Post-truth America

On January 20, 2017, Donald Trump was inaugurated as President of the United States. Leading up to the event, Trump boasted about the enormous crowds he was certain his inauguration would draw. This led many in the media to point out, after the inauguration, that it had in fact not drawn as large a crowd as either of Barack Obama's inaugurations.

Crowds from Barack Obama's first inauguration (left) and Donald Trump's inauguration (right). Emily Barnes—Getty Images; Lucas Jackson—Reuters

The next day, at White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer's first press briefing in his new job, he attacked the media and falsely claimed that Trump's inauguration had drawn the "largest audience to ever witness an inauguration – period – both in person and around the globe."

Later, high-ranking Trump staff member Kellyanne Conway defended Spicer's lie by claiming that Spicer was merely giving "alternative facts," and I feel like this infamous statement was a preview of so much that has happened in the five-plus years since. I feel like we are living in a country where more and more, everyone has their own alternative facts and it's getting increasingly difficult to bridge the divides they create.

I wrote a post last year in which I outlined the reasons that I characterize the modern Republican Party as akin to a cult. The reasons I focused on were two very prominent false beliefs around which the Republican Party had come to organize itself - one, that COVID vaccines are bad, and two, that Trump won the 2020 election. The first of those false beliefs has led to hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths. The second of those false beliefs led to a violent mob assault on the US Capitol and continues to threaten to tear apart our democracy.

These are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to alternative facts popular on the right. The epidemic of mass shootings and gun violence in this country gets worse and worse and nothing gets done because one of our two major political parties has concluded against all evidence that the solution is more "good guys with guns." Abortion bans are now going into effect in many states, the proponents of which ignore many inconvenient facts such as (to name just one) that ectopic pregnancies are never viable and the only safe course of action is abortion. Laws targeting LGBT people or targeting the accurate teaching of the role of racism in American history continue to be pushed forward based on total fantasies about non-existent harm to children, and instead cause very real harm to ordinary people who are just trying to live their lives.

I recently attended a birthday party for a relative and saw a number of other relatives who I hadn't seen in quite some time. I was reminded of how nice and enjoyable it can be to just spend time with people in person. But also of how there are certain topics that you just can't talk about because you're inhabiting two different worlds. Avoid those topics, and it's a perfectly lovely day with perfectly lovely people. Get into those topics, and you'll just get a headache as the alternative facts fly.

I've written a lot about the falsehoods that are popular on the American right. I'm also becoming more and more aware that different sets of alternative facts are becoming increasingly popular among many on the left. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying the two are equivalent to each other - the American right is waging an active campaign to end democracy based on lies, and no one in a position of real power or influence on the left is doing the same. Nonetheless, it's all bad and I feel it's all contributing to the fracturing of society.

With the recent disastrous rulings by the Supreme Court, a lot of people have pointed out that these things wouldn't be happening if Hillary Clinton had won the 2016 election, as a way of highlighting the importance of voting. Other people, many of whom in 2016 were diminishing the importance of voting for the Democratic nominee, have gotten angry at these statements.

Look, I get their frustration at the many failures of the Democratic Party, but that doesn't make it less true that the Supreme Court would not be making these rulings if not for Donald Trump, rather than Hillary Clinton, getting to appoint three new justices. That's a fact. The idea that voting doesn't matter is an alternative fact.

(I think we should take a "yes, and" approach in discussions of who is to blame for the current fiasco instead of a "no, but" approach. So if someone says that more people should have voted for Hillary, you can respond, "This is true, and at the same time, the Democratic Party should have done x, y, and z," instead of saying, "No, the Democratic Party should have done x, y, and z, so it's their fault, not people who didn't vote." There are so many things that could have been done differently to avert this nightmare, and I'm not pinning all the blame on not enough people turning out to vote for Hillary Clinton, just using that as an example.)

One issue where I'm becoming increasingly aware of alternative facts becoming popular in some circles on the left is COVID. Obviously, as I've written about before, COVID misinformation on the right has taken a horrible toll. I don't want to minimize that at all. But I also see a lot of people on the side who say we should "follow the science" who... aren't following the science.

