The pandemic road, with data

Two year follow-up to a post on path dependence.

Mexico City’s program to distribute ivermectin to 200,000 COVID-19 patients, and the bad science that propped it up

They gave ivermectin to thousands of people outside of a controlled experiment. Was that unethical and bad medicine given the state of knowledge in late 2020? Yes.

Comment on pandemic family plans

In light of disparate impacts of COVID-19 itself and the social and economic fallout of the pandemic, research should concentrate on widening inequalities in fertility and family well-being, and their relationship to health disparities.

Chasing Life podcast on making babies, or not

CNN's Dr. Sanjay Gupta has a podcast called Chasing Life about coming out of the pandemic. Associate producer Grace Walker interviewed me for an episode titled, "Let’s Talk About Making Babies (Or Deciding Not To)." In it reporter Chloe Melas starts with the story of a Black couple (two women, one of them trans) seeking…

New paper: Baby Bust analysis of 124 counties in 2 states through February 2021

Births fell more in January/February in those counties with more COVID-19 cases, and those with more mobility limitation, through the end of last May.

Pandemic Baby Bust situation update

Some of the new numbers are small, in a very big way

Host, parasite, and failure at the colony level: COVID-19 and the US information ecosystem

Dr. Birx in the role the rapid raccoon, watching herself lose her grip on scientific reality as the authoritarian leader douses the public health information system with bleach and sets it on fire with an ultraviolet ray gun "inside the body."

COVID-19 mortality rates by race/ethnicity and age

Why are there such great disparities in COVID-19 deaths across race/ethnic groups in the U.S.? Here's a recent review from New York City: The racial/ethnic disparities in COVID-related mortality may be explained by increased risk of disease because of difficulty engaging in social distancing because of crowding and occupation, and increased disease severity because of…

COVID-19 Baby Bust update and data

Killing time while we wait for events to occur, I set up a dataset to build on.

New COVID-19 and Health Disparities lecture

I recorded a new version of the lecture I created last spring: COVID-19 and Health Disparities. It defines health disparities, introduces the theory of fundamental causes, and then describes COVID-19 disparities by race/ethnicity and age with reference to education and occupational inequality. For intro sociology students. Using data from Bureau of Labor Statistics (inspired by…