Month: March 2021

Graphing the pandemic

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.axios.com/graphing-the-pandemic-6b62e35a-8481-4287-bcab-70d4b2fc2091.html

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Excerpt:

2020: The year the y-axis broke

Why it matters: Changes that typically take months or years to show up on a trend line started happening in weeks — resulting in a year of numerical outliers that will be breaking the axis for decades to come.

The result was two-fold:

Y-axes need to be continually adjusted to accommodate ever-higher numbers.

Longer term, there’s now a year of graphical outliers that future charts will have to account for.

Author(s): Mike Allen

Publication Date: 13 March 2021

Publication Site: Axios

Why humans love pie charts

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://blog.usejournal.com/why-humans-love-pie-charts-9cd346000bdc

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We might think of the pie chart as a fairly recent invention, with arguably more flaws than benefits, in regards to the statistical portrayal of data. However, if we look deep into history we realize this popular chart is only a recent manifestation of an ancient visual motif that carried meaning to numerous civilizations over space and time. A graphical construct of radiating lines enclosed by a circle, this motif is also a powerful perceptual recipe. If we look deep into ourselves we uncover a strong proclivity for such a visual pattern, despite the final message it might carry. As one of the oldest archetypes of the circular diagram, the sectioned circle will certainly outlast all of us, and indifferent to criticism, I suspect, so will the pie chart.

Author(s): Manuel Lima

Publication Date: 23 July 2018

Publication Site: Noteworthy – the Journal blog

Vaccines can get us to herd immunity, despite the variants

Mary Pat Campbell
Vaccines should end the pandemic, despite the variants, say experts

Excerpt:

A Harvard immunologist said current vaccines appear to be effective enough to end the pandemic, despite growing concerns that more infectious COVID-19 variants would severely blunt the effectiveness of the preventative treatments and set the nation back in its fight against the disease.

Galit Alter, professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT, and Harvard, said the fast-spreading U.K. variant seems able to evade some vaccine protection, and the South African variant appears able to skirt even more. Despite that, she said, none have completely escaped the body’s post-vaccination immune responses.

Author(s): Alvin Powell

Publication Date: 25 February 2021

Publication Site: Harvard Gazette

Federal law prohibits employers and others from requiring vaccination with a Covid-19 vaccine distributed under an EUA

Mary Pat Campbell
Federal law prohibits employers and others from requiring vaccination with a Covid-19 vaccine distributed under an EUA

Excerpt:

The same section of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act that authorizes the FDA to grant emergency use authorization also requires the secretary of Health and Human Services to “ensure that individuals to whom the product is administered are informed … of the option to accept or refuse administration of the product.”

Likewise, the FDA’s guidance on emergency use authorization of medical products requires the FDA to “ensure that recipients are informed to the extent practicable given the applicable circumstances … That they have the option to accept or refuse the EUA product …”

Author(s): Aaron Siri

Publication Date: 23 February 2021

Publication Site: Stat News

Excel Never Dies: The Spreadsheet That Launched A Million Companies

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.notboring.co/p/excel-never-dies

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Excel may be the most influential software ever built. It is a canonical example of Steve Job’s bicycle of the mind, endowing its users with computational superpowers normally reserved for professional software engineers. Armed with those superpowers, users can create fully functional software programs in the form of a humble spreadsheet to solve problems in a seemingly limitless number of domains. These programs often serve as high-fidelity prototypes of domain specific applications just begging to be brought to market in a more polished form. 

If you want to see the future of B2B software, look at what Excel users are hacking together in spreadsheets today. Excel’s success has inspired the creation of software whose combined enterprise value dwarfs that of Excel alone.

Author(s): Packy McCormick

Publication Date: 8 March 2021

Publication Site: Not Boring

How Losing At Least 375 Businesses Since Last March Reshaped D.C.

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.npr.org/local/305/2021/03/12/976091647/how-losing-at-least-375-businesses-since-last-march-reshaped-d-c

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At least 235 brick-and-mortar businesses have closed permanently in D.C. since the first known coronavirus case was reported on March 7, 2020, with 100 more shuttered temporarily, a count by DCist/WAMU found. (The status of another 40 is unknown.)

As of December, more than 36,000 residents were unemployed — a 77% increase over the prior year. Downtown D.C., once an economic engine that contributed nearly 16% of the city’s tax revenue in 2019, is today an effigy of its former self. At night, the bars and restaurants that propelled so much of D.C.’s economic growth seem funereal without scores of intoxicated revelers streaming through the doors and swiping their credit cards.

Author(s): ALLY SCHWEITZER

Publication Date: 12 March 2021

Publication Site: NPR

Cuomo Killing the Disabled and the Elderly: This Time It’s Personal

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://marypatcampbell.substack.com/p/cuomo-killing-the-disabled-and-the

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But the other problem, of course, was that Cuomo wasn’t the only governor who sent sick people back into nursing homes. In addition to New York, there was also Michigan, California, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.

Except it seems Cuomo was the only one who had his staff falsify data. So perhaps the others can get away with just admitting they made decisions that were very unwise.

As it is, the New York state legislature is starting an impeachment investigation, and I assume they’re not going to half-ass it like other impeachments we have heard tell of.

