Category: pandemic

Five timely readings for the day

July 10, 2020 • 10:30 am

I have nothing to say, but it’s okay (Good morning!).  Actually, duck duties in the pouring rain (yes, I got soaked, but in a good cause), combined with overdue grocery shopping, has put a crimp in my day. But, mirabile dictu, I have five—count them, five—pieces that are worth your time to read. I’ll give a link to all of them in screenshots, though the second piece, from The Economist, is behind a paywall (judicious inquiry might yield a copy). And the indented bits are quotes from the article.

In this interview with Steve Pinker (published, in all places, at the Templeton-funded Nautilus), he discusses why Americans continue to defy social distancing and abjure masks despite the palpable health risks.  It’s largely about tribalism, but part of that involves not just solidarity with the group, but distrust of “elitist” experts.

A few bits:

We turned to Steven Pinker for help with an answer. The professor of psychology at Harvard, author of widely discussed books, including How the Mind Works and most recently, Enlightenment Now, sees the deep-seated mindset, tribalism, at work in people’s defiance of health recommendations. But it’s more than a tribalism of being with your crowd. “There’s a moralistic component to this kind of tribalism, mainly that people tend to see their own tribes as victims of some kind of oppression or harm by some rival coalition,” Pinker says, his distinctive mass of gray hair filling the Zoom screen. “They believe their actions on behalf of the group, even if symbolic, are a kind of justice, a kind of settling the score, making a statement, advancing a moral cause—as strange as that may be to those of us who are not part of that coalition, and might even have contempt for that cause. But from the inside, it always feels as if your group has been victimized, has been a longstanding victim of a series of affronts and harms for which you seek redress. And that’s common in the invented histories and myths and narratives of many peoples.”

Pinker says it can be easier to understand the effect of tribalism by putting the shoe on the other foot. “Some of the people on the political right could, indeed, ask that question of the people showing up at Black Lives Matter rallies. They’re crowded together. They’re shouting. They’re chanting. A lot of them are not wearing masks. If we imagine answering that person’s question from the point of view of our buddies on the street protesting that Black Lives Matter, we can get probably some insight, even if we have our loyalties as to which is a legitimate cause and which is the not-so-legitimate cause. But you’re asking about psychology, about what people could possibly be thinking. Well, what could they be thinking in the street, shouting slogans without a mask? What could the public health experts be thinking, telling people it’s OK to do that?”

. . .Dan Kahan, a professor of law and psychology at Yale, heads the Cultural Cognition Project at the university, which explores how cultural values shape public risk perceptions. He has shown, time and again, that the need to belong to a group, usually political or religious, overrides the facts of science. Kahan, who was unable to be interviewed, has written in Nature: “People find it disconcerting to believe that behavior that they find noble is nevertheless detrimental to society, and behavior that they find base is beneficial to it. Because accepting such a claim could drive a wedge between them and their peers, they have a strong emotional predisposition to reject it.”

Pinker agrees, but stresses that doing the right thing is never easy for anybody. “With coronavirus, it’s genuinely hard to know whether surfaces are potential vectors, whether six feet is enough or not enough, whether masks help or don’t help,” Pinker says. “From a scientist’s point of view, it’s not surprising the information would shift. That’s because our natural state is ignorance. We can only learn from data, and as the data comes in, our state of knowledge and best practices will change. But, partly because people think of experts as oracles, as opposed to experimenters and exploiters of trial and error, there’s a presumption that either the experts know what is the best policy from the get-go, or else they are incompetent and ought to be replaced. That’s opposed to what we know to be the correct situation in science—namely, no one knows anything, and you have to learn.”

 

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A piece in The Economist describes the differences between justified complaints about racism and the view of those who, on both the Right and Left, “exploit racial divisions as a political tool.” One of the cures proposed by the anonymous author is free speech and a curbing of identity politics, as well as a list of tangible governmental policies that will reduce inequality.

A few excerpts:

This ideology also has some valid insights. Racism is sustained by unjust institutions and practices. Sometimes, as in policing, this is overt. More often, in countless small put-downs and biases, it is subtle but widespread and harmful.

But then the ideology takes a wrong turn, by seeking to impose itself through intimidation and power. Not the power that comes from persuasion and elections, but from silencing your critics, insisting that those who are not with you are against you, and shutting out those who are deemed privileged or disloyal to their race. It is a worldview where everything and everyone is seen through the prism of ideology—who is published, who gets jobs, who can say what to whom; one in which in-groups obsess over orthodoxy in education, culture and heritage; one that enforces absolute equality of outcome, policy by policy, paragraph by paragraph, if society is to count as just.

. . . The pity is that these ideas will not solve America’s problems with race. They will not eliminate inequality because they are a poor way to bring about beneficial change. Unless you can freely analyse causes and question orthodoxies you will not be able to solve problems. And unless you can criticise people and practices without fear of being called out, you will not be able to design effective policies and then go on to refine them.