For a couple of specific examples, here are things I've seen people say on Twitter recently that were racking up huge numbers of likes and that I think represent pretty common sentiments among certain groups of people. Yes, I'm sure these views are over-represented on Twitter compared to society as a whole, but I'm also pretty sure there are a lot of people out there who think similarly.

One was a person posting the weekly case averages for the state of Virginia at this time in 2020 (608 cases/week), 2021 (200 cases/week), and 2022 (2,695 cases/week). "The biggest changes? No more mask requirements and a governor who refuses to acknowledge this multi-organ damaging virus is an issue," they wrote.

No. The biggest change, or at least by far the most important, is that the version of COVID circulating today spreads much more easily and is much more immune evasive than the versions circulating in 2020 and 2021. To an absolutely ridiculous extent. These numbers say literally nothing about the effectiveness of mask requirements or guidance from the government. Yet many people out there very confidently hold the incorrect belief that the much higher case numbers now vs. one year ago are because of mask mandates going away.

My other example is someone who said this:

Every time I tell a friend their in-person social activities prolong the pandemic & prolong my isolation, 9 times out of 10 they say, "I need SOMETHING to give me release/a break."

And I say, "So do I, but your actions mean it'll be longer until I can."

Many of them are still friends because we have conversations about why their actions are ableist & they change their behavior.

The ones who don't are no longer friends.

The person who said this has some sort of condition (I'm not sure what it is) that puts them at higher risk from COVID. I have a huge amount of sympathy for people like this. I hate that this is the new reality of the world. It has to be unbearably awful to feel that you have to isolate yourself for an unknown duration because even in spite of being vaccinated, your level of vulnerability to a COVID infection is still too high to risk getting infected. (I think there are some people who are correct in feeling this way and some people who are overestimating their risk, but I don't know which category this person falls into and I'm not criticizing their personal risk assessment.)

The harsh reality, though, is that the idea that people engaging in in-person social activities are "prolonging the pandemic" is not an idea grounded in evidence.

Imagine that somehow we could make everyone stop their in-person social activities for some amount of time. (We can't, without being a totalitarian state, but imagine we could.) The number of cases would go down, but the virus wouldn't be eradicated because it's too widespread (even in many non-human animals!) and a functional society requires some contact between people and other people. Also, lots of bad side effects would happen - people's mental health would suffer; businesses like restaurants and music venues would have to close, etc. Eventually, after whatever amount of time, social activities would resume... and the case numbers would go right back up. Stopping in-person social activities would have accomplished nothing toward the goal of ending the pandemic.

To be fair, I said similar things about people "prolonging the pandemic" in 2020 and early 2021, and I can see now that I was wrong. I now think that once the virus started to spread globally, it was essentially inevitable that we would eventually reach a situation like our current one. But in my past self's defense, back then, we didn't yet know that the virus would evolve to a form where reaching herd immunity would be impossible even with very good vaccines. Also, in 2020 there was a very clear goal - by limiting in-person social activities to reduce the number of people infected until vaccines were available, we could clearly save a lot of lives. And it was a goal with an end point. Now there's no clear goal and no end point.

I want to also say that there is a lot of very justified frustration about people pretending the pandemic is over and the government not doing more about it! There are a lot of things we should still be doing - namely, pouring huge amounts of funding into improving indoor air quality and into research on better vaccines, as well as mandating paid sick leave, and better accommodations such as remote options for vulnerable people. All of these would have huge benefits both in the near term and for the foreseeable future. But I don't think there's anything that anyone could realistically do right now that would change the reality of a virus still running rampant.

The people who think there is seem to also be ignoring that, with the much more easily transmissible and immune evasive omicron variants, case numbers continue to surge even in countries that had largely suppressed the virus through the pandemic's first year-plus. This is no longer a situation where America is screwing up and we can look to a lot of other countries that are doing a lot better. We can just all be grateful that the surges in case numbers are becoming decoupled from surges in deaths.

