Month: March 2021

I get asked about this with some regularity, so here's the answer: Lead poisoning has nothing to do with the overall crime rate these days. Its effects lasted from the mid-60s through about 2010. After that, everyone under 30 had grown up in a low-lead environment and there was little additional improvement to be had.

The past few years have seen some peculiar ups and downs in the violent crime rate, and the murder rate in particular has increased considerably over the past year. There are lots of possible reasons for this, ranging from the statistical to the very real (George Floyd, the COVID-19 pandemic), but at the moment we don't really know the cause.

But it's not lead.

This is a pair of European starlings at sunrise on the border fence. They have their feathers puffed up to stay warm.

Is Italy a bellwether? Both their case rate and their mortality rate are trending back up, and case rates have also turned upward in France, Germany, Denmark, Austria, and other countries. Europe needs to get its vaccination program working pronto.

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through March 15. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

How much money are Black farmers getting from the COVID relief bill? Here's the Washington Post:

Of the $10.4 billion in the American Rescue Plan that will support agriculture, approximately half would go to disadvantaged farmers, according to estimates from the Farm Bureau, an industry organization. About a quarter of disadvantaged farmers are Black. The money would provide debt relief as well as grants, training, education and other forms of assistance aimed at acquiring land.

So that's one quarter of one half, or 12.5% of the entire amount. Lindsey Graham calls it "reparations," while Sean Hannity uses it as an excuse to whip up the usual Fox News hysteria about white people getting screwed yet again.

You'd think even these two might be a little embarrassed about what they're doing, but they aren't. To them, fanning the flames of racism is just a smart political move. This is what we get from Republicans when we try to do even the smallest thing to concretely help Black people and other minorities.

Nuntes vulpes delenda est!

I'm puzzled about something related to the AstraZeneca vaccine. Several European countries have put it on hold due to reports of blood clots in patients who have received it. If I have the numbers right, about 40 cases of blood clots have been reported out of the 17 million people who have gotten the AZ vaccine.

But COVID-19 itself is far more dangerous on the blood clot front. "Blood clots continue to wreak havoc for patients with severe COVID-19 infection," reported the University of Michigan Health Lab a few months ago, and that hasn't changed.

So let's do some arithmetic. The overall hospitalization rate for COVID-19 is about 100 per million per week, which means that of the 17 million who have received the AZ vaccine since January, something on the order of 17,000 would have been hospitalized if they hadn't been vaccinated. The incidence of blood clots in patients hospitalized for COVID-19, according to a recent study, is about 20%. This means that roughly 3,000 people out of those 17 million would have developed blood clots without the vaccine, simply because they would gotten a serious case of COVID-19.

So . . . 3,000 without the vaccine, 40 with the vaccine.¹ That seems like a no-brainer: keep inoculating people with the AZ vaccine until firm evidence of large-scale harm emerges.²

Unless, of course, I bollixed up my amateur risk-assessment arithmetic. If I did, what am I missing?

¹Also, AstraZeneca claims that 40 cases out of 17 million is about the same as it is for other vaccines. I can't verify that at the moment, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's true.

²The calculus might work out differently if you had plenty of alternate vaccine supplies, but I don't get the impression that's the case in Europe.

This is a panoramic picture of the Eastern Sierras taken in the early morning on Highway 168 just before the turnoff to the Bristlecone Pine Forest. The small patch of brown in the lower middle is Big Pine. The colors in this picture are interesting, but what's really remarkable is how solid the lines are. They look drawn on, not photographed. And yet, photographed they were.

This was a very strange weekend. On Saturday we blew past every previous record by vaccinating 4.6 million people in a single day. Then on Sunday we plummeted down to 1.4 million. Overall, though, this is good news. Saturday's performance demonstrates that we have the infrastructure to vaccinate 4-5 million people in a day, while the three-day weekend average of 3 million is well above any previous weekend. At this point, I think the only thing really limiting us is supply.

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through March 14. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

Sunday was a crash day for me, so I have nothing serious to say. But I do have a few quick hits:

• Conservatives are griping that President Biden hasn't held a press conference yet. Biden's defenders say that he's held loads of small press avails, so it's not as if he's avoiding questions. Personally, I've always found formal press conferences to be fairly useless, since they encourage reporters to preen and allow presidents to filibuster and tap dance. But if the press wants a press conference, why not give them one? I'm not sure what the harm would be.
• Biden backed the Trans Pacific Partnership, a trade treaty that included nearly every country around the Pacific rim except for China. Donald Trump, naturally, pulled out of TPP because he hadn't negotiated it, and then spent four years whining about problems that wouldn't have even existed if he'd just accepted TPP in the first place. So . . . is it too late to join belatedly? Seems like it should still be possible.
• Biden really does seem to have encouraged a big surge in refugees and unaccompanied children along the southern border. You don't have to adopt Trumpish levels of cruelty to tighten this up, and it's something he really ought to do.
• Finally, enough's enough. Biden promised us a cat in the White House, and it's time for him to deliver. Please join me in demanding answers. #WheresTheCat

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through March 13. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.