The new race theory blocks progress in another way, too. The barriers to racism can be dismantled only when they are exposed—and so they must be, however painful. But the false idea that ingrained racism will forever block African-Americans at every turn is a barrier in its own right.

And, by focusing on power and division, this ideology only creates more space for some on the right to exploit race as a tool. A fundamental belief in power above persuasion frustrates coalition-building. Essential allies are not carried along, but forced along. When every transaction at work, at home, or at the school gate is seen through a prism of racial power, no encounter between different races can be innocent.

. . . . Liberals can help in America, too. Much of the material gulf between African-Americans and whites can be bridged with economic policies that improve opportunity. You do not need to build a state based on identity. Nor do you need tools like reparations, which come with practical difficulties and have unintended consequences. Economic policies that are race-neutral, which people qualify for because of poverty, not the colour of their skin, can make a big difference. They have a chance of uniting Americans, not dividing them. If the mood now really is for change, they would be politically sellable and socially cohesive.

Our Briefing lays out what some of these policies might look like. Top of the list is tackling the housing segregation that is central to America’s racial economic inequality. The reform of zoning laws and the grant of rent-assistance vouchers are the chief ingredients. That would bring many benefits, improving public services and lessening violence. More integrated housing would integrate schools too and, given America’s locally financed education, mean that more would be spent on black children. Affordable measures, including advice and modest cash grants, have been shown to boost graduation from college. A third tool is the tax system. The earned-income tax credit tops up wages of working adults. A child allowance would cut poverty. A baby bond would help shrink the wealth gap.

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In this piece in Quillette, Lawrence Krauss argues (correctly, I think), that science is not structurally racist: that is, there are no longer built-in barriers to the advancement of ethnic minorities. This doesn’t mean, of course, there aren’t barriers, but that they rear up before minorities even get a chance to do science. That’s why, despite fervent efforts by every biology department I know to hire blacks and Hispanics, as well as procure minority graduate students, we aren’t succeeding. That’s not because there’s discrimination at the hiring and grad-school level, but that the pool of people reaching that stage is tiny. And that’s because there’s a lack of opportunity beginning early on: even before school starts.

Quotes:

During the academic strike called for by the APS [American Physical Society], it was emphasized that the proportion of black physicists in national laboratories such as the Fermi National Laboratory in Illinois (where one #strike4blacklives organizer works) is much smaller than the percentage of blacks in the population at large. It was implied that systematic racism in the profession was responsible for this, although no explicit data supporting this claim was presented.

In fact, there is a simpler explanation. There are fewer tenured black physicists at universities and laboratories because there are fewer black PhD physicists. There are fewer black PhD physicists because there are fewer black physics graduate students. There are fewer black graduate students because there are fewer black undergraduates who major in physics. This latter fact is a cause for concern. But the root cause lies in inequities that arise far earlier in the education process. These cannot be addressed by affirmative action policies at the upper levels of practicing professional scientists.

Well, affirmative action policies could help remedy the problem, but, argues Krauss, one has to abrogate the duty of science to adhere to the policy that “quality alone [is] the final discriminator.” Some will disagree with this, and for this statement Krauss has been demonized widely. I’ve argued that some form of affirmative action is useful here, but science departments throughout the U.S. have failed miserably, simply because the pool of people is so small. We need to adopt the kind of policies that the Economist article describes, and try as hard as we can to ensure equal opportunity for all from the outset. As scientists we can start doing this by doing outreach in minority communities. But that’s not nearly enough because, after we sell our field to others, we go home to our prosperous digs while the targets of our actions return to a life bereft of opportunity.

I do agree with Krauss that our main duty is to do science, and, while we should do our best to give everyone an opportunity to do science if they want to, we are not suited to be social engineers. As Krauss says:

Assistant professors of physics cannot solve racial inequality in our society. The professional responsibility of individual scientists, especially young scientists, is to do the best science they can, and to train their students as best they can. It is not to become part of a social movement, however well-intentioned that movement may be.

To see a better statement of this idea vis-à-vis official stands of universities and their academic departments, read the Kalven Report that, until recently, held sway at the University of Chicago. (Sadly, it’s dissolving as our University is deciding to take ideological stands). No, it’s not our duty to become part of a social movement, but as an evolutionary biologist whose work was funded by the public, I at least feel an onus to give back to the public by showing people how great the study of evolution is. Is that kind of outreach helpful in increasing diversity and equity? Who knows?

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Several readers have sent me a multi-page list of demands, signed by hundreds of Princeton faculty, students, and staff, directed at their school as a cure for the systemic and pervasive racism they see in that institution. Although the motivation is laudable, the execution is poor, with many items almost fascistic in their requirements. This is a true document of Authoritarian Leftism.