Why is this such a big problem? These alternative COVID facts on the left aren't directly causing a bunch of people to die the way the alternative COVID facts on the right have. So what's the harm?

Well, let's look at what the second person I quoted said. "Many of them are still friends because we have conversations... & they change their behavior. The ones who don't are no longer friends."

So what we have, really, is someone telling their friends to do something based on ideas that aren't well supported by evidence. And then cutting people out of their lives who don't do that. They certainly have a right to make that decision, yes. But it's pretty bad, I think, especially if it's happening on a large scale! I think people everywhere are building up a huge amount of resentment toward other people because they don't subscribe to the same alternative facts. And it's all contributing to the fracturing of society.

Specifically, regarding alternative facts on the left, I think that with the growing threat of fascism from the right, anything that leads to a fracturing of the different groups of people who should be united to oppose fascism is a big problem.

I realize as I write this that I might sound like I think I'm above all the other people with their alternative facts and I'm some ultimate arbiter of truth. I'm not. I'm sure there are things I believe that aren't true. I just try to be really careful about believing too strongly in things that aren't really well supported by evidence.

So a big question about all of this is, are things really different now from how they've been at various other times in human history? I mean, people everywhere have always believed things that aren't true.

I'm not sure of the answer to this question. But one thing I think might make this moment actually different is the Internet. In the pre-Internet days, everyone everywhere believed some things that weren't true, but they just had their own untrue beliefs, or the untrue beliefs shared by relatively small (at a societal or global level) groups. They didn't have the ability to instantly connect with lots of other people around the world who have similar untrue beliefs, leading to increasing reinforcement of those untrue beliefs. During the flu pandemic of a century ago, someone could tell their friends an alternative fact about the flu. But they couldn't send that alternative fact out into the world and instantly be rewarded with hundreds of little hearts and the resulting little dopamine hits.

People have always to some degree self-segregated themselves based on beliefs they hold. But it seems like the extent to which that is happening today, to which people are organizing their whole lives around certain sets of alternative facts and then organizing themselves into social groupings based on belief in those alternative facts, is unusual. Perhaps even unprecedented.

It feels like we've entered a post-truth America, a place and time where the truth largely just doesn't matter. Where different groups of people all live in their own alternate realities. From my perspective, it seems like the alternate reality that is shared by the most people, and that is the most threatening to society, is that inhabited by many on the right. And that it's imperative that everyone else recognize that threat and work to stop it, but instead different groups on the left and center are drifting off into their own alternate realities. But maybe that's just what it looks like from my perspective.

Anyway, it's all pretty scary!

I don't know what the answer is. I guess I'll keep trying to do my own little part to encourage people to look at the evidence on things and not just accept at face value whatever so-called facts are popular in their in-group. As well as to encourage people to regard other human beings and their life situations with empathy and decency. It often seems futile, but I'll try.

I paid 25 cents to light a little white candle

For the last few months, I've felt like I've been seeing the number 424 unusually often. The number 424, or the time 4:24, or the date 4/24, or a 4 and a 24 next to each other. Some of you reading this already know why that number would have meaning to me. For anyone reading who doesn't know, it's because my wife Cara passed away on 4/24 - April 24, 2015. I was already feeling like I was seeing this combination of digits with uncanny frequency prior to the events I'll describe in this post. That's important background for the events I'll describe.

This year, on April 24, I traveled to Detroit to see a concert by one of my all time favorite bands, Typhoon. They're a band whose music, with lyrics grappling with mortality, was my own personal soundtrack to Cara's battle with lung cancer, so the date of the show was eerily fitting. It was even more weird to consider that the most recent previous Typhoon concert I attended had taken place on June 12, 2018 - that is, my and Cara's wedding anniversary. Significant concerts taking place on significant dates - a long running theme of my life and my blog!

