Some Stats and Some Questions

 

Pic courtesy paho.org

I have posted before about the potential for the Covid pandemic to work as a catalyst.

Apart from that potential, it also provides a snapshot of how well various communities (and societies) work in times of crisis.

An analysis of the performance of the 51 US states on their management of this major health issue provides an insight into how well they function at their most basic task, that of keeping their citizens safe, and how political values are reflected in the outcome.

The measure I will use is the Covid-19 death rate per million as published on the Worldometer website, which uses a variety of information sources to arrive at the various statistics, and is generally reliable.

Let's rank the various American states from worst to best in terms of the deaths per million as of today (29th December 2021), list the political affiliation of the governor, and then specify the vaccination rates at December 28th for each state. The first figure represents the deaths per million for that state, and the percentage represents the vaccination rate -

1. Mississippi - 3501 - Republican - 48.06%

2. Alabama - 3352 - Republican - 47.49%

3. Arizona - 3317 - Republican - 56.85%

4. New Jersey - 3256 - Democratic - 70.26%

5.  Louisiana - 3222 - Democratic - 50.15%

6. New York - 3067 - Democratic - 71.53%

7. Tennessee - 3018 - Republican - 51.17%

8. Arkansas - 3014 - Republican - 51.06%

9. West Virginia - 2951 - Republican - 54.89%

10. Georgia - 2948 - Republican - 50.65%

11. Massachusetts - 2922 - Republican - 74.41%

12. Oklahoma - 2920 - Republican - 53.33%

13. Florida - 2905 - Republican - 63.11%

14. Rhode Island - 2875 - Democratic - 76.1%

15. Michigan - 2868 - Democratic - 56.59%

16. Pennsylvania - 2828 - Democratic - 63.57%

17. South Carolina - 2826 - Republican - 53.01%

18. Indiana - 2812 - Republican - 51.89%

19. South Dakota - 2790 - Republican - 56.83%

20. Montana - 2717 - Republican - 53.86%

21. New Mexico -  2754 - Democratic - 66.06%

22. Nevada - 2725 - Democratic - 56.26%

23. Kentucky - 2708 - Democratic - 54.09%

24. Wyoming - 2637 - Republican - 47.33%

25. North Dakota - 2627 - Republican - 52.38%

26. Texas - 2619 - Republican - 56.78%

27. Missouri - 2589 - Republican - 52.89%

28. Connecticut - 2546 - Democratic - 74.47%

29. Iowa - 2472 - Republican - 58.67%

30. Ohio - 2462 - Republican - 54.97%

31. Illinois - 2435 - Democratic - 64.2%

32. Kansas - 2390 - Democratic - 56.71%

33. Delaware - 2337 - Democratic - 63.96%

34. Idaho - 2313 - Republican - 46.15%

35. California - 1935 - Democratic - 65.95%

36. Maryland - 1931 - Republican - 70.2%

37. Wisconsin - 1903 - Democratic - 61.73%

38. Minnesota - 1868 - Democratic - 65.18%

39. North Carolina - 1841- Democratic - 52.38%

40. Colorado - 1817 - Democratic - 65.09%

41. Virginia - 1816 - Democratic - 67.86%

42. Nebraska - 1722 - Republican - 59.52%

43. District of Columbia - 1713 - Democratic - 67.41%

44. New Hampshire - 1423 - Republican - 67.01%

45. Oregon - 1333 - Democratic - 66.39%

46. Washington - 1294 - Democratic - 67.7%

47. Alaska - 1292 - Republican - 56.1%

48. Utah - 1177 - Republican - 58.44%

49. Maine - 1110 - Democratic - 75.56%

50. Hawaii - 764 - Democratic - 63.38%

51. Vermont - 745 - Republican - 77.29%

And, just for the hell of it, let's list the same data for the various Australian states (which, to be consistent, requires some squirrelly maths to arrive at the deaths per million figure as expressed for the USA. The figures for Tasmania, the NT, WA, SA, and Qld are comparatively meaningless, as they are projections per million for the very few deaths that have occurred in those jurisdictions. You'll note that whilst only one person has died from Covid in the NT, my data says "4". this is simply a projection based on the population of about a quarter of a million. The same mathematical contortions are employed for Tasmania. I include these figures in the same form as the US figures to provide a basis for comparison. Again, the first figure is the death rate per million, and the last the percentage of fully vaccinated individuals) -