There have been two pieces of pushback. One is by Samantha Harris, a Princeton alum writing at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE):


Here she describes two of the demands, one of which is clearly illegal:

The petition includes a long list of “demands,” several of which stand in direct opposition to Princeton students’ and faculty members’ rights to free speech, academic freedom, and freedom of conscience. (Notably, one of them — a demand that faculty of color receive extra pay and sabbatical time compared to white faculty — is simply illegal.) Princeton’s leadership should categorically reject these illiberal demands and make clear that the fundamental rights of its students and faculty are non-negotiable and will not be subordinated to political expediency.

The most chillingly illiberal demand in the petition asks Princeton to:

[c]onstitute a committee composed entirely of faculty that would oversee the investigation and discipline of racist behaviors, incidents, research, and publication on the part of faculty, following a protocol for grievance and appeal to be spelled out in Rules and Procedures of the Faculty. Guidelines on what counts as racist behavior, incidents, research, and publication will be authored by a faculty committee for incorporation into the same set of rules and procedures.

The threat of discipline for speech, research, and publication that is subjectively deemed “racist” by a committee of ideologically motivated Princeton faculty is an anti-intellectual, frontal assault on free speech and academic freedom at Princeton that would shut down entire avenues of inquiry, research, and discussion. How, exactly, would such a committee determine whether faculty expression or research is “racist”? A look at some recent demands for faculty discipline is illustrative.

. . .In a terrific article last month in Inside Higher Ed, University of Pennsylvania professor Jonathan Zimmerman argued that faculty must rally behind academic freedom in this historic moment — one he compared to 1950s-era efforts to purge universities of Communist-leaning faculty. Zimmerman wrote:

The biggest myth about the McCarthy period is that purges of university faculty were imposed upon an unwilling professoriate. In fact, most American faculty members embraced the campaign to remove Communist or left-leaning colleagues. They took loyalty oaths, condemned “fellow travelers” and did everything else they could to protect the university from its supposed Red enemy.

Noting that universities are “repeating all the same patterns” today, Zimmerman urged his colleagues to stand up for the academic freedom rights of unpopular colleagues:

Our university leaders are busily issuing new loyalty oaths, declaring allegiance to Black Lives Matter, and everyone else is expected to follow along. That can’t be good for our democracy, or for our universities. It’s not even good for Black Lives Matter! Like any other social movement, BLM can only benefit from a full and free discussion of it.

If met, the Princeton faculty’s demand for a committee to police speech, research, and publication for signs of racism would be the end of academic freedom at the Ivy League university. And while one would hope that any free-minded academics at Princeton would simply leave the university under such oppressive circumstances, it is more likely that, given the challenges of the academic job market (particularly for faculty with dissenting views), they would instead opt for self-censorship.

Finally, Joshua Katz, a Princeton professor of Humanities and Classics, has written a “Declaration of Independence” (presumably from the letter of demands), also outlining those parts of the demands that would nearly destroy his school as a high-quality University.

One quote and then I will leave you to your reading. But at least look first at the letter of demands. What’s remarkable about that letter is that these days it is so unremarkable: it’s a boilerplate of every grievance of the offended.

Katz:

Indeed, plenty of ideas in the letter are ones I support. It is reasonable to “[g]ive new assistant professors summer move-in allowances on July 1” and to “make [admissions] fee waivers transparent, easy to use, and well-advertised.” “Accord[ing] greater importance to service as part of annual salary reviews” and “[i]mplement[ing] transparent annual reporting of demographic data on hiring, promotion, tenuring, and retention” seem unobjectionable. And I will cheerfully join the push for a “substantial expansion” of the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program, which encourages underrepresented minorities to enter PhD programs and strive to join the professoriate.

But then there are dozens of proposals that, if implemented, would lead to civil war on campus and erode even further public confidence in how elite institutions of higher education operate. Some examples: “Reward the invisible work done by faculty of color with course relief and summer salary” and “Faculty of color hired at the junior level should be guaranteed one additional semester of sabbatical” and “Provide additional human resources for the support of junior faculty of color.” Let’s leave aside who qualifies as “of color,” though this is not a trivial point. It boggles my mind that anyone would advocate giving people—extraordinarily privileged people already, let me point out: Princeton professors—extra perks for no reason other than their pigmentation.

“Establish a core distribution requirement focused on the history and legacy of racism in the country and on the campus.” There would be wisdom in this time of disunity in suggesting (not, in my view, requiring) that students take courses in American history and constitutionalism, both of which almost inevitably consider slavery and race, but that is not the same thing. Not incidentally, if you believe anti-blackness to be foundational, it is not a stretch to imagine that you will teach the 1619 Project as dogma.

