Statistics with Sasa

It's Thanksgiving, also known as DJ Khaled's birthday , and COVID-19 is back with a vengeance. We've all been cautioned by the CDC to celebrate a socially distanced holidays this year, and the data shows most of us are ignoring them so far.  I'm not here to lecture anyone about that -- but also you're all terrible people.  I'm here to talk about what's different about this so-called "Third Wave", which has been going on since October. Specifically, there has been a stark Urban-Rural Divide , which has been wildly easy to see in the data. Rural areas, which managed to avoid a lot of the initial damage of COVID, are getting especially hammered now. And the data indicate they may not have the resources to deal with it.  Urban-Rural Divide Measuring COVID One of the best ways to measure the ever-evolving conditions of COVID is daily new cases. This metric is unstable, so researchers typically take a moving average   over a 5-7 day period instead. Daily...

The president has COVID . A number of his close confidants, including Kellyanne Conway and Chris Christie , have COVID diagnoses of their own. It appears that Supreme Court Nominee Amy Coney Barrett's Rose Garden Nomination Ceremony  was a "superspreader" event that spread COVID among all levels of government -- from the Presidency to the Senate.  There were some key details to the ceremony: it was largely mask-less , it ignored social distancing protocols  and it was a GOP event (I'll get into that later). Descriptions of the event paint a picture of an administration unconcerned with traditional COVID precautions. There were few face masks present and people were seated closely together. Instead, the White House relied on rapid COVID tests, which deliver results in 15 minutes, to screen guests for the Coronavirus prior to entering the Rose Garden.  However, frustratingly, the Trump Administration completely misused these tests -- putting everyone who attended the e...

COVID has been tough for all of us. It's been 171 days since the White House declared coronavirus a National Emergency, and life hasn't been the same since. As with any major life change, there are bound to be mental health effects for a lot of us. The CDC even has an entire page  on taking care of your mental health during the pandemic. In fact,  the pandemic has indeed coincided with a mental health crisis,  and mental health is arguably in the public eye more than ever.    In the spirit of this, I thought I would do an article on mental health in America. I use a pre-pandemic survey of roughly 500,000 Americans called the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) collected in 2018-19. Importantly, I don't measure mental health by rate of psychiatric disorders (depression, anxiety, etc.) in a population. Rather, I measure well-being based on the answer to the survey question:    " Now thinking about your mental health, which includes stress...

Race has a long and complex history in the United States, perhaps first dating back to 1619 when some "20 and odd" Africans were first brought to the colony of Jamestown.  Since then our rich culture of immigration (some of it, unfortunately forced ) has resulted in a society where 40% of us can be considered "minorities." In fact, less than half of children under 15 are white , indicating a potential shift to a majority-minority society in the future. It goes without saying that minorities have made and continue to make enormous contributions to American society. Despite this, we as a country have a checkered past of treating them. From slavery to internment camps, from the transcontinental railroad to Jim Crow laws, the list really goes on. Given that some of these transgressions, like the Jim Crow laws, occurred just a generation ago, it is not hard to imagine a world where residual sentiments behind them still linger. This brings me to current events. Fro...

Climate change has far reaching impacts beyond the gradual warming of the earth. The ocean is becoming more acidic , coral reefs are dying , and species are going extinct at alarming rates. In particular, extreme weather events appear to be becoming more common in recent years. Evidence suggests that severe floods and droughts have increased  in certain regions of the United States. Anecdotally, just in the past few years, we've seen historic floods in Houston, the worst natural disaster in recorded history to hit Puerto Rico (Hurricane Maria), and devastating wildfires in Australia, just to name a few. I'm going to take a closer look and see if we can empirically show that flooding has gotten worse in frequency and magnitude in the Southern U.S. Interestingly, I found little scientific research on the subject. So basically. You heard it here first. Flooding Down South The Model I obtained data from the United States Geological Survey (USGS) for the stream/river networ...

It's been some 45 days since the White House declared COVID-19 a National Emergency and the bulk of us became largely confined to our homes. As people begin to agitate for the end of the quarantine and a number of states begin to open up, I thought I'd offer up a loose collection of data-driven thoughts on the quarantine we've all been experiencing. These insights are based on mobility data measured as Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT). While this is an imperfect metric, we can use the reduction in VMT since before the pandemic as a rough proxy of how effectively we have been adhering to the quarantine. The Quarantine Was Effective, but Effectiveness Varied by State The first observation is that the quarantine was effective, which is probably obvious from a quick glance outside. Average mobility by county fell by approximately 65% when compared to January (the troughs you see are weekends). Some states adhered to the quarantine more seriously than others ...