I’ve always at least somewhat tried to model these posts after the pure joy of America’s only true newsletter, Matt Levine’s Money Stuff. This week I finally got around to listening to Matt do this amazing podcast about the philosophical side of what he does
As someone who has access to lots of data that could be used to study long COVID (limited data as per the tweet thread, but still) curious if you would elaborate anymore on your thoughts for how to best go about it.
"Pay me if you want to that detail" would be a valid response to my question.
The reason I was thinking it's prohibitive is it involves running experiments rather than looking at existing data. If you say more about the form of what you DO have to work with (don't tell me what it says at all, just tell me what's been done) I'll think about if there's something worthwhile to do.
All looking at existing data so mostly what he mentioned in the tweetstorm - medical and pharmacy claims for millions of members starting in 2018-2020 in one dataset, and 2019-2022 in another. About to do the influenza comparison he mentioned, though as he said, issues with other potential confounders caused by lockdowns/health system stresses. Focused more on quantitative increases in costs/serious conditions as opposed to qualitative health/ less serious diagnoses (constipation??) though which may help some in teasing out some signal from the noise.
Obviously hard to control COVID given the act of seeing a doctor makes it more likely to have increased diagnoses/tests/catch an infection from being in a waiting room etc. Tried doing so via comparing to other cohorts that saw the doctor frequently (ie diabetics with and without COVID so a really simplistic matching process) but nothing perfect.
Regarding the New York Times confusing MIS *deaths* with *diagnoses*: when you really look, it's amazing how often numbers are mis-reported in this fashion. Sometimes numbers are simply incorrect, but very, very often they are mislabeled / misinterpreted, which amounts to the same thing. I blogged about this recently, under the title "Never Trust a Number": https://climateer.substack.com/p/numbers. Might be of interest.
Whether or not Long COVID exists will be determined by whether a medical code created for it leads to higher insurance reimbursement. If it does everyone will have Long Covid.
Feel free to ignore this request, but I'd _really_ like some details/info about how you're staying 'sane' throughout all of this.
I very much appreciate all of this work you've done and I feel very lucky to have already been following you before COVID-19 happened. But I think I might need to start avoiding reading these posts right away – or any of your posts unless there's some 'light-hearted' ones – for the same reason that I no longer read/watch/listen-to the news, or ever login to Facebook, etc..
(EY's recent 'die with dignity' post maybe pretty severely bruised my mood too.)
But I'd expect you might have some practical tips for dealing with 'EVERYTHING GOING ON' that I might have overlooked or not know of at all.
"Let this sink in. The FDA wants to change the formulations of the vaccines because they are worried not doing so would ‘befuddle’ people.
I happen to think the exact opposite. Different people like different things. Making this seem more like a choice seems likely to be actively good. I would not, however, be so bold as to change the formulations of the vaccines to try and play mind games with the public."
From my reading, isn't it the other way around? Doesn't the FDA want to keep the formulations of the vaccines the same, to avoid befuddling people? (Which is still absurd.)
As someone who has access to lots of data that could be used to study long COVID (limited data as per the tweet thread, but still) curious if you would elaborate anymore on your thoughts for how to best go about it.
"Pay me if you want to that detail" would be a valid response to my question.
The reason I was thinking it's prohibitive is it involves running experiments rather than looking at existing data. If you say more about the form of what you DO have to work with (don't tell me what it says at all, just tell me what's been done) I'll think about if there's something worthwhile to do.
All looking at existing data so mostly what he mentioned in the tweetstorm - medical and pharmacy claims for millions of members starting in 2018-2020 in one dataset, and 2019-2022 in another. About to do the influenza comparison he mentioned, though as he said, issues with other potential confounders caused by lockdowns/health system stresses. Focused more on quantitative increases in costs/serious conditions as opposed to qualitative health/ less serious diagnoses (constipation??) though which may help some in teasing out some signal from the noise.
Obviously hard to control COVID given the act of seeing a doctor makes it more likely to have increased diagnoses/tests/catch an infection from being in a waiting room etc. Tried doing so via comparing to other cohorts that saw the doctor frequently (ie diabetics with and without COVID so a really simplistic matching process) but nothing perfect.
Regarding the New York Times confusing MIS *deaths* with *diagnoses*: when you really look, it's amazing how often numbers are mis-reported in this fashion. Sometimes numbers are simply incorrect, but very, very often they are mislabeled / misinterpreted, which amounts to the same thing. I blogged about this recently, under the title "Never Trust a Number": https://climateer.substack.com/p/numbers. Might be of interest.
Whether or not Long COVID exists will be determined by whether a medical code created for it leads to higher insurance reimbursement. If it does everyone will have Long Covid.
Please – spare my internal despair-o-meter! And you might give someone the idea now!
Feel free to ignore this request, but I'd _really_ like some details/info about how you're staying 'sane' throughout all of this.
I very much appreciate all of this work you've done and I feel very lucky to have already been following you before COVID-19 happened. But I think I might need to start avoiding reading these posts right away – or any of your posts unless there's some 'light-hearted' ones – for the same reason that I no longer read/watch/listen-to the news, or ever login to Facebook, etc..
(EY's recent 'die with dignity' post maybe pretty severely bruised my mood too.)
But I'd expect you might have some practical tips for dealing with 'EVERYTHING GOING ON' that I might have overlooked or not know of at all.
"Let this sink in. The FDA wants to change the formulations of the vaccines because they are worried not doing so would ‘befuddle’ people.
I happen to think the exact opposite. Different people like different things. Making this seem more like a choice seems likely to be actively good. I would not, however, be so bold as to change the formulations of the vaccines to try and play mind games with the public."
From my reading, isn't it the other way around? Doesn't the FDA want to keep the formulations of the vaccines the same, to avoid befuddling people? (Which is still absurd.)