the broadcast occurred after the cruise started. It then made it seem as though Fox News and Hannity were making false claims — at the very same time that the New York Times and the reporter who wrote this piece were telling people not to worry. And it claims that Hannity was saying the virus was a hoax, when he was saying nothing of the sort.
Monday morning quarterbacking is always easy, but the New York Times and its reporter have forgotten their track records from less than two months ago. There is a lot of hypocrisy in going after others for not recognizing dangers that you didn’t even see yourself. What must gall the Times is that Donald Trump saw these dangers well before they did.
When I was young, the NYT was a newspaper. Now, it is just propaganda.
-----------------------------------
Hypocrisy in NYT’s Reporting on a COVID-Skeptic’s Death.
The New York Times thinks it nailed Fox News. Over the weekend, the Times ran a blistering story that blamed the death of Brooklyn bar owner Joe Joyce on skepticism of the coronavirus panic. Supposedly assured by President Trump and Fox News that there wasn’t a problem, Joyce made the fatal mistake of going on a cruise.
Times reporter Ginia Bellafante wrote:
“He watched Fox, and believed it was under control,” Kristen [Joyce’s daughter] told me. Early in March, Sean Hannity went on air, proclaiming that he didn’t like the way that the American people were getting scared “unnecessarily.” He saw it all, he said, “as like, let’s bludgeon Trump with this new hoax.”
Many in the media, such as CNN senior media reporter Oliver Darcy and reporters from the Washington Post, have seized on the Times story as proof of the harm from Fox News’ reporting. MSNBC’s David Corn wrote: “A beautifully written and sad story. It shows how Trump and Fox have killed Americans. It’s unforgivable.”
But there were big problems with Bellafante’s story. For one thing, Hannity’s on-air statement came eight days after Joyce’s cruise began on March 1, so it couldn’t have been a factor in his decision to go. Also, Bellafante misconstrues Trump’s use of the word “hoax.” Most glaring is the story’s sheer hypocrisy. Virtually all of the news media, including Ms. Bellafante herself, were claiming immediately before the cruise that there was little reason for Americans to alter their behavior because of the virus.
On Feb. 27, just three days before the cruise began, Bellafante tweeted: “I fundamentally don’t understand the panic: incidence of the disease is declining in China. Virus is not deadly in the vast majority of cases. Production and so on will slow down and will obviously rebound.”
The media has made a big play of Trump supposedly having “blood on his hands.” The basic claim is that he was in denial about the seriousness of the virus and delayed dealing with it. But after Trump banned travel from China on Jan. 31, the New York Times itself ran the headline “Beware the Pandemic Panic.” On Feb. 5, the Times mocked Trump’s travel ban as being “unjust” in an article headlined “Who Says It’s Not Safe to Travel to China?”
The United States was the first country to impose such travel restrictions on China, and did so in defiance of both the World Health Organization and much of the Democratic Party. Trump was ahead of the curve again when he imposed a travel ban on Europe on March 12. The New York Times has to rewrite history to make its case. Couldn’t the Times now find a reporter who had in fact seen this coming? That would at least reduce the glaring hypocrisy.
Democrats have seized on Trump’s use of the word “hoax” back in February, but the president was referring to the media criticism of his handling of the emerging pandemic. Fact-checkers have attacked this interpretation of the “hoax” comment, and even liberal-leaning PolitiFact dismissed as “false ” the notion that Trump used that word to describe the coronavirus. PolitiFact pointed out that “there was nearly a full minute between when the president said ‘coronavirus’ and ‘hoax.’” FactCheck.org also said that the claim was false.
The Times has pulled off an amazing trifecta. It links a segment from Sean Hannity with someone’s death, when the broadcast occurred after the cruise started. It then made it seem as though Fox News and Hannity were making false claims — at the very same time that the New York Times and the reporter who wrote this piece were telling people not to worry. And it claims that Hannity was saying the virus was a hoax, when he was saying nothing of the sort.
Monday morning quarterbacking is always easy, but the New York Times and its reporter have forgotten their track records from less than two months ago. There is a lot of hypocrisy in going after others for not recognizing dangers that you didn’t even see yourself. What must gall the Times is that Donald Trump saw these dangers well before they did.
Saturday, April 18, 2020
Manipulation Through Racial Hoaxes
Here is a column by Walter Williams, a professor of economics at George Mason University.
