The recent SELECT study broadcast that using Wegovy size (2.4mg/weekly) dosages of Semaglutide for three years would reduce the risk of cardiovascular men events among some pretty seriously ill people by 20%. Unfortunately, when you dig deeper, what you discover is that what the study really showed is that if you treated 1,000 of these … Read more
Another election, another massive screw up by the “best” pollsters in the business. Yes, excuses will be made about how margins of error are only 1/20 and while rare 1/20 events do happen occasionally (it’s roughly like getting two pair in a five card poker hand on your initial deal), they really don’t happen twice … Read more
I always love back of envelope calculations so I thought I would do some for the number of freezers needed for the Pfizer vaccine which, as I pointed out in my last post, needs a -80C medical grade freezer. First off, let’s assume we want to have lots of vaccination stations and we want to … Read more
Learning how to do “back of envelope” calculations is one of the most important tools you can master – it is a damn shame we don’t spend more time on them in school. The idea is you make some assumptions, round up and down often, so you can get a rough idea of what a … Read more
Sometimes the mathematician in me want to tear my hair out when I listen to the news. A 50% effective vaccine won’t stop the Pandemic, better drugs won’t stop the pandemic, the only thing that can stop the pandemic in both the short and long run is to bring the effective transmission rate r t … Read more