If two New Hampshire men aren't a match for the Devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians. -Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943)
What worked to stop the spread of COVID-19? (Kevin Drim, 8/07/24, Jabberworking)
A recent paper by Christopher Ruhm of the University of Virginia quantifies the value of various efforts to combat COVID-19 in the US. The headline result is a composite score for different states based on what kinds of restrictions they imposed, but I found the detailed national breakdown more interesting. Here are his estimates of how various interventions affected death rates:
Stricter Covid mask rules could’ve saved hundreds of thousands of lives, new study finds
Restrictions in Northeastern states likely ‘saved many lives’ say researchers (Josh Marcus, 7/28/24, The Independent)
The US could have avoided almost 250,000 Covid-19 deaths if every state had adopted stricter mask and vaccine requirements seen in the Northeast during the height of the pandemic, according to a new study.Researchers say that the country, which saw more than 1.1 million Covid deaths, could have been spared an estimated 118,000 to 248,000 more lives.
The “Deaths of Despair” narrative is wrong: It’s time to be a little ruder about this (Matthew Yglesias, Oct 10, 2023, Slow Boring)
Over the past few years, Anne Case and Angus Deaton have unleashed upon the world a powerful meme that seems to link together America’s troublingly bad life expectancy outcomes with a number of salient social and political trends like the unexpected rise of Donald Trump.
Their “deaths of despair” narrative linking declining life expectancy to populist-right politics and to profound social and economic decay has proven to be extremely powerful. But their analysis suffers from fundamental statistical flaws that critics have been pointing out for years and that Case and Deaton just keep blustering through as if the objections don’t matter. Beyond that, they are operating within the confines of a construct — “despair” — that has little evidentiary basis. The rise in deaths of despair turns out to overwhelmingly be a rise in opioid overdoses. This increase is not happening in European countries that have not only been buffeted by the same broad economic trends as the United States, but are also seeing the rise of right-populist backlash politics. […]
Novosad, Rafkin, and Asher have provided a compelling analysis of a very concentrated problem of worsening health outcomes for the worst-off Americans. Case and Deaton, by contrast, have delivered a very misleading portrait of worsening health outcomes for the majority of Americans that (because they mistakenly think it’s a majority) they attribute to broad economic forces that exist internationally but which for some reason only cause “despair” in the United States. And then it gets worse, because as Matthews argues (citing Raj Chetty’s Opportunity Insights Project data), the growing disparities are located in specific parts of the country:
While it’s true that rich people in America live significantly longer than poor people, that’s much less true in New York City. It’s not true in California as a whole. Heavily urban areas with high education levels see a modest relationship between income and death rates. More-rural, less-educated areas, by contrast, see a very strong relationship between the two.
Areas with smaller mortality gaps tend to be places, the researchers find, with lower rates of smoking and higher rates of exercise, which makes sense when you consider that the variation in death rates between cities is driven not by factors like car crashes or suicide but conditions like heart disease and cancer, which are themselves driven in part by lifestyle conditions. Local unemployment rates and other indicators of the health of the local labor market did not seem to be associated with longevity, nor did income inequality. These aren’t firmly causal findings, to be clear, but they might be suggestive of potential causes to investigate.
Conveniently, there’s a new piece out in the Washington Post by Lauren Weber, Dan Diamond, and Dan Keating that I think explains this geographic variation very well: Places that adopt nanny state policies to improve public health get better public health.
Who’s Afraid of the Placebo Effect?: New research into the healing power of placebos could upend our understanding of medicine, if the medical industry is willing to listen (Josh Sims, July 26, 2024, Inside Hook)
The placebo effect involves the release of feel-good neurotransmitters, plus increased activity in parts of the brain related to mood and emotions. It appears to be the product of our positive expectations and some Pavlovian conditioning.
Looking for Long Covid: A Clash of Definition and Study Design (SARA TALPOS, 07.25.2024, UnDark)
Few experts dispute that long Covid can be debilitating, or that it warrants careful study. But in interviews with Undark, a number of experts said that it is misleading to frame long Covid as an increasing threat. The best data, they say, suggest that most people recover from the disorder and that long Covid rates will decline as people develop immunity. (A July study by the VA St. Louis team also found that rates of long Covid declined over the course of the pandemic.)
The work produced by Al-Aly and his colleagues, which relies on electronic health records of U.S. veterans, is also a key point of contention. In interviews, several experts questioned the VA St. Louis’ methods. At the request of Undark, Harvard epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch reviewed the group’s first long Covid study and raised a range of concerns. Many of them related to the handling of negative controls, a statistical technique that, when deployed properly, can help researchers detect problems in the analysis of their dataset. Some of the negative controls “are simply misused in the paper,” Lipsitch wrote in an email to Undark.Additionally, some experts suggested that the VA St. Louis studies are not truly measuring long Covid. “They’re not studying post-viral illness, in my opinion, in these VA studies,” said Anders Hviid, a professor at the University of Copenhagen and head of the Department of Epidemiology Research at the Statens Serum Institut. Post-viral syndromes, said Hviid, are relatively rare and are usually characterized by fatigue and cognitive difficulties. Al-Aly’s research, meanwhile, looks at what Hviid described as a gamut of outcomes: dementia, thromboembolisms, psychiatric diseases, kidney diseases — “everything under the sun,” he said.
