Nate Silver

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

RT @laurabronner: 4 things we know about the Georgia Senate runoffs, and 3 reasons there's a lot of uncertainty: 1. The polls are *extreme… — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@apoorva_nyc FWIW I think there's much better data on this now than these self-selected studies. UK data suggests ~20% still experiencing symptoms after 5 weeks, ~10% after 12 weeks. https://t.co/hcgPgGzsAG — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Good range of answers here. FWIW I don't see too many ways around the fact that more contagious new variants likely push back the timetable for the return to normal a bit. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

There'll be people who feel more comfortable getting vaccinated in a hospital or doctor's office. But other people will be wandering through a Walgreens while buying paper towels and say "hey, why not?". Having multiple channels likely increases access/acceptance. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

In addition to the potential for high throughput, maybe also something to be said for the high visibility of chains like CVS etc delivering vaccines. Nearly everyone visits these stores occasionally and it could normalize vaccines a bit for people who are on the fence about them. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

One problem might literally be that this very good and practical solution is too simple when committees feel as though they need to design complicated solutions to prove that they've done their job and weighed all the relevant equities and so forth. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

That matters because when you have a multidimensional split within a party that can't easily be squashed into one left-right scale, there is probably more risk of fracture, and generally a lot more unpredictability about how things will play out. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

These are some rather conservative representatives. And for that matter folks like Mitt Romney and Ben Sasse are pretty conservative, too. The thing is this authoritarian/antiauthoritarian split within the GOP is fairly orthogonal to e.g. conservatism on economic issues. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

I really don't want to be too dogmatic about stuff like how long the gap should be between doses because I know there's a lot of disagreement among the smart experts I follow, but I do think the thread Phil cites is good about how it's not as simple as saying "there's no data". — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@nataliemj10 That's fair. I guess my prior was that things would move toward the GOP because it would function like a midterm. So maybe that prior was wrong, obviously. But if we go from Perdue beating Ossoff by 2 in November to say losing by 2 in January, that seems interesting-ish. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

The conventional wisdom on here seems to be that the crazy shit Republicans are doing has little/no electoral recourse. While obviously polls can be wrong, if Democrats do win both runoffs folks may need to re-examine that. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Lotta pollsters that had pretty big GOP house effects in November (often correctly, it turned out) showing good numbers for the Democrats in Georgia. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

So it's not crazy, but it took quite a while to build up that testing infrastructure and we don't really have that time now (not that we really did before either). — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

To give you some sense for scale here, NYC will do about 100k COVID tests on a fairly busy day. Assuming giving a vaccine takes about twice as long as giving a test (not crazy if you want to monitor people post-vax) that's the scale of infrastructure buildout we're talking about. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

NYC is going to have to be administering about *50,000 vaccine doses per day* to keep up with anticipated supply through July 31. Instead we're taking weekends off. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

And this is the best argument *against* expanding the interval between doses. However, I know there is a lot of disagreement among experts on the extent to which this is likely to be a problem. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

A lot of the issue is that vaccine distribution questions have often been framed as "Who is most deserving of the vaccine?" when they be something more like "How do we mitigate mortality/morbidity from COVID as fast as possible while adhering to basic principles of fairness?" — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

BTW, what New York and other states need ASAP is a standby list. Keep it simple: every New Yorker age 16+ is eligible. If a pharmacy/etc. has excess vaccines that are going bad, randomly ping people on the standby list from the pharmacy's zip code until you get enough takers. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

I am not as down on Cuomo/NY's COVID handling as some people on here. But, yeah, this is a bad idea. You don't want to create too much friction to vaccine distribution at a time when distribution is slow and doses have a relatively short shelf life. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Nonauthoritarian Republicans splintering off from their party (either on a piecemeal or organized basis) is a pretty big risk for the GOP. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

RT @thehowie: My thoughts on 1-dose vs 2-dose approach. TL; DR Wrong questions give you wrong answers. We assuredly should want 2 dose… — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

I'm not sure how willing people will be to abide by new lockdowns, particularly if they're frustrated by the slow pace of vaccine distribution and they think their own first dose is many months off. Getting more people a first dose sooner will mean people feel more "dealt in". — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Part of that is because of how I read public opinion. It may be that it would be rational to have some fairly harsh lockdowns in say Feb-April if the UK variant is becoming more established but not enough people have been vaccinated to really help with herd immunity. However... — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

I've read a lot of arguments on both sides of this debate and to me, this side (that we should allow for a longer gap between the first and second dose to let more people get their first dose sooner) is more persuasive by some margin. https://t.co/X3L8zFGlca — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@R_Thaler One question is how fine you want the subgroups to be. My hunch is that you don't want them to be superfine or you create bottlenecks, especially with vaccine hesitancy in some groups. But these are the sorts of things that state vaccine panels should be studying. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

If you're not going to do things by age there starts to be an argument for just putting everyone after health care workers/nursing homes in the same pool and randomly choosing the order by birthdate. I don't think that's a great plan but it's a decent null hypothesis so to speak. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

That's why I strongly favor a system that just goes in 3 tiers or so by age, with extremely few exceptions (health care personnel and long-term care facilities would be some of the exceptions). It's easy to implement, hard to cheat, and has an easy-to-explain medical rationale. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Yeah. And the extremely byzantine vaccine priority plans developed by many states is going to make this worse. The more subcategories you create, the more things there are for people to object to, which may further erode trust in the public health system. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Polling trends haven't been favorable for Perdue and Loeffler lately. https://t.co/jNFvD5ZNhd — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@BenjySarlin @chrislhayes @zeynep @benyt Not sure those situations map to this one so neatly. You do have some outright science denialism on the right. But denying the existence of tradeoffs has been an issue across the spectrum in the US covid debate (and this denial sometimes takes the form of "follow the science"). — PolitiTweet.org