Jesse Watters was criticized as a racist for claiming that the coronavirus outbreak was caused by Chinese people “eating raw bats and snakes.” He added that “They are a very hungry people. The Chinese communist government cannot feed the people, and they are desperate. This food is uncooked, it is unsafe and that is why scientists believe that’s where it originated from.” Watter’s statement can be settled by a bit of empiricism. Just find out whether Chinese people eat bats and snakes and whether that has anything to do with the spread of the coronavirus.
It may be perplexing to some, but I believe that our nation has made great progress in matters of race, so much so that imaginary racism and racial hoaxes must be found. Left-wingers on college campuses and elsewhere have a difficult time finding the racism that they say permeates everything. So they’re brazenly inventing it.
Jussie Smollett charged that two masked Trump supporters, wearing MAGA hats, using racial and homophobic insults attacked him. The anti-Trump media gobbled up Smollett’s story hook, line and sinker, but it turned out to be a hoax.
A large percentage of hate-crime hoaxes occur on college campuses. Andy Ngo writes about this in his City Journal article “Inventing Victimhood: Universities too often serve as ‘hate-crime hoax’ mills.” St. Olaf College in Minnesota was roiled in mass “anti-racism” protests that caused classes to be canceled. It turned out that a black student activist was found to be responsible for a racist threat she left on her own car. Five black students at the U.S. Air Force Academy Preparatory School found racial slurs written on their doors. An investigation later found that one of the students targeted was responsible for the vandalism.
Andy Ngo writes that there are dozens of other examples. They all point to a sickness in American society, with our institutions of higher education too often doubling as “hate-hoax mills,” encouraged by a bloated grievance industry in the form of diversity administrators. These are diversity-crazed administrators, along with professors of race and gender studies, who nationwide spend billions of dollars on diversity and a multiculturalist agenda. Racial discord and other kinds of strife are their meal tickets to greater influence and bigger budgets.
There’s another set of beneficiaries to racial hoaxes and racial strife. These alleged incidents are invariably seized upon by politicians and activists looking to feed a sacrosanct belief among liberals that discrimination and oppression are the main drivers of inequality. Jason Riley, writing in The Wall Street Journal says “In the mainstream media we hear almost constant talk about scary new forms of racism: ‘white privilege,’ ‘cultural appropriation,’ and ‘subtle bigotry.’” Riley mentions the work of Dr. Wilfred Reilly who is a professor of political science at Kentucky State University and author of a new book, “Hate Crime Hoax,” that states “a huge percentage of the horrific hate crimes cited as evidence of contemporary bigotry are fakes.” Reilly put together a data set of more than 400 confirmed cases of fake allegations that were reported to authorities between 2010 and 2017. He says that the exact number of false reports is probably unknowable, but what can be said “with absolute confidence is that the actual number of hate crime hoaxes is indisputably large. We are not speaking here of just a few bad apples.” But Reilly has a larger point to make, writing, “The Smollett case isn’t an outlier. Increasingly, it’s the norm. And the media’s relative lack of interest in exposing hoaxes that don’t involve famous figures is a big part of the problem.”
WW is on target.
Racial hoaxes and their complicit spread by the media and others can produce a backlash. Stick to the truth.
-------------------------------------------------
We black people are so convenient and useful to America’s leftists. Whenever there’s a bit of silencing to be done, just accuse a detractor or critic of racism. A recent, particularly stupid, example is CNN’s Brandon Tensley’s complaint that the “Coronavirus task force is another example of Trump administration’s lack of diversity.” Tensley said the virus experts are “largely the same sorts of white men (and a couple women on the sidelines) who’ve dominated the Trump administration from the very beginning.” I’d like for Tensley to tell us just what racial or sex diversity contribute to finding a cure or treatment for the coronavirus. Jesse Watters was criticized as a racist for claiming that the coronavirus outbreak was caused by Chinese people “eating raw bats and snakes.” He added that “They are a very hungry people. The Chinese communist government cannot feed the people, and they are desperate. This food is uncooked, it is unsafe and that is why scientists believe that’s where it originated from.” Watter’s statement can be settled by a bit of empiricism. Just find out whether Chinese people eat bats and snakes and whether that has anything to do with the spread of the coronavirus.
It may be perplexing to some, but I believe that our nation has made great progress in matters of race, so much so that imaginary racism and racial hoaxes must be found. Left-wingers on college campuses and elsewhere have a difficult time finding the racism that they say permeates everything. So they’re brazenly inventing it.
Jussie Smollett charged that two masked Trump supporters, wearing MAGA hats, using racial and homophobic insults attacked him. The anti-Trump media gobbled up Smollett’s story hook, line and sinker, but it turned out to be a hoax.