. . . “Constitute a committee composed entirely of faculty that would oversee the investigation and discipline of racist behaviors, incidents, research, and publication on the part of faculty… Guidelines on what counts as racist behavior, incidents, research, and publication will be authored by a faculty committee for incorporation into the [usual] set of rules and procedures.” This scares me more than anything else: For colleagues to police one another’s research and publications in this way would be outrageous. Let me be clear: Racist slurs and clear and documentable bias against someone because of skin color are reprehensible and should lead to disciplinary action, for which there is already a process. But is there anyone who doesn’t believe that this committee would be a star chamber with a low bar for cancellation, punishment, suspension, even dismissal?

As Andrew Sullivan would say, “See you next Friday.” Actually, I’ll see you this afternoon and tomorrow morning.

h/t: Merilee, pyers, Paul

A bummer year for American colleges, exacerbated by a new government policy

July 7, 2020 • 9:15 am

My Ph.D. alma mater Harvard has announced its attendance policy for the 2020-2021 academic year. As the articles below report (click on screenshots), at that school every single class, large or small, will be taught online. Further, only 40% of the undergraduate students will be allowed on campus at one time. In the fall semester, the first-years (freshmen) will be on campus, as well as those with a pressing need to be on campus to further their education. The first-years will then return home and be replaced in the spring semester by seniors.  The article below doesn’t say whether second- and third-year students will also be present in the spring, but with 40% attendance tops, it seems unlikely.

Nevertheless, Harvard is charging the students full freight: the year’s tuition, about $54,000—a total bummer for students who might not even be on campus. While they’ll save meal and housing fees, and Harvard is offering, as a sop, two free summer-school courses in 2021 for those students who are away from campus the full academic year, that’s not much of an incentive.

In addition, every Harvard student will be tested for coronavirus before arriving on campus, and those living in dorms will be tested every three days.  There will also be social distancing and a change in dining-hall policy to a “touchless food pick-up system.” No more pigging out at all-you-can-eat dining halls!

While Harvard is clearly doing this to avoid the possibility of a viral outbreak on campus, it’s a pretty lousy way to go to school. In my conversations with professors and their students throughout the U.S., I haven’t met a single one who prefers online learning (all things equal) over in-person teaching. I wouldn’t either, though I don’t teach any longer.  And what about those science classes that require labs? There’s no way one can re-create the lab experience online. What about art classes where you create your own works?

The chance to socialize with other students is also much reduced. No parties, social distancing of everyone (perhaps wearing masks), and no discussions with other students, even in small seminars.

I conclude two things. First, were I a Harvard student, I’d take a year off rather than pay $54,000 for a much degraded academic experience. Presumably things will be back to normal in 2021, though if the coronavirus isn’t tamed by then, all bets are off. Some schools (see NYT article below) are penalizing students who take a sabbatical, saying that they might not get dormitory housing if they return.

Second, Harvard has some nerve to charge students full tuition for a year like this, especially when Harvard is so wealthy, with an endowment of $41 billion. Now I know they don’t like to touch the principal, but these are extraordinary circumstances. If Harvard halved its tuition, it would cost them $190 million—less than 5% of its endowment.

It’s especially hard on foreign students, as the U.S. government has just decreed that student visas will not be given to those who plan to attend U.S. universities where all courses are online. And if they’re in the U.S. already, they must return to their home countries. This will affect all foreign students at Harvard, though not at schools like the University of Chicago, where small classes will be taught in person. (Here are the new federal guidelines).

This, too, seems unfair. If American students can come to campus, why not foreign ones? After all, letting 40% of the students return to campus each semester presumes that there is some benefit to being there. And although the feds say this is due to the pandemic, it can’t be useful at Harvard, where all entering students are tested for Covid-19 and then tested every 3 days. It seems to me that a). for students already here, there’s no pandemic rationale for making them go home, and b.) the rules don’t work at Harvard, where all entering students are tested for coronavirus and then tested regularly. Why couldn’t this be done for all students? My view is that the xenophobic Trump administraion is simply doing this as a way to expel foreigners.

Other schools are a bit less restrictive, as this new article in the NYT describes:

As I’ve said, at the University of Chicago all students can come back, but there will be a mixture of remote and in-person classes, students will have to live in single rooms (first- and second-years are required to live in dorms), meals will be takeaway, and the last bit of the fall quarter will be held remotely. We’ll be hard pressed to find accommodations for our 6,500 undergrads.

At Yale, nearly all courses will be taught remotely, but small seminars can still be in-person, allowing foreign students to return. All student will be tested for coronavirus. And everyone will be charged full tuition—about the same as Harvard’s.

Princeton is one of the few Ivies to give a tuition discount: a full 10% off, making it $48,501 for the full year instead of nearly $54,000. How generous! All students will be on campus for only half the year: first- and third-years in fall, first-years and seniors in the spring (this is, of course, to allow “live” graduation).

Finally, Cornell is allowing all students to return to campus, though there’s still a hybrid model of online and in-person classes.  This is also true of Penn.

All in all, college students are getting a bad break this year. My view, which you should take with a grain of salt, is that students should take a year off and do something rewarding: foreign or domestic service, volunteer work, and other forms of “life experience” that are also educational—and would also be safe.

