statistics

A few thoughts about masks

/ IlanaB / 1 Comment

TL;DR – Wear masks!

As a fan of Korean dramas, I noticed a lot of the big stars would wear cloth masks in public. Are they trying not to be noticed?

Screen grab from SOURCE, note that the date is 2019 (not coronatimes)

I also noticed Asian tourists in Israel wearing masks. They aren’t trying to keep a low profile in public.

I found out that in Korea specifically, but also in other Asian countries, the pollution is so bad they include fine dust warnings in their weather reports. People wear masks on particularly bad days. Masks also are a layer of protection against sun damage – the tourists were often wearing big sun hats and UV protective sleeves on their arms. For this post, I also did a little research about mask wearing in Asia and found an article from 2014 about the culture of wearing masks in Asia. In short, if someone is ill, they will wear a mask to protect others. Apparently this has been part of the culture since the flu pandemic of 1918. Today, it’s a fashion statement.

Coronatimes

Now we are in the middle of a pandemic that is not getting better. To update the numbers from last week: There are now 11.2 million cases – up 1.2 million since last week. Incidentally, May 27 was the first day there were more than 100,000 new cases and it’s been steadily going up to 200,000+ new cases every day. The death rate remains stable with 29,500 deaths this week putting the world on track to reach another 100,000 deaths within about 3 weeks.

Israel is officially in the second wave. We’ve doubled the new case rate this week with over 1,000 new cases reported in a single day. It’s directly tied to reopening and people ignoring warnings about how to reopen safely.

The best option for people is to not get exposed to the virus by staying home. That’s not a long term solution. So if we have to go out, we need to protect ourselves and others. That means masks.

My office sent this graphic.

A slightly more colorful comparison was making its way around Facebook.

Masks = Healthy society

I’ve been horrified by the public meltdowns in the US over wearing masks. I can’t understand how a matter of public health became a question of freedom.

I think one good example is smoking. A person is free to smoke as much as they want. That’s a choice they’ve made. Now that science has proven that second-hand smoke causes cancer and puts children in smoking households at a higher risk for respiratory illnesses like asthma, smokers may not like that they can no longer smoke in bars and other public places, but they tend to agree that they don’t have a right to blow smoke into people’s faces and potentially cause cancer or respiratory distress in other people.

What about speed limits and seatbelt laws? They are government-imposed laws for public safety. No one (that I know of) has tried to avoid paying the fines because they have a god-given right to pass other drivers like they’re standing still and smash through their own windshield when they slam on the breaks.

Now compound the danger by making smoking and bad driving contagious.

Yes, masks are uncomfortable. But surgeons and dentists haven’t thrown out sterilization procedures because they are uncomfortable. Coronavirus is also uncomfortable. Many of those who “recover” suffer as much as when they were sick and can’t return to normal life. That’s pretty uncomfortable. If an asymptomatic carrier turns into a super-spreader and people end up hospitalized or dead because they were near that person, that’s not comfortable for anyone.

Your freedom ends at my personal space. Wear a mask.

Corona Corner

/ IlanaB / 1 Comment

With everything else in the news, you might have forgotten that there was a virus. I didn’t. I’ve been wearing my mask in public and socially distancing all the time. I think twice before taking a bus and use alcohol gel after each trip.

Israel is trying desperately to get back to normal with mixed results. Hundreds of new confirmed corona cases are showing up every day, but deaths remain in the single digits. Is this the dreaded “second wave”? Probably not; it’s just people thinking they don’t need to take precautions. The government doesn’t want to shut down the whole nation again, so they are enforcing targeted lockdowns.

Big-picture view

One statistic I followed – and I haven’t seen reported – is the time it takes to reach 100,000 deaths globally.
It took 77 days to reach the first 100,000 deaths (January 23-April 9).
It took 14 days for the next 100,000 (April 10-April 24).
It took 19 days for the next 100,000 (April 25-May 14).
It took 22 days for the next 100,000 (May 15-June 6).
We’re just about to reach the next 100,000 (probably today, June 27) and that took 21 days.
It seems to me that since April 25, the global death toll has been stable. If one country starts to lessen their death toll, another one steps up to take its place.

Is the US doing as badly as reported?

The big headline in the past few days has been Americans will not be allowed in EU countries because of their poor handling of the coronavirus. What’s left out of the headline is that the US is not targeted and is one of a number of countries (including Israel) that will not be allowed in the EU yet.

I’ve felt that perhaps the reporting on the US handling of the coronavirus has been a little bit skewed. The US has 50 states and 330 million people; it’s the third largest country in the world in terms of population. So I combined the 6 countries in Europe with the highest death rates (UK, Italy, France, Spain, Belgium, Germany) and found their total population is 335 million. Altogether, those 6 countries have 155,000 deaths (133 days) to the US’s 127,000 (119 days) (both numbers rounded as of this writing).

