Week of November 7, 2022
Until this weekend, the only thing I ever invented was the term "Data Wrangler" (denoting a person in a medical practice responsible for organizing pop health information). Recently, I purchased a second battery-powered leaf blower in the misguided belief that my teenagers would join me in yard work. And while using two leaf blowers simultaneously may seem obvious, I cannot find an internet reference mirroring the Weinsteinian dual-blower cross-stream vertical and horizontal techniques. This email will (undoubtedly) claim my status as a founding thought leader in a (currently unwritten) comprehensive guide to leaf-blowing strategy and tactics - a sort of Art of War for yard work.
Of course, I found an article (from Lawn and Landscaping Magazine), applying lessons from Sun Tzu's Art of War to the landscaping industry. But, I note the article's absence of advanced leaf-blowing tactics.
https://www.lawnandlandscape.com/article/ll1013-ancient-chinese-warfare-strategy/
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Fourteen-day rates of new cases, hospitalizations, and deaths are stable in the U.S.
N.Y. Times Tracker
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html
Financial Times Data for Europe
https://ig.ft.com/coronavirus-chart/?areas=eur&areas=usa&areas=e92000001&areasRegional=usny&areasRegional=usnm&areasRegional=uspr&areasRegional=usaz&areasRegional=usfl&areasRegional=usnd&cumulative=0&logScale=0&per100K=1&startDate=2021-09-01&values=deaths
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CDC's weekly review of COVID data offered a concise analysis of current data and vaccine information.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/covidview/index.html
Reviewing their "layered approach to protection" as you think about gathering with vulnerable family members and friends for the holidays is prudent:
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/prevent-getting-sick/prevention.html
Eric Topol discusses the rising prevalence of the Omicron BQ.1.1 strain in Europe (and the U.S.). Early data MAY hint at less virulence (or more population immunity) since hospitalizations are lower than expected.
https://erictopol.substack.com/p/daily-pandemic-briefing-4-november
more from French journalist Nicolas Berrod on Twitter (which will translate)
https://twitter.com/nicolasberrod/status/1588478559571824640
Jeremy Faust discusses the "from" vs. "with" data problem. COVID is associated with higher death rates, but how physicians fill out death certificates can be highly variable. Drawing clear lines from COVID to a known mechanism of death can be very challenging for medical professionals. We know that COVID causes varying severity of systemic inflammation/immune activation. This immune activation is associated with numerous bad outcomes - organ damage, strokes, heart attacks, and (maybe) long COVID symptoms. So if you come into the hospital due to pneumonia from COVID but die of a heart attack - how do you most precisely capture the role COVID played on the small blank line of a death certificate? It is like translating a chapter of Doesteveky into a Tweet. How do you maintain intellectual integrity while summarizing a patient's cause of death?
https://insidemedicine.bulletin.com/for-versus-with-covid-deaths-are-getting-harder-to-count-but-they-still-matter/
and background on inflammation/immune activation
https://answers.childrenshospital.org/covid-19-inflammation/
For those still reading, look at this article discussing documenting an accurate cause of death that shows the boxes on a sample California death certificate. Box 107 on page 3 of the article is where a physician has to capture the nuance of "myocardial infarction in the setting of years of diabetes, hypertension, smoking, non-adherence to lifestyle modifications and a COVID infection resulting in a systemic immune response" in 3 to 4 lines.
http://publichealth.lacounty.gov/wwwfiles/ph/media/media/rx-may2014.pdf
Medical Trends and Technology
Some people are tall; some people are short; others attract mosquitos differently due to the carboxylic acid levels on their skin. I found a study examining skin factors that impact why mosquitos are attracted differently to different people. But between the unintentionally amusing infographic and the use of the term "mutant mosquitoes," this article was my favorite random science find of the week.
Re: the infographic in the article (link below)
(So many questions. Why did they choose volleyball as the representative activity? Why is the woman excreting more carboxylic acid? Who are those silhouetted people? What is their relationship? Why don't they have Off!?)
Also - I highly recommend reading the "Microbiota influence over human skin acid production" section near the end of the article. It is a fascinating description of how humans vary from other mammals and why each of us has unique combinations of chemicals on our skin.
https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(22)01253-3
Infographics
Happy Election Day! A good resource for those who "eat from a limited buffet" of information sources.
https://repository.ifla.org/bitstream/123456789/167/1/How_to_Spot_Fake_News-Full-resolution.jpg
Topics from the newsletter through the "eyes" of our A.I. Overlords!
(What is this section? - https://openai.com/dall-e-2/)
"Photo of mosquito wearing an aluminum foil hat reading the Washington Post"
https://labs.openai.com/s/m2HcO8uUfYDDXNv1ecI2ZDIl
Things I learned this week
A constant theme of my emails is the interpretation and application of data. I found three items this week that exemplify the struggle to acquire, interpret, and effectively use data across various provocative topics. Taking a step back from the issues themselves, the common questions raised amongst these items are - How do ordinary people know who to trust and how to interpret complex data? How is data incorporated into policy discussions? What are the typical ways people leverage evidence and expertise to support their opinions, especially when confronted with conflicting data? And what happens when public policy and the best available science conflict?
Data used by the anti-gun control lobby is problematic.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/a-reporter-at-large/the-shoddy-conclusions-of-the-man-shaping-the-gun-rights-debate
An AMA podcast on the data and legal issues around the supreme court's Dobbs decision
https://edhub.ama-assn.org/jn-learning/audio-player/18733737
And a 24-minute visual documentary in-depth analysis of how to wade through the data surrounding climate change:
https://www.neilfilms.com/degrees/
Clean hands and sharp minds,
Adam
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