Nate Silver

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@conorsen Yeah that sounds about right. I do think you may have an interim period where some states will struggle with stuff like not having enough staff, not expanding eligibility quickly enough, or having logistical issues with both 1-dose and 2-dose vaccines on hand. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Will it go that fast in reality? No, probably not. But barring manufacturing setbacks, we aren't going to have a *supply* problem for very much longer. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Another cut on this: These amounts are enough to fully vaccinate 70m Americans per month. Skipping the math, but if we vaccinated at that pace—plus accounting for people who have already been vaxxed—it would be enough to reach ~70% of the adult (age 16+) population by April 30. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

At least conceivable some states will have delivery bottlenecks & will need to open more points of delivery or keep them open longer hours, which requires more staffing. Probably what happens is a larger share of deliveries wind up coming via the major retail pharmacy chains. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

We're really at an inflection point here. Pfizer increasing deliveries to 14m/week by mid-March. Moderna aiming to ramp up to 40m/month by April. J&J (one dose) delivering 20m doses in March. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Obviously the media coverage varies too. I think the NYT has generally done a very good job for instance (on the variants and other topics). But the "experts vs. public officials" framing is often suspect, as it is here. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

This is such a weird framing as there are lots of public health experts I follow who seem to think media coverage of the new US variants is hyperbolic. https://t.co/ClNqlDr1gB — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@JamesSurowiecki @kmedved @joshtpm @mattyglesias @DKarol Argentina is reasonably wealthy and had perhaps the world's strictest lockdown and had similar issues. It's clear that lockdowns work up to a point—if people have fewer contacts, less COVID will spread!—but there may be a cap on how much people are able & willing to isolate. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@kdrum @mattyglesias @DKarol @joshtpm That's a good summation. And it seems like people should be pretty obsessed with the question of why East Asia did so much better than the Americas/Europe when it's sort of dropped off the radar as a topic. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@joshtpm @mattyglesias @DKarol Yeah, I totally agree with that. And it's also interesting that (in thinking about what constitutes "the West") the rest of the Americas (Mexico, Brazil, Peru etc.) have had quite a bad time with the pandemic whereas Australia/New Zealand have done very well. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@joshtpm Yeah, nobody in the West has done well, exactly! And the countries that had seemed like exceptions (Germany, Canada) have been real slow on vaccines. I guess I'd just say that "the pandemic shows that the West in decline" works better than "the pandemic shows the US in decline". — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@DKarol @joshtpm I also think there are fewer confounders (less "luck") involved in vaccine procurance and delivery than in other phases of the pandemic. So the fact that we're administering vaccines 3x faster than the EU is something to consider. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@DKarol @joshtpm I think the timing's a bit more ambiguous. There was a lot of virus circulating in e.g. NYC in February 2020 even if it went largely undetected. And both the US and the EU had a major fall/winter resurgence, with plenty of warning that one might occur. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@joshtpm So if we get an F for handling the first phase of the pandemic, they're at about a D-. And we get a B for the vaccine phase whereas they also get a D- there. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@joshtpm The per-capita death toll so far is reasonably similar between the major non-Germany EU countries and the US, especially given ambiguities in how deaths are counted. And our vaccine rollout is hugely better than theirs. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

With some exceptions (Germany, though even they have a slow vaccine rollout), the EU's pandemic handling has been worse than the US's on balance. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

RT @COVID19Tracking: Many data-watchers are understandably concerned about the recent uptick in national reported cases. A closer look at t… — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Their search function is kind of dumb and will only look within ~5 miles of the zip code you enter, so you might try other zip codes within the city if you can't find one. Again, only for 65+ (the pharmacies have more limited eligibility than the state and city sites for now). — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

FYI, not sure if people are but aware NY is now doing some vaccine distribution through pharmacies and not just state/city-run sites. Walgreens seems to have a decent amount of appointments available in NYC right now (note: only for people aged 65+). https://t.co/L5OpHEWFJr — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@mattyglesias The economists, etc. would probably have been accused of prioritizing efficiency before all else. But ironically the free-for-all that's resulted is reasonably efficient as far as getting large #'s vaccinated, but middling on aligning to public health need and poor on equity. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

RT @kavitapmd: Unanimous vote to recommend EUA for Janssen/JNJ vaccine (22 votes). More than even Pfizer (bc of people's concerns re ages 1… — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@conor64 @mattyglesias Very mixed experiences with them as a sports fan! But yeah I see where you're going. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@mattyglesias Also people with expertise in queueing theory. Whoever makes the lines move fast at Chick-Fil-A or Whole Foods or other businesses with famously good queue management is someone worth talking to. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@mattyglesias This might be an unpopular view but it feels like states should have consulted more operations researchers, economists, sociologists etc. in designing their rollout plans or other people whose expertise broadly speaking includes thinking about how people respond to incentives. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

What's tricky is there's a strong case IMO for keeping restrictions in place for another ~3-5 weeks but few experts want to be quite that specific about the time frame. So governors may think "well, we have to end these 'indefinite' lockdowns sometime". https://t.co/5wSmUruLdO — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

So for better or worse—worse, obviously, in hindsight—they were trying to triage the situation. But they were working with bad early projections that greatly overestimated the hospitalization rate from COVID (while getting the fatality rate about right, interestingly). — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Something I don't see brought up much in the discussion of why Cuomo and other govs sent hospitalized patients back to nursing homes or kept nursing home patients out of hospitals is that the projections for hospital usage were absolutely catastrophic. https://t.co/aIzf6qRodU — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@conorsen @DKThomp I'm trying to square my subjective sense that we're at an inflection point with data that I think doesn't necessarily suggest that. We may be at an inflection point among high-info/blue checkmark elites but that's not the same as the general population. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@kwcollins Yeah. It's a huge advantage to know where and when to look, to have the time to invest, and to have a fast web connection, and that's before getting into more elaborate stuff like having the skill set to build an automated script. Who-can-click-fastest is really bad for equity. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

RT @kavitapmd: Exactly right- and at this point, it would be easier to work with payers or even Netflix at this point to figure out who peo… — PolitiTweet.org