Brazil has the second most confirmed cases in the world (half of what the US has) and about two-thirds the population of the US. Since May 27, it averages about 1,000 deaths every day. From the first deaths on March 22, Brazil reached 56,000 deaths (rounded as of this writing) in 97 days.

For a closer-to-home comparison: Mexico has one-third the population of the US and 26,000 dead (85 days) with hundreds dying every day; Canada has 38 million people and 8,500 deaths (103 days) with not even dozens dying every day. Americans are allowed to travel to Mexico, but as yet are not allowed to travel to Canada.

Another statistic is that there are 10 million confirmed cases in the world and 2.5 million are in the US. Of the nearly 500,000 deaths, 127,000 are in the US. The US, a single country, represents 25% of both numbers. No other single country comes close.

Is the US doing badly? It depends.

Europe has many countries and many governments. Their policies are not entirely coordinated under the EU umbrella. Some countries do better. Some do worse – like the UK’s failed “herd immunity” policy and Sweden’s “just be responsible citizens” policy. In the US, some states are doing really well (Wyoming) and others are struggling (New York). It could be said that Europe and the US are sort of equal in numerical terms.

In general, the daily coronavirus death toll in the US is going down (see the daily deaths graph and the CDC’s excess death rate – the spike in 2018 was the flu). But it would be a stretch to say that the downward trend was a result of compassionate, logical, serious, unified leadership at the federal level.

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nvss/vsrr/covid19/excess_deaths.htm

Is the US leading the world with a unified message on coronavirus? No. Once the US president was seen as someone who would bring nations together to solve global problems. The current president is not a voice of leadership for this global pandemic, and so, on the world stage, yes, the US is probably doing as badly as reported.

Don’t Panic, Pt. 6: Swedish factor

/ IlanaB / Leave a comment

The days are all running together, but apparently we had Passover this week, and the Israeli government took the opportunity to temporarily but fully lock down the nation. I know that this is economically, psychologically, emotionally straining (I think the vernacular is “it’s a sh*tshow”), but for now I’m still okay with these extreme measures. The reason I’m okay is Sweden.

I’m trying to scroll less and take news breaks. I find the site that interests me most is featured on The Times of Israel related to the coronavirus.

9pm

9pm, Saturday night

See the Coronvirus Worldmeter? That’s my go-to site.

This week, I saw a little clip about Sweden’s policy of not closing down the nation and allowing people to “use their common sense.” Culturally, Swedes are quite fine with working from home, they aren’t overly social, they don’t have multiple generations living together. It’s not exactly a “herd immunity” argument, but it does suggest that healthy, younger, less-vulnerable people can go about their business as usual while vulnerable people should be isolated.

Sweden is of interest to me because they have a similar population to Israel: Sweden, 10.1 million; Israel, 8.6 million.

**Note: I’m not a statistician or an epidemiologist, and I know the comparisons below are not scientific.**

Israel and Sweden have a similar number of confirmed coronavirus cases. I tend not to follow that number because it’s based on testing capacity. You can see on the site that Israel is testing twice as much as Sweden is.

I follow the number of deaths (no, not because I’m morbid). This number is also a bit flawed. What if someone died but didn’t get tested for coronavirus? If they died of regular flu or pneumonia or didn’t get treatment in the ICU because it was crowded, is it counted in the corona deaths? I don’t think so, but these are the numbers we have.

Ready?

As of this writing: Israel has a total of 97 deaths. Sweden has a total of 887.

Now one might argue that Scandinavia in general has more deaths. Nope. Finland has 49. Norway has 117. Denmark has 260. Lock down nations all, and their populations range from 5.4 to 5.7 million.

The main “herd immunity” experiment was in the UK (67.8 million people). They have since walked it back and locked down (mostly). They even had their prime minister in the ICU this week. How are they doing? 9,875 total deaths with around 900 per day most of this week.

Israel’s first death was March 20, and the “closed case” statistic is 93% recover, 7% die.

Sweden’s first death was March 11, and the “closed case” statistic is 30% recover, 70% die. I can’t even begin to speculate why there is such a huge difference.

Sweden’s death graph tends to be up and down (it’s reality, not a projection, after all). Most of this week saw 75-114 deaths per day, but only 17 so far today. It remains to be seen if in the long term Sweden’s strategy will work.

Israel was ranked number 1 in COVID-19 safety by Deep Knowledge Group. So even though we are going through something resembling a science fiction/dystopian future movie, I feel pretty good about how Israel is doing.

But I have some complaints.

