September 4, 2020
Briefly
- A surprising (to me) statistic from the Washington Post: 100 US law enforcement officers have died of COVID contracted at work. That’s more than all other line-of-duty deaths this year put together. And it doesn’t include 150 more deaths that the Officer Down Memorial Page is still reviewing.
- A particularly malign case of ‘predictive policing’ in Florida.
- You’ve probably heard about the UK’s plan to impute A-level grades after cancelling exams. A good discussion of why this is a hard problem and how to avoid solving it.
- “Sooner or later we are going to have to have an inquiry into the role of statisticians in the Covid-19 crisis,” declared the journalist Ross Clark in the Daily Telegraph recently.” David Spiegelhalter would relish the opportunity.
- Alert-level decision in NZ are hard; getting them wrong either way can have very bad consequences. Ars Technica has an excellent report on a similar sort of decision: whether or not to evacuate Houston as Hurricane Laura approached.
- The FDA Commissioner, talking about plasma from recovered COVID patients as a treatment, managed to get both the estimated benefit and the reliability of the evidence badly wrong. Hilda Bastian writes about the implications for informed consent by future patients
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
The law enforcement category in those US deaths includes prison warders
“According to both organizations, officers in correctional facilities account for a substantial number of covid-related law enforcement deaths, reflecting the dire epidemiological situation in many of the nation’s prisons and jails.”. For eligibility for federal benefits its presumed all the covid cases were contacted from their work.
There could be around 1000 prisoner covid related deaths and around 70 other prison staff
4 years ago