Samuel Hurtado
@samuelhurtado
Head of Stress Testing division at Banco de España. Macroeconomics, machine learning and worrying about a world full of post-viral sequelae. He/him.
There's a chance it will be covid. It's still smaller than in previous years, but there's something brewing.
Alibaba's Qwen-3.8-max is really impressive. It beats the biggest and newest models from OpenAI and Google in some benchmarks, but that's not what impresses me most. They entered it into a coding competition and it beat 87% of human teams.
Looking at Semenzato et al, I believe there's an effect of covid on cancer deaths, but it's not so big that it would show up on aggregate numbers, where "frail people died if they got covid" is probably bigger. I made this table using their results.
As Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz again, there were between 6 and 8 million barrels crossing out of the Persian gulf.
Happy Sakura season (I brought out the appropriate flo mask cover)
@zalaly.bsky.social Hi, I'm curious about your take: how is health evolving in the whole veterans database since the pandemic started? I ask because this is what I got using the information about the controls in the supplementary tables from two of your papers.
This is official data from Spain, where I live, and where 85% of the >18 population got the first two doses of the vaccine, and 55% of the population got the third dose as well. Yes, vaccines are great (I'm on my 7th dose), but no, vaccines alone are absolutely not enough.
That's not the case for milk and eggs, but my guess is that there are public interventions in those markets (probably import agreements with other countries)
H5N1 must be still doing the rounds in farms across the US, even if there's almost no information about outbreaks anymore. The prices of live cattle and beef are at 10-year record levels. Poultry not so much but still quite high.
Vaccines are awesome (I've had 7 covid jabs so far) but they won't spare you a significant amount of health sequelae. You need a respirator and avoiding covid altogether for that. (Spanish data because that's where I'm from)
The chart shows that the harvest effect is really interesting. Most analysis doesn't take into account that people can only die once.
I used their results to build this table, I think it is a cleaner way to convey the message
Today it was A LOT better, in a similar train with a similar amount of people. Reminder that you can't sense ventilation and you can't guess it from previous experiences.
I don't think the mad king wants Greenland for the rare earths, and if he does, it's worse than most people think. Rare earths are not uncommon, they are easy to find. But separating them from other stuff in the ore is expensive and an environmental nightmare. This is from the wikipedia article
Is there a covid wave in the US right now? - yes, as high as the one they had in the summer - yes but smaller than the summer wave - not really, just a very small bump - not at all, it's flat at very low levels - all of the above
If by "a fraction" you mean 4/5 (80%), then you're right. I plugged my numbers into the IEA calculator below and got this. www.iea.org/data-and-sta...
Public transport is a death trap. I had to take a train yesterday, CO2 was unacceptably high even though the train was half empty. No masks anywhere, except for mine.
I'm #oneofthetwo that Jon Stewart from @weeklyshowpodcast.bsky.social mocked for still wearing a mask in 2025. I don't have a weird disease or a disability and I don't do it to protect others. I do it because I have read the papers and I'm seeing what covid is doing to everyone else.
Son los resultados del barómetro sanitario del CIS, que dicen que desde que llegó el covid la gente está hecha polvo
... And the situation here in Spain is starting to look pretty bad. First chart is positivity of flu in our sentinel system, the second one is prevalence (share of patients that have symptoms, times positivity among them).
Thanks. I have a question: would the new clade be expected to explode if the population has low B cell count? I ask because the recent paper by Jiang et al finds a small but persistent reduction in lymphocyte counts, but on B cells in particular the reduction is not so small...
Spain is different Data published today, first is positivity in the sentinel system, second is prevalence in the sentinel system (share of patients with symptoms times positivity)
I used their results to build this table, I think it is a cleaner way to convey that message
Any info from Boston? I found this recent covid uptick a bit weird (it started before thanksgiving)
This is a very interesting paper. Let me plot their results in a different way so it shows a clearer picture of what they mean:
Those extrapolations are not helping. Talking about the observed increase should be enough. xkcd.com/605/
It seemed impossible but: new record, 19 ambulances in an otherwise normal day. And yes my car now has an ambulancemeter.