Day 383: SSC and COVID Resurgent

Of 110 million coronavirus cases worldwide, 28 million have been in the US, with 500,000 deaths. India at #2 is nearing 11 million cases, and #3 Brazil is nearing 10 million (and also boasts its own strain these days). Russia and the UK are close as thieves with 4 million each, though some would say Russia's numbers are much higher, at least for deaths:

Russia’s official figures for the number of dead during the corona pandemic come from the Rospotrebnadzor authority and currently stand at 79,000 dead. However, on Monday the country’s statistics institute published data, revealing that the excess mortality in 2020 stood at 358,000, compared to the average deaths from the last couple of years.

Deputy Prime Minister Tatiana Golikova announced that 31 percent of the excess mortality rate in 2020 was due to covid-19, in other words 111,000 deaths. But the official death toll sent daily to the WHO is still below 80,000 dead.

Independent Russian newspaper Meduza now states that the Ministry of Health for the Moscow region has estimated that 98-100 percent of the excess mortality is due to the corona pandemic.

Loyal readers may recall that the New York Times killed Slate Star Codex back in the summer, for having gotten too much right about COVID. Since then, Scott Alexander has recovered from being set upon by the bullies of the legacy media, and has started up a new blog (Astral Codex Ten), where he has made new predictions of more coronavirus from more strains and also written up his thoughts on the weak tea science behind Vitamin D for COVID. His humor is back, too:

If blacks get coronavirus more often because of socioeconomic reasons, and also have lower Vitamin D, anybody looking at coronavirus infection rate without adjusting for race is suspect. Merzon and the Israelis didn't control for race (and Israel is quite racially diverse). Kaufman and the Quest team say they adjusted for race, but if you look at their paper, they didn't have access to race data for any participants, so instead they looked at what zip code they were in, coded it as majority-black or majority-white or whatever, and adjusted for that. I live in a majority black zip code, so apparently I'm black now. And my lived experience as a person of color, which I hear is more trustworthy than any scientific study, tells me this is a big enough loophole to invalidate the entire paper.

On the home front, Massachusetts is back up to #15 in the country, though yesterday's numbers were up only a fifth of a percentage point.

P.S. Massachusetts cases were up a quarter of a percentage point.