  1. Families around the nation were forbidden from meeting or traveling to other cities and even shut in their homes on the evening of the Seder, and yet somehow our president and prime minister managed to meet with their adult children. Way to lead by example, guys! At a minimum, they should be fined 5,000 NIS like others have been.
  2. Flights were bringing Israelis home from around the world and passengers were not checked for the virus or put in quarantine. They just took taxis home. Way to be organized, guys! So Netanyahu cancelled all flights to Israel.
  3.  The government is not yet formed, and there is no exit strategy for the lock down. Way to put egos aside for the good of the country, guys!
  4. I keep saying “guys,” not because I’m sloppily generalizing, I’m saying it because it’s mostly men in charge of this sh*tshow.

***

Even so, there are still glimmers of light in the darkness.

One of my best scrolling experiences this week comes from the Facebook group View from my window. It’s exactly what it sounds like, and it’s beautiful, inspiring, and reminds us that we are all in this together.

Speaking of sh*tshows, this is the meme that made me laugh the hardest this week (from The Language Nerds on Facebook).

meme

Stay healthy! Stay home!

Stay sane! Stay safe! 

 

Hey, is that an elephant in the room?

/ IlanaB / 1 Comment

With all the fuss about William Barr’s 4-page summary of the Mueller report, I decided it might be worthwhile to read it.

The line that caught my attention and the line that no one seems to be talking about is:

The report outlines the Russian effort to influence the election and documents crimes committed by persons associated with the Russian government in connection with those efforts.

 

Russian meddling is not alleged or suspected. It is a verifiable fact.

Since I didn’t see it mentioned anywhere, I thought, “How often does a foreign power interfere with elections?” There’s a Wikipedia page about it.

There we find that in the 2016 US election, Russia intervened, Ukraine tried, and there’s some suspicion about Saudi Arabia.

Guess who interferes in elections more than any other government in the world, and by a large margin too?

The. United. States.

One study indicated that the country intervening in most foreign elections is the United States with 81 interventions, followed by Russia (including the former Soviet Union) with 36 interventions from 1946 to 2000 – an average of once in every nine competitive elections.

This study was done by Dov Levin, an Israeli scholar who started his academic career at Haifa University.

His research shows that the United States and the Soviet Union/Russia use covert or overt “partisan election interventions.” Influence tends to swing the vote by 2 to 3 percent. Sometimes that’s enough, sometimes not. (He published his academic article in February 2016.)

He notes that two things need to happen in order for intervention to take place – he calls them motive and opportunity – “a great power must perceive its interests as being endangered by a certain candidate or party within a democratic target … a significant domestic actor must consent to, and willingly cooperate with, a proposed electoral intervention by the great power.” The willing actor need not be the candidate.

In September 2016, Levin published an article in the Washington Post giving a synopsis of his research and said that the Soviet Union/Russia had meddled unsuccessfully in US elections two times previously (1948 and 1984). At the time, he said that Russian interference would likely be ineffective as the United States is a “hard target,” but Putin’s end goal would be “anyone but Hillary.”

In December 2018, Levin published an article stating that it would be unlikely for Mueller to prove that Trump colluded with Russia.

if possible collusion between the Trump camp and Russia occurred along the lines of past cases, the number of people who would know or who were involved in the collusion in the Trump campaign is probably quite small. Many senior members of the Trump campaign, including some of those personnel with ties to Russia, would likely have had no clue of such collusion going on. It may well be possible that even Trump was kept in the dark by those in his campaign who might have conspired with Russia.

Another obvious difficulty is that colluders are not taking notes and keeping records of their activities. Anyone who has seen even one episode of Law & Order knows that you can’t prosecute without hard evidence.

And then I started wondering about the numbers in the 2016 election. Did Russian meddling have an effect?

I’m not a statistician, but here are a few things I found interesting.

  • The trend in the 2016 election was for most states to shift toward the Republican side.
  • In many cases, the shift was not enough to swing a blue state to a red state.
  • In 4 states, the margin of victory was less than 1 percent. Together they equal 50 Electoral College votes (or enough to change the election result).
    • Michigan
    • New Hampshire
    • Pennsylvania
    • Wisconsin
  • Compared with the 2012 election, only 1 state (29 EC votes) had a margin of victory of less than 1 percent, and in the 2008 election, it was 2 states (26 EC votes). In neither case was it enough to change the outcome of the election.
  • Michigan, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin were blue states in the 2012 election, all shifted toward red, but only New Hampshire (4 EC votes) stayed blue.

Then I took an even closer look.

State Clinton Trump Other parties
Michigan 47.27% 47.5% 5.46%
Pennsylvania 47.46% 48.18% 5.08%
Wisconsin 46.45% 47.22% 7.09%

Neither major party got 50 percent of the vote, and the non-major parties got more than 3 percent of the vote (the number of votes Levin says a foreign power can influence). If Levin is correct and Putin wanted “anyone but Hillary” in office, these numbers seem to suggest that.

