Cats, charts, and politics
Here's an article from February 1932 in Time magazine about an outbreak of smallpox in a small city in Massachusetts. Note the jocular tone throughout. Vaccination mandates were treated as entirely unremarkable, and resisters were caricatured as witless bumpkins.
Here's the latest:
Here are the basics. Gruesome details are available everywhere for anyone who's interested.
If this happened in any other country, it would be called both an attempted insurrection and an attempted coup. Nothing like it has happened in American history.
UPDATE: The original post contained a couple of small inaccuracies in the timeline of events on January 6. I've corrected them.
The decline of lead poisoning in children eventually led to a huge reduction in crime rates between 1990 and 2010. It took a while for prison populations to follow suit, but eventually they did too. Rick Nevin sends along the latest numbers for teen incarceration rates among males:
The overall incarceration rate for teen males is down 81% since 2001. You can click the link for more data on other age groups.
This is yet more good news that most people are probably unaware of, and it's one of the things that makes our massive political polarization so inexplicable: it's happening during an era that's been almost uniformly outstanding, but no one quite seems to realize this.
I blame Fox News for much of this, but I'll acknowledge that liberals engage in an awful lot of trash talking too. When both parties are dedicated to telling everyone how terrible things are, I guess it's no big surprise that people end up thinking that things are terrible.
Here's the LA Times piece I quoted earlier about first responders who are out with COVID-19:
More than 1,000 police officers, firefighters and paramedics in the Los Angeles region were ill or at home quarantining on Tuesday after testing positive for the coronavirus.
....More than 500 employees of the Los Angeles Police Department — including 416 sworn officers — were at home quarantining....The Los Angeles Fire Department had 201 employees out due to the coronavirus as of Tuesday, while the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department had 573 employees out.
....Across the state, more than 1,230 state prison employees were infected, as were 712 incarcerated people, officials said.
I got curious about how this same report sounds if you express everything in percentages. Here it is:
A little less than 3% of all police officers, firefighters and paramedics in the Los Angeles region were ill or at home quarantining on Tuesday after testing positive for the coronavirus.
....About 3.8% of all employees of the Los Angeles Police Department — including 4.2% of sworn officers — were at home quarantining....The Los Angeles Fire Department had more than 5% of its employees out due to the coronavirus as of Tuesday, while the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department had about 3% out.
....Across the state, a little less than 2% of all state prison employees were infected, as were nearly 1% of all incarcerated people, officials said.
I guess regular people hate percentages? Maybe. It's just that I read stuff like this and the first thing I wonder is, "How big a number is that?" After all, very few us know off the top of our heads how many total cops and firefighters there are in Los Angeles.
Of course, if this story had used percentages in the first place, maybe I'd be griping that I wanted exact numbers, not these approximations. Maybe I'm just never satisfied.
What's the rate of child poverty in the United States? It's a trickier question than you might imagine. Here's the answer from the Census Bureau. This is the one you'll probably see in newspaper headlines:
Here is the Census Bureau's "Supplemental Poverty Measure." It's the one you use if you're smart enough to know that the official figure isn't really worth a damn:
Here's the estimate from the Center on Poverty and Social Policy at Columbia University. It's pretty similar to the Census SPM figures, but it goes back further if you want a historical look at things:
Here is the OECD's estimate, which uses a poverty rate equal to half a country's median household income. It's the figure you'll see on charts comparing the US to other countries:
Finally, here's a measure of child poverty based on consumption, not income. It's the one to use if you're a conservative:
I've highlighted the 2018 estimate on all five charts since it's the most recent year common to all of them. Here's a recap:
So then: what's the child poverty rate in the United States?
More than 500 employees of the Los Angeles Police Department — including 416 sworn officers — were at home quarantining as of Jan. 1 after positive tests, the department said. In the last week alone, the department had seen 424 new cases, officials said.
That's a little less than 4% of the police force. Here is Dan Drezner:
Reading story after story about the contagious nature of the omicron variant, and learning that a lot of our close friends had tested positive, the inevitable seemed on our doorstep....Here’s the thing, though: I never tested positive. It was not for lack of testing, either. Over the last 10 days of December, I tested at my place of work and performed rapid at-home tests at least five times. All negative!
If you're vaxxed and boosted, the odds of getting COVID in any given month is about 1 in 500. Maybe it was higher in December. So double it. Or triple it. Call it 1 in 100. That's still only 1%. Nobody should be surprised at not getting COVID if they're vaxxed and boosted and not doing anything stupid.
Elsewhere, Jon Stewart is trying to blame everyone but himself for saying that J.K. Rowling had made goblins into Jewish caricatures in the Harry Potter series. It was all just lighthearted fun, he says. No reasonable person could have seen it otherwise.
Yeesh. It was obviously serious. Give us a break, Jon.
Once again, you get two photos for the price of one! I took both of these on New Year's Day in lieu of watching football games I wasn't really interested in. The top photo is a picture of a brilliant orange liquid amber tree with the morning sun behind it. The bottom photo is a closeup of some backlit leaves.
I was nosing around on the Gallup site a few minutes ago and happened to visit their presidential job approval center. Here's what Joe Biden's approval rating looks like over the past year:
I don't especially have a big point to make about this. I was just impressed with how precisely the trendline directions of the most recent three presidents match each other, so I thought I'd share.
How many people are currently infected with COVID-19? As near as I can tell, the official answer is about 4 million or so. If you double that to account for both asymptomatic cases and mild cases that never get reported, it's 8 million. Then add some more just because, and it seems like 10 million is probably close to the mark. That's 3% of the US population.
I don't have an axe to grind here. Honest. I'm just confused. If, say, 3% of your teachers or your flight attendants or your truck drivers are out sick, that's... not a big deal. I imagine that something like 3-5% of US workers are routinely out sick, especially during winter.
Obviously the percentage of COVID cases is higher in places like New York City, that have seen a big spike. And hospitals are a whole different story. Generally speaking, though, it seems like 3% is a plausible number and that doesn't track at all with reports on the ground about massive chaos due to the virus.
What am I getting wrong here? Am I overreacting to a few isolated news reports in specific places and specific industries? Is most of the country humming along fairly normally? I can't figure out what's really going on here.