By now, all professors and students know that online learning is a lousy way to get a college education, and for the sciences it’s especially tough. I know that colleges want to keep operating, keep their students safe, but also haul in the dosh, yet this way of dealing with it gives the students a raw deal. At least the schools could halve their tuition! The charging of full tuition for a year in which you’re constrained to take all classes online (as at Harvard), and be on campus only half the academic year, seems unconscionable.

 

What’s the risk of death from coronavirus? A summary from Nature

June 25, 2020 • 9:00 am

A new article in Nature has gathered statistics from several studies to come up with an estimate of the overall death rate from coronavirus (click on screenshot below to read it, pdf here). If you’re paywalled, a judicious request might work. I’ll put the latest estimates at the bottom, as you’ll need to read the preliminary information since these figures come with many caveats.

As the article notes, when you’re estimating fatality rates, the gold standard is called the “infection fatality rate” (IFR), which is the proportion of all infected people, including those who are asymptomatic or haven’t been tested, who will die from the disease at issue.  You can imagine the difficulty of estimating this. While we can get an accurate handle on the fatality rate among those known to have the disease, that’s only a part of the statistic, and may either under- or over-estimate the IFR.  Further, if you have antibodies against the virus, you may have recovered from an infection without knowing you’ve had it. Yet that data must also be incorporated into the IFR, and antibody testing is not the same thing as testing for the virus. (How many of you have been antibody tested?) One study from Germany showed that 15.5% of the people in a town that had an outbreak had coronavirus antibodies—five times the proportion of people known to have had coronavirus at the time. Not doing antibody testing would have drastically overestimated the IFR.

Another complication is that some countries don’t test postmortem, and, importantly, the fatality rate in different groups (age, ethnicity, class and wealth, comorbidities, access to healthcare) haven’t been compiled thoroughly. Of course, if you’re infected or in a group that doesn’t have the average IFR, you’ll won’t care that much about the overall rate—you’ll want to know your own chance of dying.

Why do we need these data? As Nature notes:

Getting the number right is important because it helps governments and individuals to determine appropriate responses. “Calculate too low an IFR, and a community could underreact, and be underprepared. Too high, and the overreaction could be at best expensive, and at worst [could] also add harms from the overuse of interventions like lockdowns,” says Hilda Bastian, who studies evidence-based medicine, and is a PhD candidate at Bond University in the Gold Coast, Australia.

The article outlines other complications, but there’s no need to go into them here. I’ll just add that Nature presents the rate of six studies from five countries, and there isn’t much variance among them, with the first study, using data taken from a cruise ship in which everyone was tested, gives the only estimate of the true IFR. But the sample (3,711 people) was small.

So here are the data at hand, and realize that there are problems with all of the studies. But it is interesting that they tend to converge on a value of 0.5% to 1%. (Of course, if you’re old like me, or have other medical issues, this will be an underestimate):

Some scientists impute the small scatter to “luck” (whatever they mean by that) or coincidence, and virtually none of the data have been published in peer-reviewed manuscripts.  Finally, of course, we need to know the death rate for different groups, which will help in figuring out individual treatment, though for epidemiological purposes the IFR is necessary—if it’s from a random sample of people. (Nature cites one study from Switzerland estimating an overall IFR of 0.6%, but a tenfold higher rate of 5.6% for people 65 or older.

The lesson: so far across several populations, one’s chance of dying should they contract the disease is about 0.5% to 1%. But your mileage may vary (I have a lot of mileage and my figure would be higher), and it’s early days for these statistics.

Did countries with female leaders have a better coronavirus response? Statistics say “no”.

June 3, 2020 • 12:30 pm
It seems that the coronavirus has motivated many people to use the pandemic to leverage their favorite social-justice issue. So, for example, we’ve seen many discussions that the poor and African-Americans were disproportionately affected by the virus, which is true.  Another claim, not so obviously true, was the assertion, widely seen in the liberal media, that countries led by women had a better response to the pandemic—fewer infections and deaths—than did countries led by men. The implication was often that the character of women leaders was different from men in a way that led to a more salubrious response.  (Some sardonically said this response was basically that “men and women are the same—except when women are better.”)I wrote about this issue on May 17, and pointed out that the results given were largely anecdotal (invariably involving New Zealand and West Germany), had other explanations (e.g., countries with a more liberal social agenda could both deal with the pandemic more effectively and be more likely to choose women leaders), and that the assertion, of which I gave three instances (the New York Times, Forbes, and The Hill), needed a nonparametric statistical analysis. As I said at the time:

Is it true that countries with women leaders have done better than those with men leaders in fighting the coronavirus? That requires some kind of statistical analysis, for the analyses focus primarily on seven countries with female heads of state: Taiwan, New Zealand, Germany, Denmark, Norway, Iceland and Finland. And indeed, these countries have done better in fighting the virus than many others led by men. But there are other countries led by women as well, which are omitted from the analysis. Ideally, you’d want to do a rank order correlation between some measure of successful mitigation of the pandemic with whether the countries are led by women. Sadly, there are only 29 women-led countries in the world, and many have no data on coronavirus response.

