A lot of the questions parents have — either in the COVID-19 context or elsewhere — are about very rare outcomes. Monday’s newsletter had a brief discussion of the SNOO and SIDS risk.Several people wrote to ask: does the SNOO actually reduce SIDS? To answer this convincingly in a randomized trial, you’d need an enormous sample size. Even a 50% reduction in SIDS risk — which would be astronomical — would require a sample size of between 100,000 and 150,000 infants, which may be impractical even putting aside the cost of the SNOO. It just isn’t feasible to answer this in this way.
Nobody does randomized controlled trials of that magnitude. So that makes the claims that back-sleeping reduces SIDS risk unconvincing.
Arnold,
Now that we are 100 days or so into the new Administration, I think it would be interesting to look at what did and didn’t stick from the campaign. And I don’t just mean Biden but the entire consensus he represents.
Reversals include:
1) About face on lab leak hypothesis
2) Ending Afghan war
3) Surprise (to me) ending of indoor mask mandate and COVID restrictions early (be leftist standards) after calling it “neanderthal thinking” not long ago
4) I hear student debt isn’t going to be in his infrastructure proposal, we’ll see
5) I don’t think abortion was ever a big Biden thing, but he’s pretty silent on it going to the Supreme Court
(I know the CDC did this, but it kind of seems like they got leaned into, having just issued draconian requirements on things like summer camps not long before the about face)
By contrast, it seems like all the race/crime/woke stuff has stuck. He brought back CRT on Day 1. Title IX and trans nonsense. Academia and K-12 can’t seem to abandon meritocracy and hire DEI officers fast enough.
There seems to be some lamenting over the murder uptick, but not a lot of concrete plans to do anything about it (meanwhile, the Floydism signaling is obviously demoralizing to cops).
Douthat outlined that Biden will rise and fall on three things:
1) Whether the stimulus causes big inflation
2) Crime Wave
3) K-12 Education Cultural Revolution getting out of control
But at least outside of those issues they seem to have adopted a lot of the Trump platform.
Much more important than those three is Biden’s ability to string a coherent sentence together in two years. It’s not looking good at day 100…
Jen will circle back with you on that one.
https://youtu.be/3NRvSvEFPFk
We are at peak Orwellian! Cool! Or maybe not….
It looks fine at day 100. Former occupant was no better in that regard. Its about who is around.
You can’t be serious. Biden is clearly suffering from serious memory issues whereas Trump was just not as sharp as when he was 50. I’m a centrist who has never voted Republican but almost certainly will in 2022 despite not liking them either.
Our 7 yo will not be getting the vaccine if/when approved for her age cohort. She is at extremely low risk from the virus and we are taking a longer term wait-and-see approach on the vaccine side effects. Please prove us wrong.
There is an interesting change halfway through that second sentence. You assert with sureness that “She is at extremely low risk from the virus” but then say that you are unsure and worried about longer term side effects.
Yet as new variants arise, it is certainly possible that she will be at a higher risk. And the history of vaccines suggests that there will be an “extremely low risk” of major side effects.
There is risk whatever you do but I don’t see any scientific justification for thinking the second is much riskier than the first.
I would describe the side effects I had as major. I felt very bad for days after each dose. I have never felt sick after a vaccine before, let alone awful. Probably better than me or my parents getting COVID, but I wouldn’t volunteer for anything like that willy nilly.
Right now they are testing 1/3 of the dose I got on the age 2-5 bucket. I do not want to give my two year old 1/3 of a dose that destroyed me for days each time despite my weighing a lot more then 3x my daughter.
Given the extremely low risk for kids, I’m only interested in the vaccine as a way to reduce the odds of their bringing it home to my parents (who are themselves vaccinated). I’d put up with a single dose of a dosage level less likely to cause such strong side effects for such a mild potential benefit. But I’m not going to make my two year old deathly ill for days twice.
It’s actually not that interesting of a change in the second sentence.
Known risk from virus: 0.00000001% for her age cohort
Risk from vaccine: indeterminate for her age cohort
Please call me when either 1) the virus variants change this risk dynamic or 2) the medium/long term consequences of the vaccine for her age group are more clear.
BTW – she never wears a mask. F*ck that nonsense. Her school just implemented mask optional indoors.
Both of her parents have already been poked 2x, so we are not anti-vaccine by any stretch.
I’m not going to ask for your number so I can call you when the medium-term risks become clear 🙂 But I’m sure in a year or so, you’ll be thinking, “Gee, that Roger Sweeny was right after all.”
P.S. 0.00000001% is one in ten billion (10 e10). Harvard Health Publishing from Harvard Medical School says, “Children, including very young children, can develop COVID-19. Many of them have no symptoms. Those that do get sick tend to experience milder symptoms such as low-grade fever, fatigue, and cough. Some children have had severe complications, but this has been less common. Children with underlying health conditions may be at increased risk for severe illness.
“A potentially severe and dangerous complication can occur in children. Called multisystem inflammatory syndrome in children (MIS-C), it can lead to life-threatening problems with the heart and other organs in the body. In this condition, different body parts, such as the heart, lungs, kidneys, brain, skin, eyes, or gastrointestinal organs, can become inflamed.”
That sounds like a lot more than one in ten billion.
Another preposition which would require a sample size of that magnitude:
The Astrazeneca (+/- J&J) vaccines cause blood clots.
And yet we treat this as an established fact.
The real conclusion of Oster’s post should have been to lose the artificial dichotomous thinking imposed by frequentist statistical methods and instead update beliefs in a principled and coherent manner to facilitate decision making.