November 30, 2021

Briefly

  • Is Covid Omicron going to be a gentler, kinder virus? Actually, we have no idea at all yet, as David Welch tells Jamie Morton. Worry about something else for a week or two; there’s  no shortage of world problems.  Also, see Trevor Bedford on Twitter.
  • The Statistics Act (1975) is up for revision. You have until 22 December if you want to make a submission on the current Data and Statistics Bill.  If you read StatsChat, it’s possible that you do want to comment.
  • Story in the Herald saying that healthy diets are better for the environment. I probably won’t write about this one in detail, but you might look at this 2015 post on a Herald piece saying healthy diets are worse for the environment.
  • ” if passes weren’t going to be checked, they may not represent a justified privacy breach.” Andrew Chen (the patron saint of the NZ Covid app) in a Newsroom story on not requiring vaccine pass validation.
  • Not precisely statistics or in the media, but visualisation: Assyrian low-relief carvings with (possibly) their original colours
  • If you want to read a careful and thoughtful analysis of the data on ivermectin for Covid then I’d actually advise not bothering, but this is a good place if you really have to
  • A nice illustration (via Twitter) of why you’d expect quite a few vaccinated Covid cases if you have a lot of vaccinated people
avatar

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 »