6 Comments
Oct 13, 2021Liked by Michael

The data in this paper may be systematically messed up. It mostly depends on categorizing counties and countries in various ways versus vaccination rate. Yet the examples the paper gives explicitly as above 90% vaccinated seem very wrong: Chattahoochee (GA), actual 15.2%, McKinley Co (NM), actual 60%; Arecibo (PR) actual 20%. (My data from data.news-leader.com/covid-19-vaccine-tracker). So it might be worth checking if the paper’s wrong attribution of vaccination rate to counties applies across the board. At the very least it suggests very poor quality control or review, since it is surely surprising that these counties would have such high vaccination rates. (Along with Figure 2’s obvious decrease in cases with higher-vaccination rates, strangely at odds with the written narrative.)

Expand full comment
Oct 13, 2021Liked by Michael

"the median estimate for cases per 100,000 clearly decreases as addressing rate increases" -- did you mean vaccination rate?

Expand full comment

Assaf's point about temporal dynamics seems very on-point to me. In the paper's section on Methodology, it says the study compared the total reported cases from one week, to the total cases from the preceding week, and in the example they chose to mention, "Los Angeles county in California had 18,171 cases in the last 7 days (August 26 to September 1) and 31,616 cases in the previous 7 days (August 19–25)". Clearly those two data points, showing a decrease from 31 thousand to 18 thousand in one week (!!), is not overall representative of what was going on in that county on a regular basis that can be meaningfully compared to the vaccination rate to draw conclusions!

Expand full comment

Germany and UK are not included among the 68 countries selected

Expand full comment