1. Victoria - 225 - Labor - 92.4%    

2. New South Wales - 80 - Coalition - 93.5%

3. ACT - 34.7 - Labor/Green -  95%

4. Tasmania - 24 - Coalition -  92.8%  

5. Northern Territory - 4 - Labor -  84.1%          

6. Western Australia - 3.3 - 83.4%         

7. South Australia - 2.8 - Coalition -  87.7% 

8. Queensland - 1.3 - Labor - 86.1%

Now, let's ask some questions.

It's up to you, gentle reader, to answer them.

1. Is there any connection between the political affiliation of the state legislature and the death rate? Of the top 10 worst performing states in the US, 7 are Republican, and 3 are Democrat. In Oz, it appears irrelevant, although Labor doesn't come up smelling of roses in Victoria.

2. Is there any connection between vaccination rates and death rates? In the US, with the exception of New Jersey and New York, the states with the highest death rates have the lowest vaccination rates.

3. What is the reason for the massive difference between the consolidated death rate in the USA of 2522 per million and the Australian figure of 85. Why is it thirty times ours?

It's somewhat sobering to understand that if that rate for Oz was the same as it is in the USA, we would have lost 64,000 Australians.

That's 7000 more than the number of Americans killed in Vietnam.

They built a wall in Washington to remember them. Every person killed had his or her name inscribed. It made an impact when I saw it in 2018. 

Will the saving of so many Australian lives be acknowledged?

Julia Stone - Oh Come All Ye Faithful

This is a very different rendering of the Christmas song.

Growing up, I knew it as “Adeste fideles.”

Happy and holy Christmas, gentle reader....

Promises Promises (Reprised)

Image courtesy Business Insider

Back in January 2017, gentle reader, I made a promise to review Trump's promises annually and report back here. He'd made so many, so I felt it was the least I could do. 

I got distracted and failed to do that, so I apologise, but given that he was a one-term president, it may be constructive to now belatedly keep that original promise. Hindsight always makes some things more obvious, and at least I will have kept my promise.

There were so many, and I don't have time to check all of them.There's nothing to stop you from doing that and reporting back in the comments, of course.

Perhaps the most contentious was that he would build a wall on the southern border, and Mexico would pay for it. These are the first two listed in the linked post.

The actual outcome is simultaneously insignificant and outrageous. A March 2021 review of work on the wall revealed that a total of 47 miles (76 kilometres) of barrier had been constructed where none had previously existed. The southern border is 1954 miles (3145 kilometres) long.

In fact, there is plenty of evidence that what has been done has actually made people smuggling easier, as the roads built to get machinery to the work sites along the wall construction have provided new access paths for the immigrants and those smuggling them. And Mexico hasn't put one cent towards it.

On a number of occasions, Trump declared that he would "get rid of Obamacare and replace it with something so much better..."

That's another promise that has gone through to the keeper, as a result of the votes of the late John McCain and two other nervous Republicans. McCain didn't come across as nervous, by the way. A better word to describe his demeanour is "resolute", an aspect of behaviour that has been absent in Republicans since Trump emerged.

Some of his more bizarre promises are worth revisiting. There was the one about "heavily surveilling mosques", and another about prosecuting Hillary Clinton for using a private email server whilst Secretary of State. The irony about this one is that Trump is under threat of prosecution now for his instigation of the January 6th incursion on the Capitol. To promote a cliche - the worm has turned.