It was really great to see Typhoon again for the first time in years. The band's lead singer Kyle Morton is an amazing person who I've befriended through conversations at previous Typhoon shows; unfortunately, I did not get a chance to catch up with him this time due to the band's very understandable COVID precautions. During the show he talked about how weird it was to be back out on the road playing in front of people but also how important it was, how there's such a big essential part of life that was missing when we couldn't have those in person gatherings. He also thanked people for wearing masks during the show - he has had some very serious health issues and is a kidney transplant recipient, so trying to avoid COVID is more important for him than for most people in our age bracket.

The show, along with visiting some very close friends in Ann Arbor earlier the same day, was a great way to mark an April 24. It was also not the first time I saw an important concert on April 24.

On April 24, 2018, I saw the Decemberists at Cleveland's Agora. They were a band Cara and I both loved and whose music had had some significance to our relationship. One of the highlights of that show was the performance of "Grace Cathedral Hill," a beautiful song from the Decemberists' debut album Castaways and Cutouts. I remember muttering "wow" upon my recognition that they were playing the song, because I was so happily surprised.

This has all been a prelude to what happened to me last week. I traveled to San Francisco last Wednesday to attend a meeting on Thursday and Friday where I'd discuss my research into asthma with other asthma researchers. That was what was supposed to happen, anyway. But then, on Wednesday, I realized I was feeling sick, with a sore throat and other symptoms of a respiratory infection. I took a COVID test and it was negative. On Thursday I took another COVID test and it was again negative. But I was still feeling sick. Apparently I'd come down with a cold. My symptoms had definitely made me wonder if I had COVID, even though I'm triple vaccinated and had an omicron infection at Christmas. It wouldn't be impossible. Despite apparently not having COVID this time, I still didn't want to expose all the other people at the meeting to my illness, especially considering that if they caught it, not only would they get sick, but they would have the added stress of wondering if they had COVID.

So I told the conference organizers what was going on, and then ended up with a bunch of time to kill in San Francisco, while feeling sick enough to not want to attend a meeting but not sick enough to be utterly incapacitated. I ate a lot of takeout meals. I watched a lot of playoff basketball on TV. I wandered around a lot on Wednesday, at first not realizing quite how sick I was feeling. I wore a KN95 mask whenever I was in an indoor space and tried to keep close contact with other people to a minimum. Thursday I mostly spent relaxing at my hotel, hoping I'd feel no longer sick by Friday morning, but this didn't happen. On Friday I again wandered around a lot, since at that point I was clearly missing all of the meeting and there was nothing else to do. The weather, thankfully, was beautiful the whole time I was there.

It was very disappointing to have traveled out there for the meeting and not get to participate in it, but on Friday I really managed to take advantage of my free time, and by the end of the day I came away from it thinking, oddly, that perhaps my illness had been... fortuitous?

I noticed that the famous "Painted Ladies" houses that are across the street from Alamo Square Park, as seen in the opening credits of Full House, were a couple miles' walk from my hotel, so I went there, and it was really nice just hanging out in that park for a while and taking in the sights and sounds and sun.

Heading back, I picked up some food, ate it in the park across from city hall, and then was looking at my phone trying to see if there was anything else interesting that wouldn't be a huge amount of extra walking, and I saw this:

Oh! Grace Cathedral, like in the Decemberists song! Well, I pretty much have to go, was my thought process, and then I scrolled through the music on my iPod, selected Castaways and Cutouts, hit play, and set out toward the cathedral.

I've always had a thing for cathedrals. The National Cathedral in Washington, D.C. is one of my favorite buildings anywhere. Grace Cathedral is another really nice one.

There's a line in the song that goes, "I paid 25 cents to light a little white candle," and because I'm a huge freaking nerd I of course decided, I should pay 25 cents to light a little white candle while in Grace Cathedral. (This was in addition to a $12 admission fee for visitors that I did not realize I'd have to pay until I was inside, but I decided, why not.) I first did some wandering around the inside of the cathedral, admiring the beautiful architecture and artwork and stained glass.

The whole time I was there, I was thinking of the song and of that Decemberists show that had taken place on 4/24. Eventually I decided I was ready to go and pay 25 cents to light a little white candle. I headed over toward a candle lighting station. While doing so I glanced at my watch.

