Michael Plank

Age-specific rate of severe and critical SARS-CoV-2 infections estimated with multi-country seroprevalence studies - BMC Infectious Diseases Background Knowing the age-specific rates at which individuals infected with SARS-CoV-2 develop severe and critical disease is essential for designing public policy, for infectious disease modeling, a...

at the risk of spamming you with too many papers - not sure if this one (or any of the studies it's based on) is useful
bmcinfectdis.biomedcentral.com/articles/10....

Which paper would you use? Code Availability and Different Standards for Public Health Research Just been reading a nice paper from Thomas Ward, @OvertonC and co on IFR estimation which seems to do a really nice job: The real-time infection hospitalisation and fatality risk across the COVID-19 p...

A slightly random stumble towards some points about how we assess papers and how to weight different priorities.

community.epinowcast.org/t/which-pape...

So, so much of the problem with "AI" discourse comes from viewing the new consumer products as anything like intelligences. Large Language Models is a completely fair and descriptive term - most important is the last term. These are *models* of natural language, with parameters that are >

The real-time infection hospitalisation and fatality risk across the COVID-19 pandemic in England - Nature Communications The severity of SARS-CoV-2 infection varied over the course of the pandemic due to factors such as changes in variant characteristics and population immunity from previous infection or vaccination. He...

This one looks like it estimates IFR using ONS and REACT data?

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

A little example to show well the assumptions of the Ioannidis "Lives Saved" study fit reality
- Take its IFR estimates
- Get the US MCOD covid deaths from CDC up to 14/11/20
- Calculate infx up to 31/10/20
Result? The study estimates that the US infx rate was 62% by 31/10/20😀

The slope is exactly –1 (actually, –0.96): for every kWh of wind and solar, one kWh of water is saved in the lakes in case it is needed the next day. The max capacity factor of hydro was 67% (22 July). As more wind and solar is built, look forward to fuller lakes, lower emissions, lower spot prices.

I did enjoy jazz hands

I must admit needing to click on it, and have learned something new 🤣

Further cuts fund new tech institute - Expert Reaction Details of new changes to research funding under sweeping science sector reforms have been released today. The briefing confirms that set up of the NZ Institute for Advanced Technology will be paid fo...

Further cuts fund new tech institute – Expert Reaction
www.sciencemediacentre.co.nz/2025/08/06/f...

"The movement of funds from the Investigator-led Marsden Fund ... is absolutely an attack on fundamental research and on internationally-recognised research excellence" - @nicgaston.bsky.social

🤔Thinking about developing an online model to inform policy decisions?

Check out our review of previous web-based tools and thoughts on how future work could be improved 👉🏼 rdcu.be/ezhUu

@menziesresearch.bsky.social @drwinniechen.bsky.social

Consider an infinite series of coin tosses with P(head on nth toss)=1/n.
Let X_n=0 if nth toss is a tail and X_n=1 if head.

True or false?
1. X_n -> 0 in probability as n -> infinity
2. X_n -> 0 almost surely as n -> infinity

@phkwacker.bsky.social

Letter from @royalsocietynz.bsky.social President Dame Jane Harding on further cuts to fundamental research
www.royalsociety.org.nz/news/letter-...

A 29% cut to the Marsden Fund, plus major cuts to Endeavour, HRC and elsewhere 😠
With success rates already in single figures in some areas and funding not keeping pace with rising costs, this is devastating for New Zealand science

Closing the communication gap: The new priority in public health In an op-ed published August 2 in the New England Journal of Medicine, four members of Yale's health ecosystem lay out a case for how to make America trust

"The word “immunity” really tripped people up during the pandemic. From a medical and scientific perspective “immunity” represents a very complex system in our bodies that is not an on/off switch. But in colloquial use, “immunity” often means a perfect protection, like legal immunity"

The 29 adverse outcomes tested, none of which provided a safety signal.

Despite te scare stories many antivaxxers and anti-vax organisations dump on social media, the COVID-19 vaccines are very safe.
3/3

1/ Updated joint FAO/WHO/WOAH public health assessment of recent influenza A(H5) virus events in animals and people #OneHealth #IDEpi 🧪

🗓️ Assessment based on data as of 01 Jul 2025 (with report published 28 Jul 2025)

🔗: openknowledge.fao.org/items/040b71...

📄 Nature Medicine || Human infections with highly pathogenic avian influenza A(H5N1) viruses in the United States from March 2024 to May 2025

🧪 Describes epidemiologic, virologic & clinical characteristics of the 70 human cases of influenza A(H5N1) detected in the United States since March 2024.

How conspiracy theories about COVID’s origins are hampering our ability to prevent the next pandemic The COVID pandemic likely began when the virus jumped from animals to humans, and didn’t start in a lab. But false narratives continue to circulate.

You’ve been badly misled over COVID origins theconversation.com/how-conspira...

Modelling the dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 during the first 14 days of infection Interpreting the viral mechanism of SARS-CoV-2 based on the human body level is critical for developing more efficient interventions. Due to the limit…

New paper! "Modelling the dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 during the first 14 days of infection" - we use Approximate Bayesian Computation and the theory of stochastic boundary hitting to provide a possible explanation for infectious doses in challenge data.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Oooh would love to catch up with you some time about this - we have a project with similar aims in NZ - a little bit of info here www.teniwha.com/research-pro...

PhD position for January start with me and Neil Ferguson, doing some neat model development for ethnicity-stratified transmission models. Please get in touch with any questions.

Home fees (UK) only unfortunately.

Intro to the new Ioannidis et al paper says 'Models may give unreliable results, depending on assumptions' – then it proceeds to use a model with very questionable assumptions, ignoring the best available IFR data...

But can't that effect go both ways: people who have poor health or known risk factors more likely to get vaccinated precisely because they are at higher risk? I agree it is a can of worms, but JPAI seem to just pluck a figure from thin air without explaining how/why or even citing a single paper.

Only the UK had a good idea of its infections and yet I am not aware of a single study using it to determine IFR of covid by age

A study was published today by Ioannidis et al on lives saved by vaccines and their IFR is massively lower than the real data based on from the UK

1/

Their vaccine effectiveness values appear to be plucked from thin air as well?

No irony at all in the Bill saying that if you are late enrolling, you don't get to vote ... but if you're late saying that this move breaches the NZBORA guarantees then that's all fine, no problem there, deadlines are simply a state-of-mind maaaaan.

every time the government’s covid policies were polled they were overwhelmingly popular. even at the height of the media’s anti-MIQ hysteria a good majority backed the government. and even now the former government is notching up Ws. this must hurt for the media lol www.thepost.co.nz/politics/360...

Attorney-General rules her own Govt’s voting crackdown breaches human rights The young and Māori, Pasifika and Asian communities will pay the 'heaviest price' by being disenfranchised, warns Judith Collins, KC. Jonathan Milne reports.

Hopefully the NZ govt will now backtrack on deeply unfair & undemocratic plans to change electoral processes - plans which threaten to erode trust in govt & elections. The National govt needs more experienced MPs to help it regain the middle ground it is losing #nzpol newsroom.co.nz/2025/07/28/a...

As predicted ... here is the NZBORA s7 report on the Government's Electoral Amendment Bill, in which the removal of same-day enrolment and voting for the entire advance voting period is declared to be an unjustifiable limit on the right to vote.

Changes to electoral law will disenfranchise thousands – and may not save any time The government does not want to spend the time and resources to fully modernise the law and processes surrounding our electoral rolls – so who are the real dropkicks in this story?

Reckons ranted …