A large percentage of hate-crime hoaxes occur on college campuses. Andy Ngo writes about this in his City Journal article “Inventing Victimhood: Universities too often serve as ‘hate-crime hoax’ mills.” St. Olaf College in Minnesota was roiled in mass “anti-racism” protests that caused classes to be canceled. It turned out that a black student activist was found to be responsible for a racist threat she left on her own car. Five black students at the U.S. Air Force Academy Preparatory School found racial slurs written on their doors. An investigation later found that one of the students targeted was responsible for the vandalism.
Andy Ngo writes that there are dozens of other examples. They all point to a sickness in American society, with our institutions of higher education too often doubling as “hate-hoax mills,” encouraged by a bloated grievance industry in the form of diversity administrators. These are diversity-crazed administrators, along with professors of race and gender studies, who nationwide spend billions of dollars on diversity and a multiculturalist agenda. Racial discord and other kinds of strife are their meal tickets to greater influence and bigger budgets.
There’s another set of beneficiaries to racial hoaxes and racial strife. These alleged incidents are invariably seized upon by politicians and activists looking to feed a sacrosanct belief among liberals that discrimination and oppression are the main drivers of inequality. Jason Riley, writing in The Wall Street Journal says “In the mainstream media we hear almost constant talk about scary new forms of racism: ‘white privilege,’ ‘cultural appropriation,’ and ‘subtle bigotry.’” Riley mentions the work of Dr. Wilfred Reilly who is a professor of political science at Kentucky State University and author of a new book, “Hate Crime Hoax,” that states “a huge percentage of the horrific hate crimes cited as evidence of contemporary bigotry are fakes.” Reilly put together a data set of more than 400 confirmed cases of fake allegations that were reported to authorities between 2010 and 2017. He says that the exact number of false reports is probably unknowable, but what can be said “with absolute confidence is that the actual number of hate crime hoaxes is indisputably large. We are not speaking here of just a few bad apples.” But Reilly has a larger point to make, writing, “The Smollett case isn’t an outlier. Increasingly, it’s the norm. And the media’s relative lack of interest in exposing hoaxes that don’t involve famous figures is a big part of the problem.”
U.S. COVID-19 deaths versus other countries
From John Lott at the Crime Prevention Research Center.
Yup, the media is misleading you again.
-----------------------------------------------
Headlines Around the World Say the U.S. Has the Worst Record on Coronavirus Deaths But the Data Says Otherwise.
Headlines worldwide are announcing that the United States has more coronavirus deaths than any other country. As of early Tuesday morning, Johns Hopkins University reported that the United States had 21,662 deaths. That’s ahead of both Italy (20,465) and Spain (18,056).
Many use the number of deaths as a measure of how the U.S. is faring relative to other countries, but that is extremely misleading. It would be the same comparing the number of rapes in Sweden and the United States. For example, while Sweden had 5,960 rapes in 2014, the United States had 84,767. But does that mean that a woman was more likely to be raped in the United States? Hardly. The United States has about 33 times more people living in it than Sweden. Sweden’s rape rate per capita is more than twice the rate in the United States.
It makes no more sense to compare the number of Wuhan coronavirus deaths in the U.S. versus other countries than it does to compare rape rates. But looking at the death rate also isn’t perfect. The length of time of exposure to the virus also matters, and different countries faced exposure at different times. A country that has had been the chance to expose people over months is going to have a lot more potential deaths than a country where exposure has just taken place over a few days.
Testing varies dramatically across countries, most of which are woefully undercounting cases. But at least in highly developed Western countries, we can be relatively confident that doctors will identify if someone died from the virus.
When we adjust for population, it is clear that the U.S. has fared very well at each date after the first death compared to Western Europe. Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom all have higher coronavirus death rates than the U.S.
The only country that isn’t clear for is France, and that is because a Chinese tourist who was visiting France died 11 days before anyone else in the country died from the virus. If you include the Chinese tourist in the death count, the 11 days without any additional deaths makes the spread of the virus deaths in France look a little slower than those in the U.S. But if we exclude that one case, the U.S. looks much better in slowing the spread of the disease.
There are several surprises in the data. Sweden, which has not locked down its economy as other European countries and the U.S. have done, is in the middle of the pack in death toll. Sweden is worse than Norway and Finland, but better than the Netherlands and virtually the same as Switzerland.
Germany has gotten a lot of praise for its handling of the virus. Earlier this month, the New York Times ran the headline: “A German Exception? Why the Country’s Coronavirus Death Rate Is Low.” But while Germany has outperformed most of its neighbors, its per capita death toll is still higher than that of the U.S.