The time was 4:24.

Long time readers of my blog might remember that I have a thing for noticing and pointing out weird coincidences. By now it's happened so much that things I would have once viewed as astounding coincidences, like the Typhoon show being on 4/24, I now kind of shrug my shoulders and laugh about. But this, especially in light of my already feeling like I was seeing those digits strangely often - this was a special one.

So I went, and I put a quarter in a donation box, and I lit a little white candle.

And then I stood there for a minute and talked to Cara. It's not something I do often, at least not in a direct way. But in this moment it felt like I was supposed to. I'm glad that I did.

After leaving the cathedral, I resumed my wandering, and resumed listening to the Decemberists on my iPod. The song "Grace Cathedral Hill" had not yet come up prior to my arrival at the cathedral but came on shortly after my departure. I stopped walking while listening to the song and just admired this view:

It gave me a very peaceful feeling, something I haven't had a whole lot of recently.

That night I caught a red eye flight from San Francisco to Washington DC before connecting back to Cleveland. I managed to sleep for most of the flight. Upon landing in DC, I was dismayed to receive a text message that my flight to Cleveland was cancelled and I'd have to select another flight. But this turned out to not be a problem because the flight had been replaced by another flight at the identical time. So the cancellation turned out to have no effect on my day, except for one thing, which is that I was issued a new boarding pass with an interesting combination of numbers on it:

Then, after I arrived in Cleveland, got to my car, and started driving home, I laughed when I noticed that the first gas station sign I saw showed a price of, you guessed it, $4.24.

Signs from Cara? Who knows, but it's nice to think that maybe they could be.

I listen to a lot of music from Canada (and other exciting observations about my music listening history)

If you know me well you know that I like numbers and graphs. You may have seen me post a lot of graphs and interpretation that I made about COVID. Here are some numbers and graphs about a more fun topic.

Every year at the beginning of December I see lots of people post their "Spotify Wrapped" on social media. It's always interesting to me to see what music other people listened to the most in the year. But for me personally, I want more than that. So this is kind of like a much nerdier and more detailed version of a Spotify Wrapped. And not just for a year, but for most of my adult life.

Since 2005, I've used the website last.fm to keep track of all the music I listen to (on a computer or iPod, at least; it can also track music you listen to on streaming services on your phone but I very rarely stream music on my phone). The popularity of Spotify Wrapped makes it clear that a lot of people enjoy being able to see stats about the music they listen to, so I recommend the website if you want more of that! If you go to my profile and scroll down, you can see my top eight artists (all time) displayed, kind of like a Spotify Wrapped:

Definitely a big lead for Okkervil River in first place. If you click around you can see breakdowns by artist, by song, by album, over different periods of time. But because I'm such a data nerd, that wasn't enough for me. Luckily, a kind person made a website that exports your entire listening history as a CSV file you can download. So after doing this, I used the programming language R (running under RStudio) to play around with the data.

Here are some of the results I found interesting. Will anyone else find them interesting? Maybe? But lots of people post their Spotify Wrapped every year, so I'm going to post this.

Top artists by year

Here's a scatter plot of my top five artists for each year by year and number of plays. There's a lot of information here so apologies for the small text. Click to open and zoom in if you care to.

Observations:

-For 2005 the data only cover the last five months of the year, hence the second through fifth place artists having low numbers. Still, I listened to songs by Ozma over 1400 times. I was super obsessed with Ozma when I started using last.fm.

-Okkervil River has by far the most appearances in my yearly top five with ten. Next is Typhoon with six. 

-The top seven yearly totals are all either Ozma, Okkervil River, or Woodpigeon.

-The highest yearly totals are all in the earlier years. In more recent years my music listening has become more spread out over a larger number of artists.

-The Weather Station in 2021 recorded my highest yearly total for one artist in nearly ten years.

