January 2021 – Page 6 – Actuarial News

More Jockeying on Kentucky Pension Case, Mayberry v. KKR

January 25, 2021 Mary Pat Campbell

More Jockeying on Kentucky Pension Case, Mayberry v. KKR

Excerpt:

A short update on the Mayberry v. KKR, a pathbreaking public pension suit targeting customized hedge funds designed for the sitting duck Kentucky Retirement Systems by Blackstone, KKR, and PAACO. The litigation is on track to becoming a Jarndyce v Jarndyce level case study in the (mis)use of procedure to delay a case.
…..
I neglected to add that one reason for trying another amendment as opposed to a new filing would be to assure that Shepherd remained the trial judge. New cases are assigned randomly to judges and the other judge in Frankfort is pro-corporate. However, the Attorney General’s Motion to Intervene was assigned to Shepherd’s colleague, and he bounced it over to Shepherd, so that risk looks to no longer be operative.

Author: Yves Smith

Publication Date: 8 January 2021

Publication Site: naked capitalism

Employers make the Canada Revenue Agency mistakes

January 25, 2021 Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.vaughantoday.ca/employers-make-the-canada-revenue-agency-mistakes/

Excerpt:

The Canadian Revenue Agency (CRA) presented a spreadsheet of Canada Emergency Wage Support (CUSS) that was riddled with errors and cut some business subsidies in half.
To qualify for SSUC – which has so far helped nearly 400,000 companies with grants totaling $ 59 billion – employers must fill out “spreadsheets”: Excel spreadsheets that ARC has been offering on its website since March 15th.
However, the spreadsheet available to companies for payment periods from July 5 to August 29 contained several major errors until last Friday, nine days before the deadline for grant applications.
…..
This mistake had the effect of drastically reducing support for businesses, but only for some owners and their families. It only exists in the French version of the spreadsheet.

Author: Alan Binder

Publication Date: 25 January 2021

Publication Site: Vaughan Today

Covid-19 Is Speeding Up How Deaths Are Recorded

January 25, 2021 Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-19-is-speeding-up-how-deaths-are-recorded-11611397800

Excerpt:

When governments realized death tolls were too low, they revamped the way they counted them
….
Weeks after the virus hit Italy last year, doctors, funeral homes and officials realized that government Covid-19 death tolls were too low and many victims weren’t getting included. Informal tallies quickly revealed that thousands of deaths most likely caused by the virus had been omitted. Limited testing left the number of infections unknown, and many people had died outside hospitals, which were the initial source of fatality figures.
Italy’s statistical agency, Istat, scrambled to assemble more reliable information, collecting data from towns and cities faster than ever before. In May, it revealed what people at the front lines had suspected: a 39% jump in nationwide deaths between Feb. 21 and March 31 compared with previous years.
“Normally, they [the data] would have arrived six months later,” said Istat President Gian Carlo Blangiardo in May. “We made an extraordinary effort.”

Author: Daniel Michaels

Publication Date: 23 January 2021

Publication Site: WSJ

2020 saw an unprecedented spike in homicides from big cities to small towns

January 25, 2021 Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/reoord-spike-murders-2020/2020/12/30/1dcb057c-4ae5-11eb-839a-cf4ba7b7c48c_story.html

Excerpt:

2020 has been a killer year in every way, including murder. The United States has experienced the largest single one-year increase in homicides since the country started keeping such records in the 20th century, according to crime data and criminologists.
The grim body count isn’t quite over yet, but the data collected so far is stark — a 20.9 percent increase in killings nationwide, in the first nine months of the year, according to the FBI, and even bloodier increases in many major cities, due largely to gun violence.

Author: Devlin Barrett

Publication Date: 30 December 2020

Publication Site: Washington Post

The rise in murders in the US, explained

January 25, 2021 Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.vox.com/2020/8/3/21334149/murders-crime-shootings-protests-riots-trump-biden

Excerpt:

A new report, by the Council on Criminal Justice, found homicides have increased sharply this year across 21 US cities with relevant data: “Homicide rates increased by 42% during the summer and 34% in the fall over the summer and fall of 2019.” Other data, from crime analyst Jeff Asher, found murder is up 36 percent throughout the year so far, compared to the same period in 2019, in a sample of 51 US cities. A preliminary FBI report also found murders up 15 percent nationwide in the first half of 2020.

Author: German Lopez

Publication Date: 2 December 2020

Publication Site: Vox

There is almost no evidence that vaccinated individuals can transmit the virus to others

January 25, 2021 Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://polimath.substack.com/p/in-which-i-finally-lose-my-mind

Excerpt:

Where does this idea that a vaccinated person could still be carrying COVID come from? Whenever you dig into the details of this concept, it comes from the fact that a rigorous study of asymptomatic COVID transmission among vaccinated participants was not a part of the Phase 3 study. In other words, we cannot *prove* that COVID *doesn’t* asymptomatically tag along for the ride in a vaccinated person.
When it comes to transmitting COVID to another person, a mask is only helpful for airborne transmission. That means the virus would have to be coming from your upper respiratory tract for a mask to be effective at stopping it. But if there is enough COVID virus in your upper respiratory tract for you to be transmitting it, then there is enough COVID virus for a testing swab to detect. In essence, if you had enough virus in your exhalations to infect another person, you would be testing positive for COVID… which is exactly the observed measurement that the vaccine prevents.