Let me add a few more statistics for comparison. These are popular vote percentages (due to rounding, they don’t always add up to exactly 100 percent).

Election Year Democrat Republican Other
2016 48.18% 46.09% 5.73%
2012 51.06% 47.2% 1.73%
2008 52.93% 45.65% 1.45%
2000 (Gore v. G.W. Bush) 47.87% 48.38% 3.75%
1992 (Clinton v. G.H.W. Bush v. Perot) 43.01% 37.45% 19.54%

I added the 2000 and 1992 elections to show that 3rd party candidates can have an influence on the elections – in 2000 in favor of the Republicans and in 1992 in favor of the Democrats, when a viable 3rd party candidate broke the Republican party.

What does all this mean?

  • I’m bothered that foreign interference in a sovereign country’s elections is treated as “business as usual.”
  • I wonder if the interference caused enough Americans to reject both parties, and it was a tossup whether it would favor the Democrats or the Republicans. In any case, the voting statistics show a divided nation with more people considering 3rd party candidates.
  • Maybe the strategy to determine how to tip the Electoral College was suggested by an entity that had a preferred outcome.
  • Did the United States get a taste of its own medicine in 2016? Is this a harbinger of a new world order?
  • We may never know everyone who colluded with Russia in the 2016 election, or at least we may not have enough solid evidence, but we do know Russia interfered and Putin got the result he wanted.
  • Israel’s election is coming up on April 9 and I’m feeling more cynical than ever.

Goodbye 2018!

/ IlanaB / 3 Comments

~~ My computer is back! ~~

It’s good to take a minute and look back over the year.

My goals for this blog were to write about life in Israel and make a practice of showing up to the page. I can count this year as a success for both those goals. I wrote fewer words overall than in years past and fewer blog posts, but I hope that means my writing is becoming sharper and more concise (probably not always…).

People visited my page from 54 countries!

2018 map

Leaving aside the United States (#1) and Israel (#2), the top 10 countries were:

Germany
Finland
Canada
United Kingdom
Australia
India
Japan
Italy
China
Ireland

Surprises further down the list:

Six people from United Arab Emirates visited.

Four people from Pakistan stopped by.

One person each came from Bangladesh, Gibraltar, and Fiji.

Overall, I had more visitors this year than in years past and I had the most visitors in September.

I’m hesitant to write resolutions for 2019 for this blog, but my hopes are to write about different things (life in Israel will still be the main topic), try some experimental posts (I’m not sure about this yet), and write more reviews of things I’m listening to, reading, and watching (I’ve had a lot of fun with those posts this year).

I know. Hopes won’t get you anywhere unless you have a plan. I’m working on it.

Happy New Year!

Wishing you all good things for 2019!

May it be the best year yet!

#100

/ IlanaB / 6 Comments

Drum roll please!

This is the 100th post on my blog.

When I started, I’m not sure that I imagined that I would consistently post every week and eventually get to a 3-digit number.  But here we are!

People from 50 different countries have visited my blog (and thank you very much for dropping by!).

World Map

It’s no surprise that most of my visitors come from Israel and the US (in that order).  Countries on the list that surprised me are Kenya, Azerbaijan, and Pakistan.

The top 10 countries are:

  1. Israel
  2. US
  3. France
  4. UK
  5. Germany
  6. Romania
  7. Poland
  8. Canada
  9. New Zealand
  10. Japan

My most popular post was the one I wrote about Tai Chi in Israel.  It was popular because my Tai Chi school posted it on their site and it got a lot of attention (compared to my other posts).  It had 305 views from around the world.

The 100th post is a milestone that made me think about what I want to do with this site.  Perhaps I should just close it.  After all, I don’t get a lot of readership and I just write for myself really.  But that line of thought didn’t feel right.  I don’t want to get famous and have a viral blog.  I do want to try to commit to writing more and about different things.  So far this blog has been about life in Israel, but I have many other interests and I want to explore writing about those.

In honor of my 100th post and to symbolize my increased commitment, I’ve upgraded my blog to a WordPress “personal” blog, so that I could have my own domain name.

Welcome to

thewriteplaceforme.com!

Over the next few weeks, I’ll consider what it is that I want to accomplish with the next 100 posts and where I’d like to be at #200.

This blog started with emails to my friends and family about life in Israel and that primary mission won’t change, but I do want to expand my content a bit.

I have even considered going back and rewriting a few posts – although that may be just a writing exercise for myself and those revisions won’t show up here.

I have a lot to think about.  The first step was just making the commitment and I’ve done it.