Top single months for artists

These are the top fifteen totals recorded by artists for single months:

Woodpigeon comes in with three of the top five. Like Ozma, I was also super obsessed with Woodpigeon for a time. I like the story of how I discovered Woodpigeon. When Cara and I saw A Northern Chorus's farewell show in Hamilton, Ontario, in 2008, the next day we went to a music store there and each picked out one used CD to buy (knowing nothing about the music except for what we could see in the artwork and liner notes; it was a thing we often enjoyed doing). Woodpigeon's Songbook was Cara's pick. If you're an indie pop fan, I highly recommend checking out that album and even more so their subsequent album Treasury Library Canada. Sadly, Woodpigeon is the only artist in my top twenty overall artists that I've never seen live.

The way that my music has become more spread out over a larger number of artists and less concentrated on single artists is also evident here as the National's October 2019 tally is the only one on this list more recent than 2013.

Looking at this list, it's fun to think back on what was happening in my life and why I was listening to those particular bands so much in those years and months. Which is a good segue into...

I listen to an awful lot of Sufjan Stevens in December

Sufjan Stevens came in fourth on the above list with his December 2012 tally. That was the month after the release of his second five-disc box set of Christmas music. Yes, he has released ten discs' worth of Christmas music (a mix of traditional and original songs). And I love all of it. To me, Sufjan Stevens' music basically is the Christmas season. December 2012 was also when Cara and I saw Sufjan's spectacular Christmas show at the Beachland Ballroom. Definitely one of the best shows I've ever attended. So December 2012 stands out the most, but every single December, I'm putting all that Sufjan Christmas music in heavy rotation. And so if you take each of my top nine artists overall and sum up how much I've listened to them by month of the year for the entire 2005-2021 period, you get this:

There's one month for one artist that is a really huge outlier here! Everything else is fairly random, although I enjoy the nice oscillatory pattern on the Okkervil River graph.

Now let's move on to...

My music listening habits by geography (or, I listen to a lot of music from Canada)

I took every artist for whom I've recorded at least 100 total plays and manually annotated their nations of origin (as well as state or province for American and Canadian bands). First, here's a graph showing all the nations that appeared in my history, with the total number of listens for each:

The USA has the most by far, which is obviously not surprising. But the USA also has a much larger population than any of the other countries on here. What happens if we adjust the numbers to make them a ratio of the number of plays to the national population? Then we get this:

Canada surges into the lead! Interestingly, Iceland is second. Iceland's population of 366,000 is slightly smaller than the city proper population of Cleveland, Ohio. The USA is now third. I've noticed for quite a while that there's a disproportionate amount of music that I listen to from Canada considering how much smaller a population it has than the US. There's just something about those Canadians, man.

And here's a similar analysis but in list form for the top states and provinces of my music listening history. First ranked by raw number of plays:

No surprise that California comes in first considering its huge population and sizeable music scene, but it just barely edges out Ontario. Now to reorder the list by the population-adjusted numbers:

I think the fact that the top eight states and provinces on this list consist of four Canadian provinces along with the states of Oregon, Washington, Maine, and Ohio is easily the most "on brand" thing for me in this post.

And last, what I consider by far the most interesting result from the analysis I did:

Trends in my music listening by vocalist gender

Similar to the geographical annotation, I also manually annotated by lead vocals: male, female, both, or none (none meaning music without vocals or with extremely minimal vocals). I didn't really have strictly defined criteria for the categorization but just went with what felt right, so Arcade Fire counted as "male" because Win Butler does lead on a large majority of the songs with just the occasional Régine Chassagne song, whereas the New Pornographers counted as "both" because even though most of the songs do have male lead vocals, there are a substantial number of songs throughout their catalog with Neko Case or occasionally another female vocalist taking lead.

I then excluded the "both" and "none" artists (a small fraction of the total), calculated the fraction of what remained that fell under "male" vs. "female" for each year, and got this graph:

It's just such a striking trend! When I first started using last.fm in 2005, I listened to almost no music with female lead vocals. This had been true for as long as I listened to mostly music of my own choosing, going back to adolescence. 2005 was when I first started to really expand my taste in music. And going forward, there was a steady increase in how much music with female lead vocals I listened to. Finally, in 2020 and 2021, I reached very close to a 50/50 balance. It's just such an interesting trend to me. If you're a stats nerd, you might appreciate that a linear regression of fraction (either female or male) against year has a whopping 0.86 R-squared value (p = 5.1 x 10^-8).

