But we do know how they did their analysis. At the very end of the graphic is a “Methodology” section.
They ranked each country on each of the six measures.
Still by country, they then averaged the rankings.
The average was then (sic) ‘normalised for each country’, to generate country scores from 0-100, worst to best.
The last step does not make sense to me. I imagine they normalised across countries to do that.
So the mix of absolute numbers with rates is a defect in their methodology.
A fundamental property of a score is that identical performances should produce similar scores.
So, as a thought-experiment, what would happen to identical countries of different sizes, e.g. you compared the actual UK with a representative 50% sample of the UK?
The “half UK” would beat the UK, because of the smaller absolute numbers.
Here is another one: what would happen if every country were truly identical, same size, same Covid performance, same everything.
Because of the normalisation, they would still come out with scores from 0-100, caused entirely by spurious data recording errors!
I don’t think this is a useful score.
LeSving wrote:
Consequently, further discussions will be unfruitful, it will lead to nothing, mostly because we don’t know the details of the analysis.
I think this sums it up.
Anything of this nature has very little value unless the reader is aware and entitled to see the details of the analysis so they may scrutinise this for themselves and reach their own judgement. It is the sort of thing often published in the usual rags – which is possibly fair enough. It all looks great and is often there to prove (or try) and prove a point, and will often take in those sufficiently gullible. The trouble is sometimes it does prove or at least support a point, but sometimes under scrutiny it is just misleading.
In this case as your rightly say we dont know so it should be received with a healthy portion of sceptism.
I also stand by what I said earlier – I dont think it actually advances the debate on anything, because it is far to easy to say “ah but, you havent taken into account x, y and z.”
LeSving wrote:
1. The persons doing the analysis has messed up fundamentally
Just because it comes from some “Institute of Studies” on a nice website does not mean it is any good.
We can say that based on the information provided. Their methodology is not very clear, but they say
Fourteen-day rolling averages of new daily figures were calculated for the following indicators:
- Confirmed cases
- Confirmed deaths
- Confirmed cases per million people
- Confirmed deaths per million people
- Confirmed cases as a proportion of tests
- Tests per thousand people
An average of the rankings across the six indicators was normalised for each country to produce a score between 0 (worst performing) and 100 (best performing) on any given day in the 36 weeks that followed their hundredth confirmed case of COVID-19.
A score of 100 indicates that a country achieved the best average score across the six indicators compared to all other countries examined at a comparable point in time. Conversely, a score of 0 indicates that a country had the worst average score at a given moment during the pandemic.
They say further up that the score is the average of the daily scores.
From this we can see the following:
In both cases, let’s assume two countries
Country A – 10 million population, 20k deaths, 200 deaths per 100,000 population
Country B – 100 million population, 100k deaths, 100 deaths per 100,000 population.
Which one “performed” better? Obviously country B.
But according to their methodology
Fuji_Abound wrote:
Anything of this nature has very little value unless the reader is aware and entitled to see the details of the analysis so they may scrutinise this for themselves and reach their own judgement
Sure, but they publish what they have done. Not enough to judge validity, but enough to discredit the research.
A somewhat crass analogy is
“We studied the existence of water using a proprietary methodology and have determined that there is water 1m below the surface of the moon” —> plausible, let’s see.
“We studied the existence of water using a dousing rod held by a shaman in a trance and have determined that there is water 1m below the surface of the moon” —> don’t even bother reading the paper when it comes out.
“We ranked performance using a methodology where [1/3rd] of the score is the determined by the size of the country” —> somewhere in between.
I would love see the raw data, strip out the B/S factor, and do it again to get some real insight.
PS –
dublinpilot wrote:
If the Chinese can build a hospital in 2 weeks, surely we can build some pharmaceutical plants in a month.
Sure, the building is the easy part. But where do you find the people to operate these plants on the quick ? It’s the same with hospitals. Easy to throw together a ‘field hospital’ quickly, not so easy or quick to train the required nurses and doctors.
What we are finding (among many other things) in this pandemic is that it’s very difficult to scale up human resources. This, btw, will not change. No society can afford to train thousands of medical staff for a once-in-a-lifetime event and then idling them.
The President of France, with all the resources of intelligence, expertise and scientific knowledge of the Republic at his disposal, and with all the sagacity with which he and his advisers are endowed, has described the AZ vaccine as “quasi-ineffective”.
Why on earth should I, a humble and loyal EU citizen, accept this Anglo-Swedish “snake oil” from the British NHS?
Is there any way that I can refuse my doses and ensure that they will be sent to the EU for safe disposal by French experts?
I agree Macron’s comment was unhelpful, misleading even, but it’s not entirely daft.
If the AZ vaccine had no effect in the over 65s, the probability of infection in both the vaccine and placebo groups would be 50%.
In which case the odds of the reported 2/10 infections in the vaccine group would be 4.4% (binomial distribution).
The odds of 0 and 1 would be tiny, so with 95% confidence we can say that the AZ vaccine has non-zero efficacy in the over 65s. But that’s about it. So “quasi-ineffective” might be one way of putting that.
But it was not a helpful comment. The main issue here is that 10 is a small number. There are plenty of other good reasons to believe the vaccine should have high efficacy in the over-65s, and more data is expected.
Edit: changed ‘should be effective’ to ‘have high efficacy’ in the final paragraph.
I think the English expression for all this is “sour grapes” i.e. if I can’t have something, I will slag it off when somebody else gets it.
This is the biggest political disaster for Brussels for decades (not good given the nationalist drifts in most of the member countries) and the human cost of their ~3m delay will be 100k+ lives.
Remains to be seen whether the export licenses (they have not backed down on that scheme) will be refused, for the countries which were removed from the exemption list.
EDIT: a Brussels official has tweeted that they will not block exports where existing orders are being fulfilled!
So far I have not seen a legal-looking opinion suggesting that AZ contract is problematic. There was one champagne socialist on TV today saying big pharmas have a social responsibility and thus contracts need to be interpreted differently. That’s a debate for another day, and perhaps not for a case where the company is supplying the stuff on a nonprofit basis.
Down here, Brighton area, they seem to have done the 80+ and are now doing the low 70s; a friend of mine, low 70s, is about to get it. No idea which vaccine.
European Comission fails at redacting when publishing AZ contract, a real schoolboy error: https://www.theregister.com/2021/01/29/eu_commission_vaccine_contract_redaction_fail/
They’ve also managed to unite Sinn Fein and the DUP, and Brexiteers and Remainers which seems like a real feat of … something.
