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First the link to this week’s complete list as HTML and as PDF.
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The German measures enacted in November were partly successful. They managed to stop the steep rise in case numbers with a doubling every less than 15 days and establish a plateau but failed to achieve a downward trend. A further strong tightening in December did not, so far, show any visible result at all. The comparative study by Bendavid et al. confirmed just this to be the expected outcome. The time has long come to evaluate just what works and what doesn’t. See also the results discussed in last week’s list.
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Contrary to Sridhar & Gurdasani’s misquote there was of course no such thing as “a factor of 4.5 excess mortality in 2020”
in Brazil. As Buss et al. correctly state this was a short peak in the first week of May. Even with the German life expectancy of 80 years mortality is appreciably above one percent per year. So even if 100 % of the population were to become infected, the consistently reported infection fatality rate of 0.3 % would not lead to an excess mortality of more than 25 % over the whole year. (This is of course an unacceptable number, I’m not trying to belittle the impact and with an older population it may be twice as many.) More important are Buss et al.’s other results. It seems that either 75 % acquired immunity is not sufficient to achieve herd immunity against further spread or that immunity is far more short-lived than expected.
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As Mallapaty says, border closures are only relevant after the national rates have been driven low enough for influx to make a difference. Turning that on its head means, that if you need open borders for ideological reasons, you have to prevent your numbers from being driven down – which is just what the German government did in May.
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Park et al. clearly explain what reproduction numbers are and how much else you need to calculate them correctly. This only confirms the spuriousness and total fabrication of the German reported “R-numbers”
and their wide day-to-day swings.
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I only found Polizzi di Sorrentino et al. through a retraction notice. What intrigued me was, that no reason was given for that retraction except for some very unspecific handwaving by the editors. Reading the paper I can find nothing alerting me to any weaknesses. Of course the numbers are small, in the single digit range, but that’s no different from many others in the genre. The effect sizes are large enough to stay significant and error margins are accounted for.
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Barsbai et al.’s result is not nearly as strong as Hill & Boyd claim, but still impressive. Of the 15 traits they compare between humans and other animals, ten are insignificant, three (storage, range, and density) are trivial, but two (paternal care and polygyny) are relevant and unexpected. As Hill & Boyd rightly stress, this is not to deny the importance of culture but rather to delineate just where it is most important and where culture studies may prove futile.
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Comparing Sarnthein et al.’s and Bard & Heaton’s positions I strongly tend toward the latter. If you try to use marker events to synchronize different archives, those events need to be clear and unambiguous. I might have misunderstood. If the archives are already tightly time constrained, then a delay in the onset of events may well elucidate the processes at work here.
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