Author(s): Mary Pat Campbell

Publication Date: 11 March 2021

Publication Site: STUMP on Substack

Cuomo Administration Questioned CDC Official About Covid-19 Nursing-Home Death Data

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/cuomo-administration-questioned-u-s-health-officials-about-nursing-home-data-11615408672

Excerpt:

When New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration learned last year that the federal government was about to release data on Covid-19 deaths in nursing homes, state officials were concerned: Would the federal numbers tell the public a different story than the state’s own?

…..
No other state requested details about the data release, according to the official. The federal health officials on the call described the scope of the data, how it was collected and how it compared with the state’s data.

When it was released, the federal data included fatalities inside both nursing homes and hospitals. But the federal tally of 3,525 deaths was lower than the state’s total of 5,944 because nursing homes weren’t required to report deaths to the federal government from March and April, the deadliest period for the state in the pandemic.

Author(s): Joe Palazzolo, Jimmy Vielkind

Publication Date: 10 March 2021

Publication Site: Wall Street Journal

How China’s attack on Microsoft escalated into a “reckless” hacking spree

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/03/10/1020596/how-chinas-attack-on-microsoft-escalated-into-a-reckless-hacking-spree

Excerpt:

At first the Chinese hackers ran a careful campaign. For two months, they exploited weaknesses in Microsoft Exchange email servers, picked their targets carefully, and stealthily stole entire mailboxes. When investigators eventually caught on, it looked like typical online espionage—but then things accelerated dramatically.

Around February 26, the narrow operation turned into something much bigger and much more chaotic. Just days later, Microsoft publicly disclosed the hacks—the hackers are now known as Hafnium—and issued a security fix. But by then attackers were looking for targets across the entire internet: in addition to tens of thousands of reported victims in the US, governments around the world are announcing that they were compromised too. Now at least 10 hacking groups, most of them government-backed cyber-espionage teams, are exploiting the vulnerabilities on thousands of servers in over 115 countries, according to the security firm ESET.

Author(s): Patrick Howell O’Neill

Publication Date: 10 March 2021

Publication Site: MIT Technology Review

Grim COVID-19 Scenario Could Cut Pension Liabilities

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.thinkadvisor.com/2021/03/09/grim-covid-19-scenario-could-slash-pension-liabilities/

Excerpt:

The pandemic could also slash pension plan sponsors’ liabilities, by making ordinary health care an expensive luxury — and driving up the U.S. death rate for decades to come.

Analysts at Club Vita US LLC have presented those scenarios in a look at the possible effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on three types of U.S. pension plans: defined benefit plans sponsored by single employers; defined benefit plans sponsored by multiple private-sector employers; and defined benefit plans sponsored by government employers.

The analysts’ work reflects the same kinds of effects that might affect blocks of life insurance policies, blocks of annuities, and life settlement portfolios.

Author(s): Allison Bell

Publication Date: 9 March 2021

Publication Site: Think Advisor

Blocked shots? City limiting its share of United Center vaccinations to five ZIP codes hit hard by COVID-19

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://chicago.suntimes.com/coronavirus/2021/3/10/22323505/illinois-coronavirus-united-center-vaccinations-cases-deaths-pritzker-covid-19-mar-10

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In a bid to vaccinate more people of color in neighborhoods hit hard by COVID-19, city officials Wednesday limited registration for United Center appointments to Chicagoans in a handful of South and Southwest Side neighborhoods.

Anyone who lives in the 60608, 60619, 60620, 60649 or 60652 ZIP codes can sign up for an appointment at events.juvare.com/chicago/UCPOD/ with the code “CCVICHICAGO,” or by reaching the multilingual call center at (312) 746-4835.

Chicago residents from outside those ZIP codes who try to sign up will have their appointments canceled, according to a city flyer circulated by several community groups.

Chicago will be allotted 60% of the vaccines administered at the United Center for its residents, while Cook County and the state determine rules for other residents. That’s the latest change in a signup process that has caused confusion from the start.

Author(s): Mitchell Armentrout, Brett Chase

Publication Date: 10 March 2021

Publication Site: Chicago Sun-Times

The world is far from hitting its target for carbon emissions

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/03/05/the-world-is-far-from-hitting-its-target-for-carbon-emissions

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LAST YEAR’S clear spring skies foreshadowed it and the numbers bear it out: covid-19 lockdowns caused a sharp drop in emissions from burning fossil fuels, the largest such drop since the second world war. The latest data, published on March 3rd by the Global Carbon Project, an international consortium of climate researchers, puts industrial carbon-dioxide emissions produced in 2020 at 34bn tonnes, 2.6bn tonnes (7%) lower than in 2019.

Clearly, 2020 was an unusual year and emissions have already started to rebound. What is more, the drop came at a huge cost to economies and societies. Yet, in order to meet the Paris agreement’s goal of limiting global warming to between 1.5°C and 2°C above pre-industrial levels, more big cuts will be needed for the rest of the decade. “We need a cut in emissions of about the size of the fall [from the pandemic] every two years, but by completely different methods,” said Corinne Le Quéré, of the University of East Anglia, one of the lead researchers on the study.

Publication Date: 5 March 2021

Publication Site: The Economist