While comparing per capita death rates instead of case counts has its advantages, there are countries such as China whose body counts are simply not reliable. The U.S. death toll is also somewhat dubious but for a different reason that likely results in overcounting. If someone is struck by a car and tests positive for the coronavirus before dying in the emergency room, that person will be counted in the virus death toll.
That is obviously an extreme example, but as Coronavirus Response Director Deborah Birx recently noted: “There are other countries that if you had a preexisting condition and let’s say the virus caused you to go to the ICU and then have a heart or kidney problem some countries are recording [this] as a heart issue or a kidney issue and not a COVID-19 death. . . . [In the US] if someone dies with COVID-19 we are counting that as a COVID-19 death.”
Governments’ coronavirus response policies won’t explain all of the differences across countries. Some countries are simply healthier than others. The vast majority of coronavirus deaths are associated with pre-existing conditions, such as obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart or lung disease. Those rates vary a lot across countries. Americans are more likely to be obese and have diabetes, but are somewhat less likely to have high blood pressure. The quality of the existing medical system also matters a lot, and the U.S. system has few equals.
The media is spending so much time these days is trying to pin blame on someone for the coronavirus deaths. A lot of people have died, it’s true. But we don’t have to be so hard on ourselves. For many reasons, the U.S. is faring substantially better than Western European nations.
Yup, the media is misleading you again.
-----------------------------------------------
Headlines Around the World Say the U.S. Has the Worst Record on Coronavirus Deaths But the Data Says Otherwise.
Headlines worldwide are announcing that the United States has more coronavirus deaths than any other country. As of early Tuesday morning, Johns Hopkins University reported that the United States had 21,662 deaths. That’s ahead of both Italy (20,465) and Spain (18,056).
Many use the number of deaths as a measure of how the U.S. is faring relative to other countries, but that is extremely misleading. It would be the same comparing the number of rapes in Sweden and the United States. For example, while Sweden had 5,960 rapes in 2014, the United States had 84,767. But does that mean that a woman was more likely to be raped in the United States? Hardly. The United States has about 33 times more people living in it than Sweden. Sweden’s rape rate per capita is more than twice the rate in the United States.
It makes no more sense to compare the number of Wuhan coronavirus deaths in the U.S. versus other countries than it does to compare rape rates. But looking at the death rate also isn’t perfect. The length of time of exposure to the virus also matters, and different countries faced exposure at different times. A country that has had been the chance to expose people over months is going to have a lot more potential deaths than a country where exposure has just taken place over a few days.
Testing varies dramatically across countries, most of which are woefully undercounting cases. But at least in highly developed Western countries, we can be relatively confident that doctors will identify if someone died from the virus.
When we adjust for population, it is clear that the U.S. has fared very well at each date after the first death compared to Western Europe. Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom all have higher coronavirus death rates than the U.S.
The only country that isn’t clear for is France, and that is because a Chinese tourist who was visiting France died 11 days before anyone else in the country died from the virus. If you include the Chinese tourist in the death count, the 11 days without any additional deaths makes the spread of the virus deaths in France look a little slower than those in the U.S. But if we exclude that one case, the U.S. looks much better in slowing the spread of the disease.
There are several surprises in the data. Sweden, which has not locked down its economy as other European countries and the U.S. have done, is in the middle of the pack in death toll. Sweden is worse than Norway and Finland, but better than the Netherlands and virtually the same as Switzerland.
Germany has gotten a lot of praise for its handling of the virus. Earlier this month, the New York Times ran the headline: “A German Exception? Why the Country’s Coronavirus Death Rate Is Low.” But while Germany has outperformed most of its neighbors, its per capita death toll is still higher than that of the U.S.
While comparing per capita death rates instead of case counts has its advantages, there are countries such as China whose body counts are simply not reliable. The U.S. death toll is also somewhat dubious but for a different reason that likely results in overcounting. If someone is struck by a car and tests positive for the coronavirus before dying in the emergency room, that person will be counted in the virus death toll.
That is obviously an extreme example, but as Coronavirus Response Director Deborah Birx recently noted: “There are other countries that if you had a preexisting condition and let’s say the virus caused you to go to the ICU and then have a heart or kidney problem some countries are recording [this] as a heart issue or a kidney issue and not a COVID-19 death. . . . [In the US] if someone dies with COVID-19 we are counting that as a COVID-19 death.”
