@michaelplanknz.bsky.social
Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Canterbury, NZ. Fellow @royalsocietynz.bsky.social. Math modelling in biology and epidemiology. Bicycles make the world a better place. He/him https://www.math.canterbury.ac.nz/~m.plank/
<< How do we evaluate infectious disease modelling work, and what does that imply for modelling responsibly? >>
If that sounds interesting, you're very welcome to join us!
* Workshop: Evaluation & Responsible Modelling
* 24 March 2026 | LSHTM, London
More @ epiforecasts.io/responsible-...
100%. And that thus far it appears to be a minority (not zero; there's some good solid reporting out there) who can is quite depressing. & an indictment of those in the majority.
Facts from an expert body. Spin from politicians. If their job isn't holding one up to the other for us what is it?
We don't need, and crucially cannot trust, politicians to summarise RC reports and tell us what the findings were. If we could we wouldn't need RCs
We have the report itself and journalists for that summary role.
The news value of pol reaction is simply how honest those reactions are
I do like a niche Jeff Bridges reference
And the covid reporting dashboard has been updated from 19 deaths reported in the (as of now) week before last, to 5 reported last week.
But, to keep shouting at the void, this tells us nothing about the progression of the current wave, as the reporting is now but the events were July last year.
NZ released the COVID inquiry (phase two), with four main lessons and recommendations calling for better integration of disease surveillance systems, expansion of epidemiological modelling capability, and more structured decision-making frameworks during a crisis theconversation.com/covid-inquir...
Nice summary by David Murdoch
COVID inquiry phase two: 4 main lessons to improve NZ’s future pandemic resilience
theconversation.com/covid-inquir...
Excellent summary of the inquiry findings here from Emma Ricketts at Stuff as well.
I must admit I'm surprised at how little the Royal Commission gave to vaccine opponents, some of whom saw this process as the thing that would vindicate them. Can't get much clearer than this.
It varies but 100 contact hours would be pretty normal in my department
Excellent TLDR of part 2 of NZ's Covid-19 Inquiry by @marcdaalder.bsky.social
1. Vaccine safety & approvals process successful
2. Some mandates lasted too long or went too far
3. The need for a changed testing strategy could have been foreseen
4. Lockdown decisions were ‘reasonable & evidence-based’
I'd like to spend a minute discussing this paper because it is frequently abused to make erroneous claims about the nature of the human immune system and our capacity to resist respiratory viruses:
rdcu.be/e7un8
A thread 🧵
Yes I agree
Maybe but I also think there was some misunderstanding that they were necessarily inferior to PCR whereas, once elimination was over, they were in some ways preferable
😍 Stunning, rakiura is truly a special place
The Covid-19 pandemic was a once-a-century impact on mortality worldwide. And that impact varied among countries depending on policy choices.
BUT
As bad as the height of pandemic was in Canada (purple arrow) it would be far worse to have the misfortune to be born an American (green arrow).
1/
🎓We are advertising three 2-year research+teaching positions in applied maths or stats.
These have a reduced teaching load (50 lectures a yr) compared to a standard academic position so applicants can gain teaching experience while having time for research
jobs.canterbury.ac.nz/jobdetails/a...
New Zealand is extremely fortunate to be less dependent on gas than many countries. Let's keep it that way.
See lengthy Comment by ex-chief of Statistics for both NZ and UK, Len Cook.
Using only admin data is like going back to blocky low-res graphics. Sub-populations get blurry.
🎓We are advertising three 2-year research+teaching positions in applied maths or stats.
These have a reduced teaching load (50 lectures a yr) compared to a standard academic position so applicants can gain teaching experience while having time for research
jobs.canterbury.ac.nz/jobdetails/a...
Relevant meme from our blog post on the topic: www.the100.ci/2024/12/05/w...
Hannah Ritchie has built a fun little tool where you can compare energy usage of various products and activities.
This is super helpful imho, because it's so hard to develop intuitions even just about the scales involved here.
hannahritchie.substack.com/p/does-that-...
The debt burden of UK students is one of those things where, the more you look into the details, the more insane and predatory it is. So I tried my best to explain the numbers involved without making my, or your, head explode.
Suppose you know that x+y=100 and want to know what x and y are. You’re stuck right – there’s a whole range of possibilities for two numbers that sum to 100 (in maths we call this non-identifiability).
How well did this year's flu shot work?
Interim results: Decently, not perfect.
"the risk of medically-attended influenza A(H3N2) illness was reduced by 40% among vaccinated relative to unvaccinated individuals."
tinyurl.com/emw36bfa by Separovic et al., in @eurosurveillance.org
We'd be in a better place if university leaders would constantly beat this drum. Teaching critical thinking makes for better neighbors and citizens, while creating knowledge for knowledge's sake has driven massive economic gains, often in unpredictable ways. Interfering with this is folly.
Thanks Tyler Cassidy for leading the charge on this, the excellent team of co-authors, and to @matrix-inst.bsky.social for hosting us.
Well it turns out if you know something about the distributions of x and y, you *can* (sometimes) separately estimate their population means.
We explored some biological applications of this idea here:
doi.org/10.1007/s115...
Now suppose you don’t just have one measurement of x+y but many, clustered around 100 but with some variation.
How does this help? Surely x=y=50 is just as likely as x=10 and y=90?
