Thursday Throughout: No, the Other Simpsons Pandemic Edition

The Simpsons logo is a copyright of Fox Television. Graphic altered from image via Wikimedia Commons.

[ThTh1] One of the more frustrating aspects of the pandemic recently has been the effort by the anti-vaxxers to act as if the vaccines are failing. Part of this is sheer disingenuousness. The vaccines are dealing with a variant that didn’t exist a year ago but are still 60% effective in preventing infection and 90% effective in preventing serious illness and death. Had a similar vaccine existed a year ago, 500,000 Americans would still be with us.¹

But part of it is due to statistical illusions and particularly one called Simpson’s Paradox. No, this isn’t the paradox of how the TV Simpsons never seem to age; it’s the paradox of what happens when you just mash a bunch of data together without looking deeper into it.

There are several great real-life examples you can find at the link above, but I’ll come up with another one. In my town, we have two schools across the street from each other — the High School and the Delta Program, which follows a different education model. If you measured the average height of students at both schools, the High School students would be taller. This might lead you to conclude that going to the Delta Program makes you shorter.

But you’d be wrong. Because the Delta Program has both a high school and middle school inside it. So you’re comparing a sample of 14-18 year-old kids to a sample of 11-18 year old kids. If you restricted your sample to just the high school kids from Delta, you’d find they have the same average height as the kids in the High School. And the middle school kids would have the same average height as the kids down the road in the Middle School.

This is a subtle bias but one we’ve encountered a lot during the pandemic. And it’s become a recent issues with COVID-19 breakthrough infections among the vaccinated. You might have heard from certain anti-vax types that the Israel data shows that the vaccines are only 60% effective in preventing serious cases instead of 90%. This is not true.

Once you control for age and vaccination rates, it's clear the vaccines are holding up in Israel across both the young and old. pic.twitter.com/NeAksXBroz

— German Lopez (@germanrlopez) August 18, 2021

The data give the illusion that vaccines are less effective because seniors are both more likely to be vaccinated and more likely to get sick. We might actually expect the vaccines to be less effective among the elderly because their immune systems aren’t as strong but there’s no data showing that yet. But when you compare apples to apples — vaccinated old people to unvaccinated old people — the efficacy of the vaccines is clear.

Mark Twain famously said there were lies, damned lies and statistics. But I think P.J. O’Rourke actually put it better. I can’t find the exact quote but it was something about how numbers lie to us with a straight face. And I would say that liars can use numbers to lie to us with a straight face. We live in a world of numbers and they have heft in our debates. But they are easily manipulated, distorted or even just misunderstood by people with an axe to grind. In the future, stats courses will all use examples from the pandemic to illustrate statistical biases.

[ThTh2] The claim is that children born during the pandemic have lower IQs. The response on Twitter was a massive pushback, mostly consisting of snide remarks asking how you measure a baby’s IQ. So what’s the story?

Well, the study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, comes from a Rhode Island group that does longitudinal studies of child development. With very young children, they are looking at things like speech development and motor skills, which can be kinda sorta distilled into an “IQ” equivalent. What they have found is that children born during the pandemic are trailing older children in the development of early childhood skills, with the decline strongest among males and children of low-income parents.

It’s possible that peer review will find an error in this study but, after skimming through the paper, nothing jumps out at me as particularly egregious. And the conclusions seem … well, kind of reasonable. A lot of families have been under stress during the pandemic. Daycares have been closed. Play dates with other children have been minimal. I think it is not only possible but quite likely we will see the impact of that in the development of children of all ages.

The good news is that children can make up for lost time. IQ, in particular, is extremely fluid at young ages. A a few years ago, my son was diagnosed with mild autism but that was later changed to possible ADHD. In between those two diagnoses, his “IQ” went up by more than 20 points. Not because he got a brain transplant but because he got some help with his development. And it’s never too late for this. In the Blind Side, Michael Oher’s IQ went up almost 25 points to above average after intense tutoring at the age of 17. IQ is not a measure of intelligence; it’s a measure of a specific kind of thinking ability. And in the case of very young children, it’s not even that: it’s a measure of verbal, cognitive and motor development.

The sooner we can get the pandemic under control and get ourselves back to normal life, the more likely it is that children will catch up to a normal development curve. So do not read this headline and think a generation of children are damaged goods. Read this headline and roll up your sleeves. Because there’s going to be a lot of work to do once we’re past this.

[ThTh3] Here’s a good thread on why the argument that “the world’s climate has always changed” isn’t a good rebuttal of global warming. There are also growing concerns over what happens as the permafrost thaws.

[ThTh4] The headlines scream that asteroid Asteroid Bennu could hit the Earth. The reality is that the odds are very low — one in 1750. And it’s not a concern until 2182. And the asteroid’s orbit could just as easily plunge it into the sun or yeet it completely out of the Solar System. Phil Plait has more.

[ThTh5] There’s an old joke that nuclear fusion is always going to be a source of energy ten years from today. But it does seem like we’re getting closer.

[ThTh6] The model we use for our Milky Way Galaxy is that is a grand-design spiral with huge spiral arms sweeping out from the center. That’s accurate. But as we probe our galaxy in greater details, we find that it’s … a bit messy.

[ThTh7] Saturn has a fuzzy core.

[ThTh8] When the mRNA vaccines came out, I predicted they would be revolutionary. Moderna is about to trial a new HIV vaccine.

1. And no, there is no clear data showing that “natural” immunity is better than vaccine immunity. Acquiring natural immunity is, however, more likely to kill you or give you long-term health issues, so there’s that.