Governments’ coronavirus response policies won’t explain all of the differences across countries. Some countries are simply healthier than others. The vast majority of coronavirus deaths are associated with pre-existing conditions, such as obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, and heart or lung disease. Those rates vary a lot across countries. Americans are more likely to be obese and have diabetes, but are somewhat less likely to have high blood pressure. The quality of the existing medical system also matters a lot, and the U.S. system has few equals.
The media is spending so much time these days is trying to pin blame on someone for the coronavirus deaths. A lot of people have died, it’s true. But we don’t have to be so hard on ourselves. For many reasons, the U.S. is faring substantially better than Western European nations.
Monday, April 06, 2020
Treatment of 5 Critically Ill Patients With COVID-19 With Convalescent Plasma
A small sign of a possibly effective treatment for COVID-19.
Here is a link to the paper at jamanetwork.com
Here is the abstract
Importance Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a pandemic with no specific therapeutic agents and substantial mortality. It is critical to find new treatments.
Objective To determine whether convalescent plasma transfusion may be beneficial in the treatment of critically ill patients with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection.
Design, Setting, and Participants Case series of 5 critically ill patients with laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 and acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) who met the following criteria: severe pneumonia with rapid progression and continuously high viral load despite antiviral treatment; Pao2/Fio2 <300; and mechanical ventilation. All 5 were treated with convalescent plasma transfusion. The study was conducted at the infectious disease department, Shenzhen Third People's Hospital in Shenzhen, China, from January 20, 2020, to March 25, 2020; final date of follow-up was March 25, 2020. Clinical outcomes were compared before and after convalescent plasma transfusion.
Exposures Patients received transfusion with convalescent plasma with a SARS-CoV-2–specific antibody (IgG) binding titer greater than 1:1000 (end point dilution titer, by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay [ELISA]) and a neutralization titer greater than 40 (end point dilution titer) that had been obtained from 5 patients who recovered from COVID-19. Convalescent plasma was administered between 10 and 22 days after admission.
Main Outcomes and Measures Changes of body temperature, Sequential Organ Failure Assessment (SOFA) score (range 0-24, with higher scores indicating more severe illness), Pao2/Fio2, viral load, serum antibody titer, routine blood biochemical index, ARDS, and ventilatory and extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) supports before and after convalescent plasma transfusion.
Results All 5 patients (age range, 36-65 years; 2 women) were receiving mechanical ventilation at the time of treatment and all had received antiviral agents and methylprednisolone. Following plasma transfusion, body temperature normalized within 3 days in 4 of 5 patients, the SOFA score decreased, and Pao2/Fio2 increased within 12 days (range, 172-276 before and 284-366 after). Viral loads also decreased and became negative within 12 days after the transfusion, and SARS-CoV-2–specific ELISA and neutralizing antibody titers increased following the transfusion (range, 40-60 before and 80-320 on day 7). ARDS resolved in 4 patients at 12 days after transfusion, and 3 patients were weaned from mechanical ventilation within 2 weeks of treatment. Of the 5 patients, 3 have been discharged from the hospital (length of stay: 53, 51, and 55 days), and 2 are in stable condition at 37 days after transfusion.
Conclusions and Relevance In this preliminary uncontrolled case series of 5 critically ill patients with COVID-19 and ARDS, administration of convalescent plasma containing neutralizing antibody was followed by improvement in their clinical status. The limited sample size and study design preclude a definitive statement about the potential effectiveness of this treatment, and these observations require evaluation in clinical trials.
Here is a link to the paper at jamanetwork.com
Here is the abstract
Importance Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a pandemic with no specific therapeutic agents and substantial mortality. It is critical to find new treatments.
Objective To determine whether convalescent plasma transfusion may be beneficial in the treatment of critically ill patients with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) infection.
Design, Setting, and Participants Case series of 5 critically ill patients with laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 and acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) who met the following criteria: severe pneumonia with rapid progression and continuously high viral load despite antiviral treatment; Pao2/Fio2 <300; and mechanical ventilation. All 5 were treated with convalescent plasma transfusion. The study was conducted at the infectious disease department, Shenzhen Third People's Hospital in Shenzhen, China, from January 20, 2020, to March 25, 2020; final date of follow-up was March 25, 2020. Clinical outcomes were compared before and after convalescent plasma transfusion.
Exposures Patients received transfusion with convalescent plasma with a SARS-CoV-2–specific antibody (IgG) binding titer greater than 1:1000 (end point dilution titer, by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay [ELISA]) and a neutralization titer greater than 40 (end point dilution titer) that had been obtained from 5 patients who recovered from COVID-19. Convalescent plasma was administered between 10 and 22 days after admission.