Even when initially making a promise ("leave troops in Afghanistan because it's such a mess") he felt free to reverse it and negotiate a rapid withdrawal with the Taliban, leaving Biden to pick up the pieces. The fact that he blindsided his own military is a major contributing factor to the debacle. 

He also promised to "bring back the American dream". Instead he produced a dystopian nightmare. And that's without reference to his mishandling of the pandemic. Remind me about the statistics for American deaths.

Feel free, gentle reader, to point out any promises kept from the 76 listed in my original post. 

There must be one or two in there somewhere....

The Dimensions of a Tragedy

 I can't remember where I dug this up, gentle reader, but it is illuminating.

Statistics can't effectively describe the full dimensions of a disaster, but they can attempt to measure it. Max Hastings described the war in Vietnam as "an epic tragedy", and when you read this collection of information, you can understand why he used those words.

Hastings, a writer who has authored many books about the conflicts of the last century, has well and truly hit the nail on the head.

Perhaps the most horrifying number on the list is the first one - the list of overall casualties. It doesn't specify that this is a figure which includes both military and civilian, but this is an assumption. I'd be happily corrected if a better source is available.

There is a line listing an estimate of 587,000 South Vietnamese killed. This seems a little dodgy. In the first place, what is the definition of a "South Vietnamese"? There was a lot of movement in both directions throughout the conflict, and many born in the north moved south either to fight or flee, and the opposite phenomenon also applied.

Are we to assume that if the number of the total of "South" Vietnamese killed together with the number of South Vietnamese Military personnel killed is subtracted from the list of overall casualties, that the figure of 4,965,833 derived is the number of "North" Vietnamese killed? If anyone has a better source, please let me know.

Paul Ham has published his own set of figures.*

To an ex-Nasho like me, the figures about national Servicemen are interesting. Note that 804,000 20-year-olds registered, but only 18,000 actually served in Vietnam. Of these 18,000 it is reasonable to assume that many of them were POGOs (Personnel on Garrison Operations), so it is clear that the actual number of individuals who shared my experience of extended periods outside the wire patrolling and ambushing is very small.

Forgetting about the details of postings, the proportion of Nashos who went to Vietnam of those who were conscripted is actually 28%. Of those who registered, but either weren't balloted, or weren't posted to units that served in Vietnam, it drops to 2.2%.

Those figures provide a telling insight into the level of political cynicism that drove the National Service Act. If you're in government, you can probably afford to lose the support of 2.2% of the population and survive politically, and this worked until about 1970, when the public mood began to change. It's also important to remember that for quite a long period into the Australian commitment of conscripts, that these same conscripts were too young to vote and have a say into their immediate future.

Other figures of note include those relating to exposure to combat, in comparison to the experience of those who served in World War 2. The average infantry soldier in Vietnam had 314 days in combat (as defined by being outside the wire, I assume), compared with 40 days in WW2. That is 12% of what was the norm in Vietnam.

No wonder many Vietnam vets, when told they hadn't experienced a "real war" by veterans of earlier conflicts became more than a little upset. This happened to me in 1975. I was more fortunate that many in that 2.2% because I was posted as a POGO in June of my tour, but I still had around 100 days as a rifleman outside the wire.

The extremely efficient Dustoff process gets a mention, as it should. It saved many lives. Mind you, it was excellent when it was implemented, but I was present when for reasons lost in the mists of time it wasn't, and a fellow digger died as a consequence.

When you consider the amount of ordnance expended (10,000 artillery rounds daily - and the total tonnage of bombs dropped of 6,727,084) and the chemicals sprayed (19,000,000 gallons of defoliants) you begin to appreciate another dimension of the tragedy.

As an American veteran of the war said to me in July 2018 when I chatted with him at the wall in Washington - "What a f***ing waste". 

The wall lists the names of the 57,000 American military personnel who died.

