Home » Open thread 8/19/21

Comments

Open thread 8/19/21 — 13 Comments

  1. From the Epoch Times

    When asked about the need for annual booster doses [of vaccine], Dr. Rachelle Walensky said, “I don’t want to say never, but we are not necessarily anticipating that you will need this annually.”

    “It does look like after this third dose, you get a really robust response, and so we will continue to follow the science both on the vaccine side but also on the virus side,” she said during a CBS News interview on Aug. 19.

    Official policy: “Third time’s a charm!” Magical thinking. Ha, ha, ha, ha.

  2. All the Worldometers Covid graphs I’ve looked at show we’re on the other side of the hump for Delta.

    Hooray, I guess.

  3. Griffin:

    Your tweet is based on https://covidestim.org which is pretty cute. Shows data in several dimensions over time. The default chart shows infections / 100K on a county basis which helps take in the US at a glance. Clearly the Deep South is being hit hard.

    Thanks!

    Still the country is on the other side of the Delta hump and I’m glad of that.

    I can understand why authorities panicked when they saw all those curves going positive exponential a month or so ago.

  4. Also, let’s see what General Winter has to say about Covid Delta and other variants.

    Who knows? Delta certainly has no issues with tropical heat and humidity. Has it had much of a run in any classical Northern flu season yet? Don’t think it popped up early enough to infect many people last Northern Winter. Guess there’s Australia. Gets coolish in Sydney and Melbourne this time of year.

  5. Griffin:

    That’s a great data animation too.

    I was reminded of when I gave up watching Worldometers because deaths in the Dakotas went way up and became the deadliest states in the Union by far for a few weeks for no reason I could discern.

    This is much better than going through a bunch of state graphs by hand.

  6. Also, let’s see what General Winter has to say about Covid Delta and other variants.

    Zaphod:

    That’s a good point and we shall see. What variants are on the bench waiting to come into to game?

    But we might be looking at a great safe Fall.

    Unfortunately most schools seem to be locked into masking.

  7. Who remembers the classic, “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information” by Edward R. Tufte?

    That was The Book for a long time.

  8. huxley:

    The books by Tufte were an inspiration and very useful to me, presenting groundwater contamination data for instance. “I can make this computer (software) draw a duck.” was typical at the time.

  9. Yup. Brilliant book. Could have been Tufte’s blog pointed me at Norvig’s Gettysburg PP.

    Last time I looked years ago he was trying to promote tiny little graphs the size of a few characters for providing visual cues inside bodies of text for trends being discussed in them. In other words could have better reading flow without need to constantly flip context to a larger graph figure (which you’d still provide, of course). Liked the idea but it doesn’t seem to have caught on.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

HTML tags allowed in your comment: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>