Main Outcomes and Measures Changes of body temperature, Sequential Organ Failure Assessment (SOFA) score (range 0-24, with higher scores indicating more severe illness), Pao2/Fio2, viral load, serum antibody titer, routine blood biochemical index, ARDS, and ventilatory and extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) supports before and after convalescent plasma transfusion.
Results All 5 patients (age range, 36-65 years; 2 women) were receiving mechanical ventilation at the time of treatment and all had received antiviral agents and methylprednisolone. Following plasma transfusion, body temperature normalized within 3 days in 4 of 5 patients, the SOFA score decreased, and Pao2/Fio2 increased within 12 days (range, 172-276 before and 284-366 after). Viral loads also decreased and became negative within 12 days after the transfusion, and SARS-CoV-2–specific ELISA and neutralizing antibody titers increased following the transfusion (range, 40-60 before and 80-320 on day 7). ARDS resolved in 4 patients at 12 days after transfusion, and 3 patients were weaned from mechanical ventilation within 2 weeks of treatment. Of the 5 patients, 3 have been discharged from the hospital (length of stay: 53, 51, and 55 days), and 2 are in stable condition at 37 days after transfusion.
Conclusions and Relevance In this preliminary uncontrolled case series of 5 critically ill patients with COVID-19 and ARDS, administration of convalescent plasma containing neutralizing antibody was followed by improvement in their clinical status. The limited sample size and study design preclude a definitive statement about the potential effectiveness of this treatment, and these observations require evaluation in clinical trials.
Saturday, April 04, 2020
Politicians and their epidemiologists are damaging the US health care system and the US economy with their ill-conceived COVID-19 policies
The politicians and epidemiologists have no idea how much damage they are doing to the American People. America - open your eyes.
Which makes the most sense? Devoting enormous intensive medical resources to an elderly COVID-19 patient with a moderate probability of saving him so that he can enjoy a few more years of life or devoting fewer non-intensive medical resources to, say, a breast cancer patient who has a high probability of recovery so that she can enjoy many more years of life?
The epidemiologists, focused on minimizing deaths from COVID-19, are oblivious to this tradeoff. They are destroying the health care system with their narrow view. They are not evaluating all the tradeoffs; hence do not realize that their recommended courses of action inferior. They have not evaluated properly their impact on the US health care system, much less on the economy. They fail even to attempt an evaluation of the increased deaths they will cause by shutting down the non-COVID-19 health care system and the economy.
When the health care system is operating at capacity, the choice of what patients to treat should be made on the basis of something like years of useful life saved per unit of resources required to save them, not on the basis of COVID-19 patients come first.
Decisions about what treatments should be allowed must be made not just on the results of Randomized Clinical Trials, but also on less formal knowledge about results. I'm sorry Dr. Fauci, but what you call anecdotal counts as evidence, too. You should be in favor of clinical use of drugs like hydroxychloroquine, instead of lording it over the rest of us with your knowledge and focus on RCTs. Haven’t you ever heard of Bayes Theorem? It puts your classical focus on RCTs in perspective – relying on them alone reflects ignorance, not excellence.
Maggie's disclosure, below, of the change in her medical plan is a typical example of what is wrong with the current focus on COVID-19 at the expense of all else. It's time for people to insist that the world is not only about COVID-19.
Now, for those who can’t think without an example, here is Maggie Morales.
In mid January, I was diagnosed with Her2+ breast cancer. Today, I complete the first phase of my chemotherapy treatment. My surgery has been postponed until sometime in late July or August. In two weeks, I I'll begin the second phase of chemo. Rather than weekly treatment, I will receive a "dose dense" treatment every 3 weeks (due to new Covid19 procedures). Without my family and friends I could not move through this. Thank you Dee, Donna, Bonnie and Bonnie, Joei, Sanjana, Elizabeth, Lorraine, Amy and your significant others for your support and encouragement. A huge thank you to Samantha for being an endless source of information and constantly checking in on me. One day I will pay it forward. And to the many others who have kept me in their thoughts and prayers and provided support. Be safe and gentle to one another during these confusing and trying times. Virtual hugs to all.
Good for you Maggie, but shame on the Fauci’s of the world for not expanding their view.
Which makes the most sense? Devoting enormous intensive medical resources to an elderly COVID-19 patient with a moderate probability of saving him so that he can enjoy a few more years of life or devoting fewer non-intensive medical resources to, say, a breast cancer patient who has a high probability of recovery so that she can enjoy many more years of life?