Paul Ham's numbers -

“The personal cost of the war, in terms of personal grief and moral degradation, is immeasurable. In our helplessness, we surrender to statistics. 520 Australian soldiers dead and 3000 wounded. 58193 Americans dead and about 300000 wounded. 220356 South Vietnamese troops dead or missing in action, and 1.17 million wounded. 660000 Viet Cong and North Vietnamese troops dead, with the possibility that a third were civilians mistaken for enemy troops or deemed legitimate targets

* Paul Ham, Vietnam, the Australian War, Harper Collins, 2007, p 663

Bill Logan on our War Heritage.

This is the recording of a speech given by Bill Logan at the Australian War Memorial about our war heritage quite a few years ago.

It resonated for me when I remembered Long Tan. 

I have been there twice. The first time was when we set out on our second operation in country in April 1970 after forming up there prior to an overnight insertion into our AO.

The second time was when I travelled to Vietnam in 2006 with my two sons, and we visited the memorial with its simple stone cross.

Apart from that, Long Tan is significant for me because a bloke who was my friend at Downlands college in 1961-62, Francis Topp, was killed in the first few minutes of the battle.

You'll find it here - https://www.shrine.org.au/conserving-australias-overseas-war-heritage-professor-william-logan

Vietnam veterans may find it interesting.

Simply click on the pale green triangle.

A Talent for Disinformation

Image courtesy ec.europa.eu

This post is an exercise in fact-checking. I'm addressing the claims made (most recently by individuals such as Craig Kelly and Bob Katter) about Covid-19 vaccines and Ivermectin respectively.

These claims have been floated extensively on social media, although in the case of Kelly on Twitter only, as his Facebook account has been suspended because he was using it to peddle misinformation.

Let's start with Bob Katter. Media reports circulating say that he claimed in a speech on Sunday 21st November in Cairns that several of his staff had died or been made severely unwell as a result of Covid vaccine administration. They are based on audio in which he stated that there were "eight or nine people" in his office who "had died or had been badly affected" by the vaccine.

On questioning, his staff insisted that what Mr Katter had said was that there had been "eight or nine cases come into our office" and it was not people "in" his office - obviously a complete misunderstanding. One can assume that the electoral office would have been put out of commission if this had actually happened. I don't know how many people work there, but "eight or nine" sounds more than a little suss....

The actual audio of his speech indicates that he said "into" and not "in", but is sufficiently unclear to allow for both interpretations. Let's allow Bob the charitable interpretation that he meant the eight or nine cases were were constituents in his Federal electorate of Kennedy, which covers 567,377 square kilometres and had an enrolment of 107,644 in 2019.

Now let's assume Bob was indeed referring to Kennedy constituents and that his statement that eight or nine cases of adverse reactions had occurred is correct, (although he didn't furnish any proof), and look at figures for that electorate.

I couldn't find a breakdown of vaccination take-up for Kennedy, but if you average Cairns (85% first dose) and Charters Towers (73% first dose) you come up with a figure of 79%. The only other large population centre in the electorate is Mount Isa, which is pretty much a mine town. There was nothing on-line that I could find about vaccination rates in the Isa, but unless the culture has changed since I lived there in the nineties, you can bet your boots that both the mines and the various government agencies, both indigenous and otherwise, are vigorously pushing vaccinations.

That 79% of 107,644 gives you 85,038 vaccinated. So if Bob is referring to his constituents, that's an adverse reaction rate of 0.015835, or one adverse reaction in about a thousand, on the lower end of what is typical of reactions to most vaccines, as a visit to the Australian Immunisation Handbook website reveals. In the case of the Pertussis vaccination, administered routinely to Australian infants, the incidence of adverse local reactions is approximately 10%. That's about ten times the rate for Covid vaccines. Why isn't Bob Katter getting excited about Pertussis vaccination?

