Emil O. W. Kirkegaard blog
I wrote to the lead editor of the Danish Statistics Agency on mortality data (Dorthe Larsen) on the 14th April to ask why their public mortality database is not up to date (data ends in 2019). I told her I wanted to look for evidence of excess mortality from COVID-19, and sent her an example…
Continue ReadingEvery day, I post the updated Danish COVID-19 hospitalization data on Twitter and Facebook The latest version is always available at https://rpubs.com/EmilOWK/COVID19_Denmark. The raw data are here. The figures for March 26th look like this: Why track hospitalizations instead of cases? Because the number of true cases is practically unknown due to lack of large-scale…
Continue ReadingIt is by now obvious that there are some quite large differences in how much of an impact COVID-19 is having. As usual with social science, the evidence is a bit of a mess and there’s no good randomized controlled trials. With that caveat, here’s some factors that probably contribute to the variation. Measuring COVID-19…
Continue ReadingSee also previous 2017 post. I have been repeatedly asked about this topic, so here is a post that covers the basics. The argument goes like this: Affirmation action is used in admission to medical schools, i.e. they practice race quotas in favor of less intelligent races, in particular blacks and hispanics, and discriminate against…
Continue ReadingSchneider, C. (2015). The censor’s hand: the misregulation of human-subject research. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press. Medical and social progress depend on research with human subjects. When that research is done in institutions getting federal money, it is regulated (often minutely) by federally required and supervised bureaucracies called “institutional review boards” (IRBs). Do–can–these IRBs do…
Continue ReadingWoodley reminded me of the dysgenics for health outcomes by linking me to a study about the increasing rates of cancer. I had first reached this conclusion back in 2005 when I realized what it means for evolution that we essentially keep almost everyone alive despite their genetic defects. The problem is quite simple: mutations…
Continue ReadingI have been tweeting annotated snippets from a WHO report I’m reading. Like this: Improving the health of your own citizens before foreigners? Not good! pic.twitter.com/HOix8gOZOr — Emil O W Kirkegaard (@KirkegaardEmil) August 8, 2017 Basically, the report does a decent job at summarizing the state of the art in 2002, and has some interesting…
Continue ReadingComment on: Sariaslan, A. et al. (2016). Long-Term Outcomes Associated with Traumatic Brain Injury in Childhood and Adolescence: A Nationwide Swedish Cohort Study of a Wide Range of Medical and Social Outcomes Real abstract is too damn long, this is my TL;DR version: Sibling control study of TBI as a causal effect for various outcomes….
Continue ReadingThere is a famous paper arguing the case for libertarian paternalism by using organ donation consent rates. Johnson, E. J., & Goldstein, D. (2003). Do defaults save lives?. Science, 302(5649), 1338-1339. The main result is this: So having opt-out drastically increases consent rates compared with opt-in. These countries have various other differences between them, but…
Continue ReadingMedical researchers have noticed that some diseases differ by SIRE (self-identified race/ethnicity) groups which differ by genomic (racial) ancestry. Hence, when genomic measures became available (last 15 years or so), they measured peoples relative proportions of ancestry in mixed populations to see if the diseases would be predictable by ancestry. They were. This establishes with…
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