The epidemiologists, focused on minimizing deaths from COVID-19, are oblivious to this tradeoff. They are destroying the health care system with their narrow view. They are not evaluating all the tradeoffs; hence do not realize that their recommended courses of action inferior. They have not evaluated properly their impact on the US health care system, much less on the economy. They fail even to attempt an evaluation of the increased deaths they will cause by shutting down the non-COVID-19 health care system and the economy.
When the health care system is operating at capacity, the choice of what patients to treat should be made on the basis of something like years of useful life saved per unit of resources required to save them, not on the basis of COVID-19 patients come first.
Decisions about what treatments should be allowed must be made not just on the results of Randomized Clinical Trials, but also on less formal knowledge about results. I'm sorry Dr. Fauci, but what you call anecdotal counts as evidence, too. You should be in favor of clinical use of drugs like hydroxychloroquine, instead of lording it over the rest of us with your knowledge and focus on RCTs. Haven’t you ever heard of Bayes Theorem? It puts your classical focus on RCTs in perspective – relying on them alone reflects ignorance, not excellence.
Maggie's disclosure, below, of the change in her medical plan is a typical example of what is wrong with the current focus on COVID-19 at the expense of all else. It's time for people to insist that the world is not only about COVID-19.
Now, for those who can’t think without an example, here is Maggie Morales.
In mid January, I was diagnosed with Her2+ breast cancer. Today, I complete the first phase of my chemotherapy treatment. My surgery has been postponed until sometime in late July or August. In two weeks, I I'll begin the second phase of chemo. Rather than weekly treatment, I will receive a "dose dense" treatment every 3 weeks (due to new Covid19 procedures). Without my family and friends I could not move through this. Thank you Dee, Donna, Bonnie and Bonnie, Joei, Sanjana, Elizabeth, Lorraine, Amy and your significant others for your support and encouragement. A huge thank you to Samantha for being an endless source of information and constantly checking in on me. One day I will pay it forward. And to the many others who have kept me in their thoughts and prayers and provided support. Be safe and gentle to one another during these confusing and trying times. Virtual hugs to all.
Good for you Maggie, but shame on the Fauci’s of the world for not expanding their view.
Lott and Moody's demolish Lankford's claim about U.S. public mass shootings in comparison to other countries
Here is a link to a paper by John Lott and Carlisle Moody that shows how flawed is Adam Lankford's paper about the prevalence of public mass shootings in the US compared to other countries.
Lankford's paper is found to be so flawed in such peculiar ways that the only reasonable conclusion is that Lankford either is incompetent or purposely intended to mislead.
Lankford's paper is a good example of the kind of flawed study used by anti-gunners to further their agenda without regard to the truth.
Here is the introduction to Lott's and Moody's paper.
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Adam Lankford (2016) asserted that the United States accounted for 31 percent of the world’s public mass shooters over the 47 years from 1966 to 2012. The news media around the globe widely publicized Lankford’s claim as soon as he started circulating his unpublished paper in 2015. Yet, despite numerous requests from researchers and the news media over four years, Lankford refused to provide a list of his cases or explain how he compiled them (see Lott 2018b). In responding to our research (Lott and Moody 2019), Lankford (2019) finally provided an appendix listing the 292 cases upon which he says he based his 2016 article.3 The extreme difference between his findings and ours, we now know, is driven by Lankford not following the definitions that he says that he was using. While we are still missing the data for the regressions that he ran for his 2016 paper, we at least now know what cases his sample included and excluded.
Lankford (2016, 190–191) claimed that he followed the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, and NYPD traditional definition of public mass shootings, but we discover otherwise. He included cases for the United States that do not fit those definitions, and he excluded hundreds of cases from around the world that do. Both errors greatly exaggerate the United States’ share of these attackers.
We also discovered that Lankford only included cases with just one shooter, except when he includes cases with two shooters. The only case involving two shooters in the United States that he counted was the 1999 Columbine attack, and the only such case outside the United States was from Russia.
Lankford's paper is found to be so flawed in such peculiar ways that the only reasonable conclusion is that Lankford either is incompetent or purposely intended to mislead.
Lankford's paper is a good example of the kind of flawed study used by anti-gunners to further their agenda without regard to the truth.
Here is the introduction to Lott's and Moody's paper.
--------------------------------------------
Adam Lankford (2016) asserted that the United States accounted for 31 percent of the world’s public mass shooters over the 47 years from 1966 to 2012. The news media around the globe widely publicized Lankford’s claim as soon as he started circulating his unpublished paper in 2015. Yet, despite numerous requests from researchers and the news media over four years, Lankford refused to provide a list of his cases or explain how he compiled them (see Lott 2018b). In responding to our research (Lott and Moody 2019), Lankford (2019) finally provided an appendix listing the 292 cases upon which he says he based his 2016 article.3 The extreme difference between his findings and ours, we now know, is driven by Lankford not following the definitions that he says that he was using. While we are still missing the data for the regressions that he ran for his 2016 paper, we at least now know what cases his sample included and excluded.