I think it says something about how boys are socialized to avoid "girly" things. I don't remember ever having an active dislike for music with female vocals. But I still tended not to choose to listen to it. Then, as an adult, as I explored more and more music, and started to just listen to whatever I enjoyed listening to, this eventually led to a near perfect balance of vocals by gender. Funny how that worked out.

So that includes my super nerdy analysis of my music listening history. I hope someone else found it entertaining, but at the very least I did! It's a more cheery topic for graphs than how many people have died from COVID, so at least there's that.

"3895 people died of COVID in this country yesterday" (why that's misleading, what the numbers really mean, and implications for omicron's severity)

I want to say up front, because if I didn't I think this could be easily misconstrued, that my purpose here is not to question the seriousness of what's been happening with the COVID pandemic. It's a horrific situation. And I'm also not questioning whether all those deaths were really caused by COVID. There's no reason to doubt that they were.

Also, I'm not trying to call out people who make this error, because I find it very understandable why people who haven't directly engaged with the data might make this mistake.

I also want to say up front that the most important thing to know about COVID is that everyone who's eligible should get vaccinated and boosted. People who are unvaccinated have a roughly 68x chance of dying from COVID as people who are vaccinated and boosted according to the latest numbers. We are incredibly lucky to be able to receive, for free, such an effective intervention against a deadly disease.

Anyway, I just want to talk about a thing that I see all the time that isn't accurate and that bugs me, and try to educate people a little. Because it's important to me to try to understand what's going on in the world, and I like trying to share that knowledge.

I guess I've always been someone who is a stickler for accuracy. I have a strong tendency to "well, actually" people. When I see someone make a blatant error, it's like something is triggered in my brain and I have a strong urge to correct the error. Literally, when I was in second grade I frequently corrected my teacher's spelling mistakes in front of the class. So this tendency has been around for a long time!

I very often see people on social media say "[x number of] people died yesterday from COVID" to complain about how other people aren't taking the pandemic seriously enough. (And yes, certainly, people not taking the pandemic seriously enough has been a problem since the very beginning of the pandemic.) The most recent example being "3895 people died of COVID yesterday," talking about the numbers (for the United States) that have come out in the past day as I write this post.

It is not accurate to say 3895 people died of COVID yesterday. In fact, it's impossible to say how many people died of COVID yesterday, because the vast majority of those deaths have not yet been officially recorded as COVID deaths.

Here's a graph, from the New York Times, showing where this number came from.

So, a couple things to immediately notice. One is that it's a graph of "new reported deaths by day," meaning that the deaths were reported on that day, which says nothing about when the deaths occurred. (I wrote a post in June 2020 - yeah, this has really been going on for almost two years, sigh - with a lengthy explainer on this very topic. It's been very frustrating to me seeing people continuing to make this mistake over and over for almost two years, but again, I don't really blame people who haven't directly engaged with the data for not understanding this.) The second thing is that the daily average for the last week is 2466, meaning that 3895 is a big outlier. If you're in a period of time where about 2500 people are dying each day from a disease, it's extraordinarily unlikely that suddenly nearly 4000 would die in one day. That's just not how these things work. And I notice the "[x number of] people died yesterday of COVID" trope usually comes up when there's a big outlier like this.

Why is there such a big outlier? It's because sometimes a big backlog of previously unreported deaths will be cleared in a single day.

But when did the deaths actually occur?

Well, right now I find this particularly interesting, because it relates to the issue of how big of a toll the omicron wave will end up taking.

Lately, when I see this trope about so and so many people died of COVID yesterday, I sometimes see someone add something like, "at least they were mild deaths." A snarky reference to the news stories saying the omicron variant is milder than previous forms of COVID.

