Please note I hit send too early and the final numbers are slightly off and I will be changing them soon. It will not make a difference to the conclusion but some of the calculations need to be adjusted to reflect the "fully vaccinated" population rather than the vaccinated population.
I'm a bit confused about how you're using "New York" here. In the beginning you refer to the state, but during the rest of the piece you seem to be talking only about New York City? There's a quite large state attached to that city, which even many Americans don't know (amusingly and frustratingly to those of us who live(d) there).
No, I am using state numbers the whole way through. I think the Agatha Christie quote is about the city itself but I used authors discretion and removed City to avoid confusion. Probably just caused more 😂
I was also wondering. I have heard 750,000 for the state but not sure how accurately that is reflected in the census. I would be skeptical that the census does a good/thorough job capturing people that have a serious incentive not to cooperate. There could be an extremely significant undercount there... And it would probably country wide... But that is a bunch. I haven't ever actually looked into the methodology used to estimate illegals.
Could all of this not simply be due to a long seris of compunding rounding errors and similar?
Say the root number, the one all other models and estimates build upon year after year is from 1975? Would it not then be quite reasonable to assume that the majority what you are seeing is simply accumulated rounding errors, and that due to rotation of staff over the years paired with switching from doing math to using machines to do math, this now goes unnoticed by the people collating data?
A sort of cascading, compounding flow of errors invisible becuase any user of the system starts with the system as flawed, and not from newly collected hard data (which is much more expensive to collect).
Nothing nefarious, just laziness, short sightedness, stupidity and general cheapness.
I don't think the miss in population estimates are a matter of compounding rounding errors. My understanding is the ACS estimates do readjust after new census data comes out. The 2019 estimates may have been subject to more error than normal but that still wouldn't explain being so far off the mark. I think the problem is deeper than that... And I don't blame them for poor estimation. Estimating population is hard especially in the US, which has a serious border problem. In contrast, most Canadian provinces, as an example, are extremely good at estimating population (no similar border issue). No, I don't think the people estimating population are necessarily the problem or to blame. I blame the health authorities for running with inaccurate population estimates to push vaccines.
I am sympathetic to the fact that the health authorities were not being particularly nefarious in using the 2019 ACS estimates to calculate VE. They probably used them before census numbers came out showing the ACS estimates were garbage and they have the advantage of delineating by age group, which means health authorities get to make pretty looking graphs. It may be laziness or ignorance that let them to not realize the numbers were way off after the census. Or not to update them in years. Or at the very least put a footnote explaining the population estimates are out of date (we saw in the UK, health authorities were quick to put all kinds of footnotes when they saw counterintuitive case rates).
There is also at least some stupidity, if nothing nefarious, as they have worked with the CDC to publish several studies on cases in New York which have all used incorrect population estimates to come to their conclusions. It just highlights how significant the effect of poor or unknown denominators can be in estimating these things.
And unfortunately, this entire pandemic has been a story about unknown denominators whether it's CFRs or other issues. That Pfizer document showing 42k adverse events after vaccination by February is another example. We know how many vaccines were shipped by then. How many were administered?
That is kind of worse than errors due to reasons I listed, I think. I was basing my speculation on the situation here: we have officially about 10 500 000 citizens and assorted legal residents. We also have, based on numbers from health care, social services, tax office, and police and customs about 500 000 to 800 000 illegals.
Please note I hit send too early and the final numbers are slightly off and I will be changing them soon. It will not make a difference to the conclusion but some of the calculations need to be adjusted to reflect the "fully vaccinated" population rather than the vaccinated population.
Changes made. Adjusted VE remained largely the same as one would expect using this method.
I'm a bit confused about how you're using "New York" here. In the beginning you refer to the state, but during the rest of the piece you seem to be talking only about New York City? There's a quite large state attached to that city, which even many Americans don't know (amusingly and frustratingly to those of us who live(d) there).
No, I am using state numbers the whole way through. I think the Agatha Christie quote is about the city itself but I used authors discretion and removed City to avoid confusion. Probably just caused more 😂
I wonder what the % of residents is on the population count database. I'm assuming there's a million or so (maybe more) 'illegals'?
I was also wondering. I have heard 750,000 for the state but not sure how accurately that is reflected in the census. I would be skeptical that the census does a good/thorough job capturing people that have a serious incentive not to cooperate. There could be an extremely significant undercount there... And it would probably country wide... But that is a bunch. I haven't ever actually looked into the methodology used to estimate illegals.
LOL. Thanks for the clarification.
Could all of this not simply be due to a long seris of compunding rounding errors and similar?
Say the root number, the one all other models and estimates build upon year after year is from 1975? Would it not then be quite reasonable to assume that the majority what you are seeing is simply accumulated rounding errors, and that due to rotation of staff over the years paired with switching from doing math to using machines to do math, this now goes unnoticed by the people collating data?
A sort of cascading, compounding flow of errors invisible becuase any user of the system starts with the system as flawed, and not from newly collected hard data (which is much more expensive to collect).
Nothing nefarious, just laziness, short sightedness, stupidity and general cheapness.
Ah. Reminded me of "Office Space" 😂
I don't think the miss in population estimates are a matter of compounding rounding errors. My understanding is the ACS estimates do readjust after new census data comes out. The 2019 estimates may have been subject to more error than normal but that still wouldn't explain being so far off the mark. I think the problem is deeper than that... And I don't blame them for poor estimation. Estimating population is hard especially in the US, which has a serious border problem. In contrast, most Canadian provinces, as an example, are extremely good at estimating population (no similar border issue). No, I don't think the people estimating population are necessarily the problem or to blame. I blame the health authorities for running with inaccurate population estimates to push vaccines.
I am sympathetic to the fact that the health authorities were not being particularly nefarious in using the 2019 ACS estimates to calculate VE. They probably used them before census numbers came out showing the ACS estimates were garbage and they have the advantage of delineating by age group, which means health authorities get to make pretty looking graphs. It may be laziness or ignorance that let them to not realize the numbers were way off after the census. Or not to update them in years. Or at the very least put a footnote explaining the population estimates are out of date (we saw in the UK, health authorities were quick to put all kinds of footnotes when they saw counterintuitive case rates).
There is also at least some stupidity, if nothing nefarious, as they have worked with the CDC to publish several studies on cases in New York which have all used incorrect population estimates to come to their conclusions. It just highlights how significant the effect of poor or unknown denominators can be in estimating these things.
And unfortunately, this entire pandemic has been a story about unknown denominators whether it's CFRs or other issues. That Pfizer document showing 42k adverse events after vaccination by February is another example. We know how many vaccines were shipped by then. How many were administered?
That is kind of worse than errors due to reasons I listed, I think. I was basing my speculation on the situation here: we have officially about 10 500 000 citizens and assorted legal residents. We also have, based on numbers from health care, social services, tax office, and police and customs about 500 000 to 800 000 illegals.