Lankford (2016, 190–191) claimed that he followed the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, and NYPD traditional definition of public mass shootings, but we discover otherwise. He included cases for the United States that do not fit those definitions, and he excluded hundreds of cases from around the world that do. Both errors greatly exaggerate the United States’ share of these attackers.
We also discovered that Lankford only included cases with just one shooter, except when he includes cases with two shooters. The only case involving two shooters in the United States that he counted was the 1999 Columbine attack, and the only such case outside the United States was from Russia.
Unlike Lankford, we immediately provided as part of Lott and Moody (2019) our entire list of public mass shooters as well as the news stories and sources that we relied on to put the list together. Even if Lankford thought there was a justification for studying only attacks with one or two shooters, it would have been easy to go through our list and explain why his list of such cases differed from ours. For example, Lankford excludes, without explanation, 37 foreign public mass shootings involving just one shooter and another 40 foreign cases involving two shooters. Furthermore, he does not justify the additional cases for the United States that he included that do not fit the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, and NYPD definition of public mass shootings. Both errors greatly exaggerate the United States’ share of these attackers.
We took care to exhibit, at length, official definitions (Lott and Moody 2019, 41–42). Nowhere do any of those sources confine the definition of public mass shootings under examination to cases with just one shooter. Indeed, the NYPD included cases involving up to ten shooters. Lankford’s response to our extensive demonstration of official definitions is to ignore that demonstration.
In his original paper, Lankford states, “For this study, attackers who struck outdoors were included; attackers who committed sponsored acts of genocide or terrorism were not. This is consistent with the criteria by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in its 2014 active shooter report” (2016, 190–191). Nowhere in Lankford’s original paper does Lankford mention that he limited the attacks to one or sometimes two shooters. We invite readers to obtain a PDF of Lankford (2016) and search on ‘one,’ ‘alone,’ ‘lone,’ ‘solo,’ and ‘single’ to confirm that he nowhere reveals that he has confined his definition to cases with one shooter (except when he includes two). The first example that he provides of a public mass shooting on the first page of his paper is an exception—the Columbine attack, which had multiple shooters—so that example especially obscures that, aside from Columbine and a Russian case, his list is confined to cases of lone shooters. A more complete discussion of Lankford’s decision to include attacks with one or two shooters is provided below.
Finally, we discuss whether Lankford excluded terrorism cases as Glenn Kessler (2018) guessed he did, and we point out that even if all terrorism cases from outside the United States are excluded while those in the United States are included, the United States would account for less than 6 percent of the world’s public mass shooters—less than one-fifth of the rate that Lankford claims.
----------------------------------
Here is the conclusion.
--------------------------------------
Lankford’s study makes it extremely clear how important it is for researchers to provide their data to others or at least tell people their data sources and how their data were collected. For four years, Lankford refused to do either, and his misleading and error-filled research received much attention worldwide. It shows that the press ought to be very skeptical of studies from scholars who refuse to provide others with their data. Even a quick look at Lankford’s list of cases would have made it very clear that there were significant errors in both the list of United States and foreign cases.
As it is, despite repeated requests, we are still missing the rest of the data that Lankford used to run his regressions, and we have been unable to replicate anything close to his estimates even when using his flawed list of public mass shooters. Lankford has also declined to even answer any questions about how that other data set was put together.
Lankford uses neither the FBI nor NYPD definitions that he continually said that he used. We wonder whether the New York Times, Washington Post, and USA Today would have been somewhat reticent to use Lankford’s results if they had known that he had not in fact conformed to those definitions. Now we know that his definition excluded all but a few of the non-U.S. public mass shootings. Further, his dataset contains many errors and he doesn’t use any definition consistently.
We would have no quarrel with Lankford studying lone-wolf shooters, though he didn’t do that, but if he makes an international comparison concerning the number of ‘shooters’ without the qualification ‘who acted alone,’ then he must take them as they come, often in groups. The United States has less than three percent of the world’s public mass shootings or people killed in those incidents (Lott and Moody 2019, 53, Table 1). Using the NYPD definition, the U.S. has much less than its share of public mass shooters. Allowing other researchers to examine his data would help provide answers to the remaining questions concerning the mysterious Lankford datasets.
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