Contact tracing explained
Very useful video from math vlogger 3Blue1Brown: CNET also has an explainer as well.
Category: Public Health
More evidence that social distancing works
Kapoor et al. (2020) uses rainfall on last weekend before the stay-at-home order as an instrument for social distancing. variables. They find that social distancing works and has persistent effects, especially early on: We test whether earlier social distancing affects the progression of a local COVID-19 outbreak. We exploit county-level rainfall on the last weekend…
Are touchscreens worse than cell phones for road safety?
The answer is ‘yes’ based on recent research from Neale Kinnear as reviewed in The Economist. The key finding was that: …reaction times…when the touchscreen was being employed were more than 50% longer than standard for some tasks. This was worse than the 46% impairment found in a previous simulator study looking at the effects…
COVID-19 update: We are not at the flat of the curve
For those interested in a global view, the World Health Organization (WHO) Situation Reports are required daily reading. Key notes from the March 19, 2020 situation report: Seven new countries/territories/areas (African Region [3], Eastern Mediterranean Region [1], European Region [1], and Region of the Americas [2]) have reported cases of COVID-19. • The number of…
What evidence exists that a child’s health is a form of human capital?
Janet Currie has a nice review article (Currie 2020) in Health Economics covering this topic. She summarizes the literature as follows: In the past 20 years, there has been an explosion of research demonstrating that child health is an important form of human capital. Healthier children live longer and healthier lives, get more education, and…
COVID-19 Math
Interesting video on exponential growth, logistic curves, contagious disease and COVID-19 from the always enlightening 3Blue1Brown.
Does smoking make you dumb?
Perhaps the answer is ‘yes’. A paper by Gao et al. (2020) attempts to answer that question. We identify a positive causal effect of healthy working environments on corporate innovation, using the staggered passage of U.S. state-level laws that ban smoking in workplaces. We find a significant increase in patents and patent citations for firms…
COVID-19 in context
COVID-19 has caught the headlines, and for good reason. According to the WHO, there have been 109,577 confirmed cases (3993 new on 9 Mar 2020) and 3809 deaths (225 new as of 9 Mar 2020) The stock market has plunged. Sporting events have been halted all over Italy. And the rise of cases has been…
Does drug decriminalization work? The Portugal case study
In 2001, Portugal decriminalized drugs. What does that mean? How did it health outcomes, incarcerations, drug trafficking and other outcomes? A post by Liam Bendicksen at Incidental Economist reviews the literature. The first thing to understand is what decriminalization in Portugal did and did not do. …drug reforms decriminalized possession up to “the quantity required…
Impact of air pollution on health
There is an increasing awareness of how air pollution is affecting health. As McHardy et al. (2020) report in the Health Affairs blog: Ambient air pollution is a key risk factor for preventable noncommunicable diseases (NCDs): It kills more than four million people every year globally. Worldwide, air pollution is responsible for 29 percent of all deaths and disease…