Well, we now have a statistical analysis, done in detail and sent to me by Scott Goeppner, a doctoral student in the Department of Integrative Biology at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater. As he wrote me:

You posted an intriguing article a few weeks ago about whether female leaders have been better at handling the COVID-19 pandemic than male leaders. I have been following the COVID-19 deaths and cases on the ourworldindata website and it occurred to me that per capita measures of the number of COVID-19 cases and deaths provide a metric of how well a country is coping with the pandemic. With this in mind, I decided to try to run a Mann-Whitney test comparing the per capita number of cases and deaths due to coronavirus in countries led by men and women to see if female led countries fared better.

So he did. Now remember that the data are scanty because there are so few countries led by women, the results are tentative and, as Scott notes, there may be better metrics of gender equality than “whether a country is led by a woman.” But the upshot, in the article below—which Scott has kindly allowed me to send to inquiring readers, along with the supporting data—is that there is no evidence that countries led by women had better responses to the pandemic than countries led by men. In fact, the difference, which is not statistically significant, is in the opposite direction: cases per million or deaths per capita are slightly higher in woman-led countries. This lends no support to the assertions in the NYT and other places that having a woman at the helm protects your country better against pandemics.

Here’s the title of Scott’s piece, which is a Word document. I have permission from Scott to post the results and disseminate his analysis to interested readers. Write me if you want them, but don’t ask unless you intend to read them.

I’m not going to repeat the entire analysis, which you can read for yourself. I’ll just give an outline of the analyses and the results.

First, Scott found out which countries were led by women, ensuring that the women leaders actually had power and were not just figureheads. Then he used the coronavirus data from this source (indented paragraphs are Scott’s):

On May 17th, I downloaded a dataset from ourworldindata that included total cases, total deaths, total cases per million and total deaths per million (https://ourworldindata.org/covid-deaths). This dataset includes per day case counts, death counts, cumulative to date case and death counts, and lots of other information. The dataset extends back to when testing started for each country. I truncated the dataset to include only the cumulative cases per million and deaths per million as of May 17th when I downloaded the data.

Since the World Health Organization recommends that for every case deemed “positive”, there should be at least ten tests, he eliminated all countries that didn’t meet this criterion (see paper for methods).

In the end, he came up with 62 total countries, 12 of which were led in a meaningful way with females.

There are four analyses, none of which showed a significant difference between male-led and female-led nations. Further, the differences that did exist showed that female-led countries did marginally worse on every metric.

1.) Total cases per million for countries with adequate testing. Result: no significant difference using the nonparametric Mann-Whitney U test (p = 0.2891). Here are the results:

2.) Total deaths per million for countries with adequate testing. Result: no difference using the nonparametric Wilcoxon rank sum test with continuity correction test (p = 0.1368). Here are the results displayed  graphically:’

3.) Total cases per million for countries with adequate testing and only European countries included. Scott tested this because, as he said,

A potential problem with the previous analysis is that different regions of the world have different numbers of cases and deaths, and may be at different parts of their outbreaks. This would matter less if sex of leader were random with respect to region. However this does not appear to be the case, as 8 of the 11 female leaders of countries with adequate testing were leaders of European countries. Therefore, I truncated the dataset again to only include leaders of European countries. This process resulted in 29 countries remaining, 9 of which were female led.

Result: no significant difference using the nonparametric Wilcoxon rank sum test (p = 0.2948). Here are the graphical results:

 

4.) Total deaths per million for countries with adequate testing and only European countries included. Result: No significant difference using the Wilcoxon rank sum test (p = 0.2948).  Here’s the boxplot:

Here’s Scott’s conclusion, in which he suggests a metric that might be better, although of course to avoid p-hacking (doing a bunch of different tests until you get the result you want), you need to specify the metrics you’ll use before you do the test.

Summary – I found no evidence that female led countries had lower per capita cases or deaths due to coronavirus, and thus no evidence that female led countries are coping with the pandemic better than male led countries. I don’t think my Mann-Whitney U tests really settles the issue, especially given the very small sample size of women led countries. My guess is that if female empowerment improves a country’s response to coronavirus, it is more likely to show up using gender equity metrics than comparing countries based on the sex of their current leader.

My own take: in view of this analysis, there’s no statistical justification at present for arguing that women leaders dealt better with the coronavirus pandemic than did men leaders. Since the data don’t support that conclusion in any way, there’s thus no reason to speculate why there was a difference, as the New York Times did in the May 15 piece below. Note that the subheadline gives a reason: “a new leadership style.”

