Nate Silver

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

RT @lymanstoneky: THIS IS FALSE — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Let me put this in a relatively friendly though subtweet-y way: We're getting into "unskewed polls" territory from certain people who ought to know better. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@joshtpm Yeah in some ways they're the ultimate expression of the Dunning-Kruger effect. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@Taniel I actually don't think that's totally crazy given the ages of the candidates and the terrible pandemic that we're living through. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Meant AZ and WI rather than AZ and MI but the point holds. Political prediction markets are just super dumb with lots of obvious arbitrage opportunities. Maybe if they were more liquid/robust they'd be a bit better. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

None of this makes any sense. There's no world in which Biden is favored in AZ and MI but an underdog to Trump in the Electoral College overall. And Democrats being (barely) favored to win the Senate but not the presidency is also rather dubious. https://t.co/qpmkmQfImF https://t.co/Wo7xkDD3cb — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

New York State doesn't *quite* have no-questions-asked, on-demand testing yet, but the criteria to get tested are very broad. Basically any symptoms, any pre-existing conditions, any contact with a COVID+ person, anybody not working from home. https://t.co/Q1fzGkto4D — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Good to see an uptick in testing, which comes after state and local officials in NY have worked to advise people that testing is much more widely available now. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Meanwhile, this is a record number of tests. We may not be far from breaking the 500K tests/day threshold one day soon. It's also a more robust number than before as several of the states that had been including antibody tests in their test totals have now discontinued doing so. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

A bit in the eye of the beholder, but I'd say more good news than bad. Cases and deaths both up from yesterday, but down from last Thursday, meaning 7-day averages are down a bit. We don't seem to have gotten a big midweek glut because of reporting lags from the 3-day weekend. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

US daily numbers via @COVID19Tracking: Newly reported deaths Today: 1,353 Yesterday: 1,259 One week ago (5/21): 1,444 Newly reported cases T: 23K Y: 19K 5/21: 26K Newly reported tests T: 454K Y: 285K 5/21: 417K Positive test rate T: 5% Y: 7% 5/21: 6% — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@mattyglesias Yeah, the list is going to be slightly biased toward battlegrounds since presidential voting is one of the criteria. But also, battlegrounds are often battlegrounds because they have demographics that resemble the country overall. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

So while I do think NY has managed the post-peak phase fairly well (the pre-peak phase is a very, very different story, to say the least) it's not quite an apples-to-apples comparison to places that weren't affected as badly. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Yeah, 2 things can happen after a really bad outbreak: 1) People may be quite careful and good about social distancing 2) You reduce the susceptible population (models estimate ~15% of NYS / ~25% of NYC were infected). That does make some difference. https://t.co/BUgTzjndAc — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

New hospitalizations were greater than 3,000 per day at their peak in New York. So there's basically been a 20-fold reduction to 163 in the past 24 hours. Unfortunately, NY remains more the exception than the rule and other states haven't had such a steep slope downward (if any). — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

LEAST similar to the US as a whole 1. West Virginia 2. Vermont 3. Wyoming 4. Hawaii 5. Alaska 6. Mississippi — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

What states most closely resemble the US as a whole? Here's a list from an algorithm that accounts for race, religion, density, geography, income, education, age, gender and presidential voting. 1. Pennsylvania 2. Virginia 3. Illinois 4. Michigan 5. Florida 6. Ohio — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Yeah, the "leaked White House projections" showing 3K deaths and 200K! cases per day by the end of May 1) never made much sense 2) don't actually seem to have reflected the White House's view. The way the story was reported was a big mess from the get-go. https://t.co/pivgOjiJfg — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Accusing your opponent of stealing the election doesn't seem like a great way to increase turnout among your base. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

More context on Georgia. Actually, 78K antibody tests, which they still include in their totals but which you can easily back out of the numbers since they now list them separately, as it looks like @COVID19Tracking is doing. https://t.co/BnBTdBEWGB — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

The 7-day average death toll has fallen below 1,000 for the first time since April 2. The 7-day average case count has also ticked down slightly after plateauing last week. The weekend may still be skewing the numbers a bit, though, so possible we'll get bad news tomorrow/Friday. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

The other thing is that I thought we'd get some states reporting large numbers of deaths and cases because of reporting lags after the 3-day weekend. But, actually not *that* bad. While 1,259 deaths is way up from the weekend, it's down from 1,402 last Wednesday. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

* Test numbers *dropped* by ~74,000 in Georgia, which I assume means they removed antibody tests from their testing numbers (good!). Without GA, there were 360K tests reported, a fairly typical number for recent days, for a positive rate of 5%. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

US numbers via @COVID19Tracking. A weird one. Newly reported deaths Today: 1,259 Yesterday: 629 One week ago (5/27): 1,402 Newly reported cases T: 19K Y: 16K 5/27: 21K Newly reported tests T: 286K* Y: 302K 5/27: 405K Positive test rate T: 7%* Y: 5% 5/27: 5% * See next tweet — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@mattyglesias Conversely, if you take a pessimistic view, the implication could be "we need to go back to harsher lockdowns now" or it could be "this is hopeless so let's do Sweden". — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@mattyglesias Ehhh, I think they're relatively orthogonal. Like, if you take a relatively optimistic view on current trends, the implication of that could be "great, our strategy is working, let's keep it up!" *or* it could be "OK, we can afford to loosen our belts a little bit". — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

It's true that the COVID data is a mess and it takes some work to figure out how to use it robustly. But people have to be careful not to attribute outcomes to bad/untrustworthy data every time their priors are disconfirmed. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

@skepticalsports @kmedved It doesn't seem crazy that very high mask wearing + highly targeted contact tracing could keep R<1. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Which is not to say you can't find fault with the critics. Trying to convince people that "reopening will cause huge spikes", when in practice re-opening was extremely modest and tentative, was a dumb and foreseeable mistake and set a low bar for success for these states. — PolitiTweet.org

Nate Silver @NateSilver538

Now that restaurants in these places are operating at ~50% capacity (not that restaurants themselves are so important, but using them as a proxy for broader activity) we'll see what the numbers look like in a couple of weeks. — PolitiTweet.org