Image courtesy UN ilibrary

Then we look at Craig Kelly. He's made so many bizarre claims about Covid (relating both to treatments and vaccination) that it'd difficult to address them all, but how about this one -

"The vaccines are not sufficiently effective, and they're not sufficiently safe" which you can hear at about 1:30 seconds into an unsolicited video he sent me from a speech he made at a rally in Melbourne last weekend. (This is despite the fact that I have messaged him on a number of occasions requesting that he cease sending unsolicited texts to my phone and removing the number from the UAP database).

Let's look at the first of these two statements - the first one that the vaccines are not effective. (I'm not sure what "sufficiently" means in this context). There are any number of published studies around the issue of vaccine effectiveness, but this one is very recent, and very representative. It reports -

Findings

The highest VE estimates against new cases in >16 year-old individuals, for all outcomes, were reached at the 15-21 day period after the second dose, ranging between 97.7% for deaths and 98.6% for severe/critical disease. VE estimates of the 14-20 day period after the first dose ranged between 54.3% for infection and 77.3% for severe/critical disease.

Interpretation

The *BNT162 vaccine is highly effective in preventing new SARS-CoV-2 cases. Among >80 year-old individuals, high effectiveness develops more slowly. In breakthrough cases, vaccination reduces complications and death.

Kelly has been pushing Ivermectin as a treatment, and demonstrating outrage that it is not prescribed. (Being of a cynical mindset, I do wonder if that concern has anything to do with his patron buying up copious quantities of the drug - but I digress).

Here is just one summary from a recent trial of Ivermectin conducted in June and published in the International Journal of Infectious Diseases. There are many more studies which came to the same conclusion -

In a retrospective study, a single dose of 200 ug/kg of ivermectin was explored for its effect on patients with severe COVID-19. In congruence with this evidence, no improvement in microbiological and clinical outcomes was found in the ivermectin group compared with the control group.

Similarly, in another randomised, double-blind clinical trial, ivermectin (administered at a dose of 300 ug/kg of body weight per day for 5 days) compared with placebo did not significantly improve the time to resolution of symptoms among adults with mild COVID-19 infection. The evidence is of very low certainty for the effects of ivermectin in reducing mortality, need for hospitalisation, and reduction of time for clinical improvement in COVID-19 infection.

It's obvious, that when it comes to disinformation, both these politicians have talent.

It would be funny, if it wasn't dangerous. It kills people.

And Kelly's and Katter's claims - frankly bullshit...

*Pfizer

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Getting There...

(click to enlarge)

 Slowly but surely, I'm plugging away at my study.

The project is driven by two factors, the first is attempting to understand the motives and attitudes of national servicemen in regards to their service in Vietnam. That will comprise the research element once I complete all my course work. I'm in no hurry, enjoying the journey.

The second is the sheer excitement of discovery. There is so much material hidden away in archives, and so little time left to share the recollections of those of us who were personally involved. 

And, of course, there are myths to bust.

I was initially advised by the University to jump straight in at the deep end and begin to conduct the research. Apparently my memoir would have been sufficient to gain admission to a Ph D programme. This course of action would most probably have been a mistake, because my forty-year grasp of the conventions of academia is weak, and would have turned the enterprise into an exercise in frustration.

Entering at master's level means I can navigate my way through the minefield of referencing and the various academic conventions that, whilst they haven't really changed since I last studied in the late seventies, use very different tools from those I employed forty years ago. These tools are essentially digital, and whilst they facilitate research and save time, involve techniques that have to be learned. My fellow students (digital natives) don't have these issues. I have forty years of progress to catch up with.

The only downside has been the elimination of the face-to-face aspects of the course programme as a consequence of the pandemic. Covid has turned the physical presence of fellow students into a virtual experience. You will always learn as much from your peers as your supervisors, and that learning is a bit stilted via zoom.

Having said that, my supervisor is a veteran of Afghanistan, and has a very clear understanding of military culture, which is a distinct advantage.

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