Muh Muh Muh My Corona (virus)

NJ guv Murphy said his decision cited focus groups saying people were sick of masks.

Yay science!

I guess consequences have elections.

 

A meta-analysis is a "study of studies" (ultimately they analyzed 34 papers). They absolutely DID NOT characterize cities or countries or whatever. Rather, they coded studies of cities or countries.

But in their analysis they also explored, to the degree they were allowed to by their data, degree of "lockdown stringency" (for example, a sub-section is devoted to studies dealing with shelter-in-place-orders; even those appeared to have a relatively modest effect).

Even if one runs with your criticism ("They included cities with only the barest minimum of restrictions!"), however, the overall message is still striking: If doing very little accomplishes very little and doing a lot accomplishes not much more ...

EDIT: Now I must admit I didn't read the "summary." As I understand it there are some summary-reading experts 'round here (not you). They will perhaps be calling me to task in response to this.

 

My beef is not with individual cities or lack thereof.

It is with the comically wide net they cast in defining what criteria they were working with.

 

Again, I think you've misunderstood what they did. When you do a meta-analysis, you "cast a wide net" to make sure you're not missing any studies. They're using "lockdowns" to summarize a number of keywords, etc., that they used to assemble their corpus of candidate studies.

Casting such a wide net meant that they started with more than 18,000 papers. They then whittled these down to a subset of 117 before settling on their final subset (which was further parsed for different analyses ... some looked at this Oxford University stringency index, others look at SIPOs, and others looked at specific NPIs).

Only two papers that entered their analysis looked at only one NPI. One looked only at bar/restaurant closures and the other looked only at school closures. Ironically, given your objections, those two papers most strongly undercut the takeaway that NPI's don't have much of an effect. Put simply, had the authors deleted the "LOL! You call that a 'lockdown'?" papers from their analyses ... the estimated effect of NPIs would have been even smaller!

 

Trust the podcast

Proposed Georgia law to get rid of child vaccination requirements

 

Polio coming soon

 

Fair enough.

 

Seriously - get COVID infections down to a level 10 percent below "manageable" then add another two weeks - maybe then drop restrictions. You'd think after the "olly olly oxen-free" fiasco from last year and then the Delta Farewell Tour with Special Guest Omicron - these people would know better.