Author: PoliMath

Publication Date: 22 January 2021

Publication Site: Marginally Compelling

Why scientists are more worried about the Covid-19 variant discovered in South Africa

January 25, 2021 Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.vox.com/2021/1/21/22240475/covid-new-variant-south-africa-uk-brazil-vaccine-coronavirus

Excerpt:

On January 15, US public health officials warned that a more contagious variant of the coronavirus that causes Covid-19 could dominate infections in the United States by March. That grim warning referred to B.1.1.7, a variant that was first identified in the United Kingdom.
But now, one week later, scientists are increasingly concerned about another variant that emerged in South Africa.
There’s evidence from several small, and not-yet-peer-reviewed, studies that mutations in the South Africa variant — known as 501Y.V2 and already present in at least 23 countries — may have a higher risk of Covid-19 reinfection in people who’ve already been sick and still should have some immunity to the disease.

Authors: Julia Belluz and Umair Irfan

Publication Date: 22 January 2021

Publication Site: Vox

Post-lockdown SARS-CoV-2 nucleic acid screening in nearly ten million residents of Wuhan, China

January 25, 2021 Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-19802-w

Abstract:

Stringent COVID-19 control measures were imposed in Wuhan between January 23 and April 8, 2020. Estimates of the prevalence of infection following the release of restrictions could inform post-lockdown pandemic management. Here, we describe a city-wide SARS-CoV-2 nucleic acid screening programme between May 14 and June 1, 2020 in Wuhan. All city residents aged six years or older were eligible and 9,899,828 (92.9%) participated. No new symptomatic cases and 300 asymptomatic cases (detection rate 0.303/10,000, 95% CI 0.270–0.339/10,000) were identified. There were no positive tests amongst 1,174 close contacts of asymptomatic cases. 107 of 34,424 previously recovered COVID-19 patients tested positive again (re-positive rate 0.31%, 95% CI 0.423–0.574%). The prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 infection in Wuhan was therefore very low five to eight weeks after the end of lockdown.

Authors: Shiyi Cao, Yong Gan, Chao Wang, Max Bachmann, Shanbo Wei, Jie Gong, Yuchai Huang, Tiantian Wang, Liqing Li, Kai Lu, Heng Jiang, Yanhong Gong, Hongbin Xu, Xin Shen, Qingfeng Tian, Chuanzhu Lv, Fujian Song, Xiaoxv Yin & Zuxun Lu

Publication Date: 20 November 2020

Publication Site: Nature Communications

Asymptomatic transmission of COVID-19 didn’t occur at all, study of 10 million finds

January 25, 2021 Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/asymptomatic-transmission-of-covid-19-didnt-occur-at-all-study-of-10-million-finds

Excerpt:

A study of almost 10 million people in Wuhan, China, found that asymptomatic spread of COVID-19 did not occur at all, thus undermining the need for lockdowns, which are built on the premise of the virus being unwittingly spread by infectious, asymptomatic people.
Published in November in the scientific journal Nature Communications, the paper was compiled by 19 scientists, mainly from the Huazhong University of Science and Technology in Wuhan, but also from scientific institutions across China as well as in the U.K. and Australia. It focused on the residents of Wuhan, ground zero for COVID-19, where 9,899,828 people took part in a screening program between May 14 and June 1, which provided clear results as to the possibility of any asymptomatic transmission of the virus.

Author: Michael Haynes

Publication Date: 23 December 2020

Publication Site: LifeSiteNews

Report: Death certificate analysis shows Washington state’s COVID death count inflated

January 25, 2021 Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://amp.thepostmillennial.com/revealed-death-certificate-analysis-shows-washington-states-covid-death-count-inflated/?_

Excerpt:

Washington State’s COVID death numbers could be inflated as much as twenty percent according to a new study by the Freedom Foundation, based on an analysis of death certificates.
In May, The Freedom Foundation, an Olympia based think tank, released a report which revealed that the Washington Department of Health was recording every death in which the deceased previously tested positive for the virus as a COVID death. At the time, the Freedom Foundation estimated that COVID deaths in the state were being inflated by as much as thirteen percent by deaths from other causes including even gun shots victims. After a review of the death certificates, that number could now be as high as twenty percent of all COVID deaths in Washington through September.

Author: Ari Hoffman

Publication Date: 22 December 2020

Publication Site: The Post Millennial

Minnesota lawmakers say coronavirus deaths could be inflated by 40% after reviewing death certificates

January 25, 2021 Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/coronavirus-death-certificates-minnesota-inflated

Excerpt:

Two Minnesota state lawmakers are calling for an audit of death certificates that were attributed to the coronavirus, saying COVID-19 deaths could have been inflated by 40%.
State Rep. Mary Franson and state Sen. Scott Jensen released a video last week revealing that after reviewing thousands of death certificates in the state, 40% did not have COVID-19 as the underlying cause of death.
…..
Franson and Jensen noted in their video that while the deaths attributed to the virus appear inflated, this does not mean the virus should be treated without caution.
“The COVID-19 disease is real. There is no question,” Jensen said.

Author: Emma Colton

Publication Date: 22 December 2020

Publication Site: Washington Examiner