• Posts
  • RSS
  • ◂◂RSS
  • Contact

  • Massachusetts Tick-Borne Disease Distribution

    May 11th, 2021
    lyme
    As I wrote yesterday, MA is no longer reporting good data to the CDC on Lyme disease. Starting in 2019, however, MA has been publishing tick-borne disease reports. They include this misleading chart:

    The caption includes "Although there are differences in the rate of patient visits, this shows that people are exposed to ticks throughout all of Massachusetts and should take recommended steps to reduce the chance of being bitten."

    One issue is that they've chosen to chart the rate of visits and not the rate of diagnoses, but the main issue is that the scale hides the degree of variation between counties. Pulling the numbers and manually dividing by population estimates, I see:

    The rate in the Islands (Dukes and Nantucket Counties) is 10 times any other MA county!

    (Even though these are also vacation areas, people are categorized by their home county not their infection county.)

    Now, I agree with them that taking precautions is worth it when walking through tick-friendly terrain anywhere in the state. But there are still degrees of precautions, from clothes, to tick checks, to choosing different activities, to choosing other counties, and the report should emphasize the difference in risk so people can make good decisions.

    Comment via: facebook, lesswrong

    Recent posts on blogs I like:

    Rereading Roald Dahl

    Taking out a few words doesn't change much. The post Rereading Roald Dahl appeared first on Otherwise.

    via Otherwise March 25, 2023

    What does Bing Chat tell us about AI risk?

    Early signs of catastrophic risk? Yes and no.

    via Cold Takes February 28, 2023

    Why Neighborhoods Should Have Speed Bumps

    I have several reasons I think why neighborhoods should have speed bumps. First, speed bumps are very useful to stop cars from hitting people in the streets. Second, when construction workers installed speed bumps on the street in front of our house it was v…

    via Lily Wise's Blog Posts February 27, 2023

    more     (via openring)


  • Posts
  • RSS
  • ◂◂RSS
  • Contact