Supreme Court blocks challenge to California law limiting attendance at church

May 30, 2020 • 7:30 am

This ruling is a surprise to me, but the ruling was narrow. The Supreme Court has actually made a ruling favoring secular over religious interests, saying that restrictions on Church attendance in California were legal.  Click on the screenshot to see the New York Times article:

From the Times:

The Supreme Court on Friday turned away a request from a church in California to block enforcement of state restrictions on attendance at religious services.

The vote was 5 to 4, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. joining the court’s four-member liberal wing to form a majority.

“Although California’s guidelines place restrictions on places of worship, those restrictions appear consistent with the free exercise clause of the First Amendment,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote in an opinion concurring in the unsigned ruling.

“Similar or more severe restrictions apply to comparable secular gatherings, including lectures, concerts, movie showings, spectator sports and theatrical performances, where large groups of people gather in close proximity for extended periods of time,” the chief justice wrote. “And the order exempts or treats more leniently only dissimilar activities, such as operating grocery stores, banks and laundromats, in which people neither congregate in large groups nor remain in close proximity for extended periods.”

Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr., Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh noted dissents.

. . .The case was brought by the South Bay United Pentecostal Church in Chula Vista, Calif., which said Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, had lost sight of the special status of religion in the constitutional structure.

“The Covid-19 pandemic is a national tragedy,” lawyers for the church wrote in their Supreme Court brief, “but it would be equally tragic if the federal judiciary allowed the ‘fog of war’ to act as an excuse for violating fundamental constitutional rights.”

U.S. courts have a history of giving secular interests precedence over religious ones when the religious ones endanger either public health or the health of children. In most states, parents cannot withhold “real” medical care from their children if they practice faith-healing. And, of course, the “right to worship” surely must stop when that practice could endanger those believers who go out in public and could infect people not in their church.

Roberts has become more liberal then I thought since he’s become Chief Justice. In 2012 he pronounced Obama’s Affordable Care act constitutional, and I am pleased he voted with the liberals this time.

 

Pandemic redux: 1918 vs. now, and the advent of “mask slackers”

May 29, 2020 • 12:30 pm

Reader Charles Sawicki contacted me with two links to articles about the 1918 “Spanish Flu” pandemic that killed 5 million people worldwide (the first victim was actually in Kansas), and the similarities between those times and ours. In particular, the two articles below and the photos sent by Charles, deal with the mandatory wearing of face masks in the early pandemic, decreed by several cities and states. Then, like now, there were strong opponents of mask wearing. (One person was even shot for not wearing one.) Here’s Charles’s note:

There are interesting similarities between the Spanish flu and our present situation. For example, San Francisco required masks and had an anti-masking league form to resist mask wearing. People were arrested for not wearing masks and as we have seen today, violence sometimes resulted. The same sort of hand washing was recommended as well as some crazy preventative measures. It seems, in some ways, as a society, that we have not changed much in 100 years.

Here are two article about mask-wearing and resistance to it in 1918 and 1919; the first is a long article in Perspectives in Medical Humanities, and the second an article from History. If you want a quick take, read the shorter one, but the first has lots of good photos and illustrations. Click on either screenshot to read.

The second piece:

San Francisco, which initially closed schools, churches, bars, and most businesses as well as imposing mandatory mask wearing for anyone outside their home, is the subject of both of these pieces, because an “Anti-Mask” League formed there in staunch opposition to mask-wearing? Why? Businessmen said that even for open businesses the masks would hurt their sales because people supposedly didn’t want to venture out wearing masks; many people argued that they were ineffective (people wore gauze surgical masks made from cheesecloth) and that they were uncomfortable; and people protested that this was an unconscionable government interference with their freedom. Sounds familiar?

Charles also sent some nice pictures associated with the 1918 pandemic (it killed my paternal grandmother the year my dad was born, so he never knew his mom).

Another reliving of history. At the time they didn’t know what the infectious agent was, as viruses weren’t well known then; the first photos of them were obtained only in 1931, so they were defined as infectious agents that could pass through filters that would stop bacteria.

Social pressure from the Red Cross:

Someone who wouldn’t wear a mask was shot by a health inspector:

More “mask slackers”!  (That’s a great term; why isn’t it used today?) The fines for not wearing one were substantial, and could include jail time:

Opposition!

 

And more opposition:

 

From Dolan’s article: “enforcing the “influenza mask ordinance” among non-compliant San Francisco women. Image from San Francisco Library Historical Collection.”

And the end of masks: November 29, 1918. I don’t think that people today would celebrate the end of masks as much as the end of lockdowns and quarantine:

Making America hate again: Gun sales way up during the pandemic

May 28, 2020 • 12:15 pm

Romper is a magazine for parents about how to understand and take care of their kids, and yesterday’s article (click on screenshot) emphasizes the huge increase in American gun sales during the pandemic. There’s no doubt that that’s true. But they also argue that there’s been a huge increase in unintentional deaths and injuries caused by children handling guns, an increase connected with the increase in sales. This is, as Romper calls it, a “hidden crisis.”  But the data they give about children-caused deaths are scant and unconvincing. The trend may well be real, but it’s not statistically demonstrable, and the article is a good example of how to mislead using statistics.