At best, the studies are detecting health problems known to occur when people with poor baseline health experience a severe infection of any kind, said Hviid. At worst, the findings simply reflect bias in the study design, and are picking up on symptoms that are not caused by Covid-19 at all. “It’s a disappointment that not more U.S. scientists have spoken up about this,” said Hviid.
Heck, they still pretend fibromyalgia is a thing.
The placebo effect unlocked: How the brain tricks itself into pain relief (Bronwyn Thompson, July 25, 2024, New Atlas)
The findings do more than just solve a puzzle for neuroscientists and put to bed any thought that the placebo effect was ‘all in your head’ (even though, quite literally, it is).
Handles like a go-kart, flies like a heli: Flying car coming to the USA (Loz Blain, July 05, 2024, New Atlas)
Effectively, it’s a small, single-seat helicopter with automatic quick-fold rotor blades, with a bare-bones open-wheel vehicle chassis grafted on, using carbon fiber rods. It’s not precisely clear exactly where the electric part of the hybrid drive system comes in, but the combustion power appears to come from a lightweight, buzzy “Pegasus 800” two-stroke, making around 160 horsepower.
Lab Leak Mania: Why did the New York Times publish an op-ed supporting the lab leak theory? (PAUL OFFIT, JUN 24, 2024, Beyond the Noise)
In a one-hour video, the TWiV team addressed each of the “Five Key Points” proffered by Chan. The group consisted of Vincent Racaniello (virologist), Alan Dove (microbiologist), Rich Condit (viral geneticist), Brianne Barker (immunologist), and Jolene Ramsey (microbiologist). The video was released on June 10, 2024, one week after Chan’s publication in the New York Times. This wasn’t the first time that the TWiV team had discussed the origin of SARS-CoV-2; it was the ninth. Previous guests have included evolutionary biologists who had directly investigated the events in Wuhan; specifically, Michael Worobey, Kristian Anderson, Eddie Holmes, Marion Koopmans, and Robert Garry, who had collectively published a paper in the journal Science in 2022 titled, “The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan Was the Early Epicenter of the COVID-19 Pandemic.” This paper showed that all the early cases of SARS-CoV-2 clustered around the southwestern section of a wet market in Wuhan where animals susceptible to coronavirus were illegally sold and inadequately housed. Worobey and his team had shown that 1) the early cases had direct or indirect contact with the market and 2) none of the early cases occurred around the Wuhan Institute of Virology. This single paper was devastating to Chan’s hypothesis.
Energy-positive laser fusion approach heads toward commercialization (David Szondy, June 19, 2024, New Atlas)
Since 2022, the Denver-based company has been working to turn the laser fusion concept into a practical source of power. The goal is to produce a new krypton-fluoride laser installation that generates 10 times higher laser energy at 10 times higher efficiency and over 30 times lower cost per joule than the NIF.
Using technology first developed for the US Strategic Defense Initiative (nicknamed the Star Wars program) in the 1980s, the Xcimer installation will use a laser system producing over 10 megajoules of energy. This will be focused on larger deuterium/tritium pellets that are easier to make and handle, and produce more energy when ignited.
Producing energy is useless if it isn’t harnessed, so the fusion chamber has molten lithium salts flowing through it, not only to protect the wall from neutrons, which reduces maintenance, but to absorb the energy and carry it away to generate power.
The idea is that the lasers will stand at a distance of 164 ft (50 m) and focus their beams through two small holes to reach the target pellet. The system is designed to ignite only a small amount of the fuel, which produces the energy needed to ignite the remainder like a match set to paper. This is more efficient and economical.
“The benefits of fusion for humanity have never been more clear or more necessary,” said Mark Cupta, Xcimer board member. “Xcimer has developed a game-changing approach to inertial fusion and assembled a team of the brightest minds in the industry to execute on it. I’m confident that with Xcimer leading us on this path, the world will see this transformative source of energy finally deployed at commercial scale.”
Thanks, Gipper!
Electric Flying Taxis Are Quietly Sneaking Up on Us (STEVEN ASHLEY, 6/14/24, Scientific American)
When the electric air taxi revolution arrives, you probably won’t it hear coming. A remarkable feature of an electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft is how quietly it flies, scarcely noticeable amid typical city traffic sounds. Unlike a helicopter, there’s no pounding, 90-decibel “thwop, thwop, thwop.” In contrast, eVTOL aircraft use multiple small propellers that spin half as fast as a chopper’s rotor—avoiding the annoying, low-frequency sound pulses created by the big whirling blades.
Electric motors, which are quieter than helicopters’ turbine engines, also help keep any racket to a minimum. “The latest air taxi designs, such as those from leading builders like Joby and Archer, deliver a 20- to 25-decibel reduction in noise levels compared to helicopters,” says Mark Moore, the trailblazing engineer who led the development of NASA’s X-57 Maxwell electric airplane. That means that eVTOLs could be four or five times less noisy to nearby listeners. Beyond offering quieter flights, these new machines should also be significantly safer, greener and cheaper to fly than helicopters. Moore maintains that electric air taxis are uniquely suited for what the aviation industry calls urban air mobility (UAM) services, enabling normally gridlocked travelers to “take advantage of the third dimension to escape the ant trails on the ground.”
More than two dozen major eVTOL builders have been founded in the past decade, and a few are nearing commercial certification from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration or its European counterpart, the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA).
The future always happens faster than you expect it to.