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Russ Wolfinger's avatar

Thank you Mathew for tying some good threads together. The evidence for HUB in the cases you describe appears strong.

I have the US county data in hand and have been able to reproduce the nice mortality trend graphs (yearly, with blue points) and those from T Coddington (which I presume are for 2022). However I remain puzzled by the leading graph with correlations floating between -0.1 and 0.1. Are they really much different from zero and isn't the mirroring just what we would expect from these well-known demographic variables? How are you computing theses correlations? The graphs with the blue points suggest correlations more like -0.55 or -0.6 (roughly taking square root of R^2). Also, fwiw for 2022, my state-level graphs for each month all look like your Q1 graph with no shifting trend later in the year.

Moving forward, with HUB well-recognized, the question then becomes how to best adjust for it and proceed to causal inference on key questions of interest such as a reasonable estimate of causal effect of the vax on excess mortality. This requires adjusting for all potential confounders, including those capturing HUB and spatial-temporal biases driving Simpson's paradox cases you have mentioned in the past (e.g. excess death spike in Aug-Sep 2021 in the South). This certainly seems doable although very few analysts appear to be pursuing really well-principled causal modeling. Denis Rancourt has some interesting work along these lines.

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T Coddington's avatar

Thanks for citing some of my stuff. This prompted me to update a dashboard I created awhile back. In the below (best viewed on a large monitor, in full screen mode), you can plot county level outcomes (deaths, cases, hosp) vs. several health factors (vaccination, obesity, smoking, life expectancy, physical activity & income). Hope this can be helpful:

https://public.tableau.com/shared/YSFN6KP68?:display_count=n&:origin=viz_share_link

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