But let me back up. First, there’s no doubt that many people get killed by kids getting access to their parents’ firearms. This is a national scandal, and reflects both the pervasive ownership of guns by Americans and their failure to lock them up and store the ammunition separately. All I’m criticizing here are two statistics purporting to show a significant increase in child-caused deaths that went up with the increase in gun sales. That increase in sales is very real, and is really what I want to emphasize here.

A quote about gun sales, with the data shown below:

Within the COVID-19 crisis, another public health emergency is threatening our kids. Gun sales have surged during the pandemic, with an estimated 1.9 million more guns sold this March and April than during the same period last year. This spike in sales comes as kids and teens are home from school in states across the country, and many busy, distracted, overwhelmed parents try to balance work and homeschooling.

That data (see table below) seem sound, and this is really scary. More on that in a second.

But Romper adds this about 4-year-old Amir Jennings-Green, killed while playing with his cousins:

In an instant, Amir’s life was cut short in a tragedy that was preventable, one of at least 21 gun deaths that were the result of unintentional shootings by children in March and April of this year.

. . . All of these factors are increasing the risk that curious children and teens will get their hands on unsecured guns and hurt themselves or others. In March and April, unintentional gun deaths by children rose by a staggering 43%, as Everytown calculated, and unintentional gun injuries by children increased by 7% over the same period for the last three years. Those numbers could be even higher, as journalists struggle to cover the scope of gun violence while under lockdown orders.

In March and April of 2020, the peak months of the U.S. pandemic, there were 21 total deaths from guns handled by children, which is correctly represented as an increase of such deaths by 43%. That looks impressive, but the numbers are very small.

What it really means that there were 15 gun deaths caused by children the previous year. If we assume that there wasn’t a real increase, and the rate is about the same over time and can be estimated as the average value across both periods, we’d get an average of (15 + 21)/2 or 18 guns deaths expected each year. The numbers 21 and 15 are not significantly different from an expectation of 18, 18: the chi-square value is exactly 1, far from statistical significance. Although the difference may be real, one can’t demonstrate that it differs from a constant rate of children killing others that hasn’t changed between 2019 and 2020.  And certainly the 7% increase of “unintentional gun injuries” during that period cannot be statistically significant: it’s a difference between 33 and 35.

But if the numbers get even higher with a fuller accounting, then I’d be impressed.

It does seem likely that the more guns in homes there are, the more often we’ll have deaths and injuries. Regardless of the above, it’s clear that many more innocent people are killed and injured by home-stored or hand-carried firearms, or commit suicide when them, than are real malefactors like burglars and home invaders when guns are used in self defense. Ownership of guns, in net, takes more lives than it saves. That’s one reason why I favor a handgun ban, except, perhaps, for target shooting. (In that case, keep your guns locked up at the gun club.)

Well, enough of that; I expect the gun lovers will come out in force here to oppose me. But let’s just look at the increase in gun sales during the pandemic, which the Romper article breaks down by state (their link to the table below is here).

 

 

Just comparing March + April between 2019 and the pandemic period of 2020, we see that every state shows an increase save Hawaii, which reports no gun sales. That must mean that data aren’t available for the island state, as guns are legal in Hawaii and there are reports of a similar increase in sales there this spring.  Just scanning the data, I suspect that the rates are correlated with the “redness” of a state, but I’ll leave it to the readers to calculate such a correlation.

Overall, there was an 80% increase in sales between 2019 and 2020 during this period, and that is significant.

Why the increase? The Maui article above reports several causes:

All eight customers interviewed said they wanted to protect themselves and their families if coronavirus panic worsens and their safety is at risk.

“It’s not necessarily the virus that I’m worried about — it’s how people are reacting to the virus,” said one customer at the gun store, who asked for anonymity because her husband is a first-responder. “We’ve already had break-ins in our neighborhood. What if someone gets desperate and tries to steal supplies from our home?”

. . . “It’s combination of a few things,” Redeker said. “The virus thing is causing a lot of panic. That could explain the large numbers in a short time.”

And some people may fear that the government may try to take over during the pandemic, or there could be general civil unrest due to the disruption of society, and of course then the warm, living hands of Americans reach for their guns.

I’m ashamed to be living in a country so gun-happy, and once again I reiterate my call for not only greater gun control, but very strict gun control along the lines of England and especially Scotland. If guns don’t really protect you from the bad guys, and lead to more deaths of innocents than of malefactors, what reason is there to own them? The “militia” reason outlined in the Second Amendment is no longer valid.

 

h/t: Ken