The implication here is that 3895 people died yesterday of COVID, and because we're in the omicron wave those 3895 people died from omicron, and therefore omicron can't be that mild. But did those people really die from omicron?

Let's try to figure that out.

I took a look at the data reported by the state of Ohio and identified the dates of death for all the COVID deaths that Ohio reported in the one week period from January 20 to January 26, 2022. Here's a graph of those deaths showing the number that occurred on each day (there's also a handful that occurred on earlier dates that I left off the graph):

What this tells us is that more than half of the deaths that Ohio reported in the last week occurred on or before January 3; in other words, most of the deaths occurred several weeks ago. (Certainly not "yesterday.")

Incidentally, when I analyzed this for that post in June 2020, the median delay from date of death to report date was 5 days, so the delay has become much longer. I can't say what the typical delay is in other states. I'm sure that substantial delays are quite common, but as substantial as those in Ohio? I don't know. Perhaps yes in some states and no in some others.

That graph shows us when the recently reported deaths occurred. The next piece of the puzzle is, when did those people get COVID?

It's been reported that the median duration from symptom onset date to date of death, for people who get COVID and then die from it, is roughly 17 days. (I don't know if it's exactly the same for the delta and/or omicron variants, but I expect it's at least fairly similar.) So for a quick and dirty estimate of the case onset dates (which, it should also be noted, would be a few days after the infection dates), let's send everything back 17 days:

More than half of the deaths reported by Ohio in the last week would be people whose cases started on or before December 17. At that point in time, what was the prevalence of the omicron variant?

It turns out, for the week ending December 18, about 62% of the cases in the US were still the delta variant, and about 38% were the omicron variant (from the CDC's variant tracker):

I will note that, at that point in time, omicron had already reached a higher prevalence in Northeast Ohio, where I live. Still, delta hadn't been wiped out, and the rest of the state probably had numbers comparable to the country as a whole.

So we have several pieces of data from which we can extrapolate.

1. About half of the COVID deaths reported in Ohio in the last week were likely the result of cases that began in mid-December or sooner.

2. In mid-December, the majority of cases were still delta, not omicron.

3. Delta has a higher infection fatality rate than omicron. There is now an abundant amount of evidence showing this, although we don't know exactly how much higher, but it's probably at least several times higher.

Taken together, this implies that the majority, and perhaps even a large majority, of COVID deaths reported in Ohio in the last week were caused by the delta variant, not the omicron variant. This might also be true for the country as a whole, but I'm not sure because I don't have an easy way to see deaths by date of death for all the other states.

We've seen that a lot of other countries have had massive surges of cases from omicron without anywhere near as dramatic of increases in deaths as what we're seeing in the US now. This has been attributed to the poor vaccination rate in the US. And this is indeed true, but an important point that is being missed when interpreting the current death numbers is the poor vaccination rate in the US also means that the omicron wave is happening on top of an already large baseline of delta cases. Therefore, it's hard to say right now how much of the latest wave of deaths is the direct result of omicron.

Really, to be able to tell what the impact of the omicron wave is on the US's death rates, we'll have to wait at least a few more weeks. That's not the most satisfying answer, but it's the most honest answer. Additionally, teasing out the impact of omicron vs. delta on death numbers is likely going to require a more rigorous level of analysis than what is being done by most people who are commenting on COVID death numbers.

We are actually incredibly lucky that omicron does cause considerably less severe disease and death per case than all previous versions of COVID. It's horrific to contemplate how things might look right now if that weren't the case.

I hope this was informative. My purpose here was simply to try to educate people. I'm not trying to tell anyone what to do with this information. At this point, almost two years in and with no real way to know what's going to happen in the future, I hesitate to try to tell anyone what they should do in regard to COVID matters. With one definite exception, which is that everyone who's eligible should get vaccinated and boosted, and that we collectively have to increase our efforts to vaccinate people both in this country and around the world. I don't know how many people are going to end up dying from omicron vs. delta, but it's going to be a lot either way, and it continues to be true that the vast majority of those deaths could have been prevented by vaccination.