A paper has recently come out claiming that lockdowns had minimal effects on COVID mortality, causing quite a stir. The headline figure is that in Europe and the USA, lockdowns reduced mortality by 0.2%. Fifty words in and the authors are already dropping bombs like this:
There have been interesting reports from Public Health Scotland that COVID infection rates amongst the unvaccinated have been consistently lower compared to those who have had one or two doses of vaccine since early December 2021, though higher compared to those with a booster dose. See a news story here, based on the original report here. I believe this has led many people to question vaccine effectiveness.
There has been a great deal of controversy over the way COVID-19 deaths are calculated. Initially in the UK, the count that was most widely reported consisted of all who died within 60 days of a positive PCR test, or who died more than 60 days after a positive test but had COVID-19 listed as a cause of death on their death certificate.
The main objection to this is that, for example, someone could test positive for COVID-19, recover fully, then die in e.g. a car crash and still be counted as a COVID-19 death.
The efficient market hypothesis is, roughly speaking, the idea that asset prices ‘reflect all available information’. This means that the only way to consistently outperform the market is to have access to information that isn’t widely known, or to get lucky.
In particular, it implies that even the fanciest of funds, managed by very smart people with fancy degrees from even fancier universities, will on average fare no better than a monkey throwing darts at a list of stocks.
For many decades now, physicists have been trying to ‘unify’ quantum mechanics and Einstein’s general relativity into a quantum theory of gravity. This has proven to be very difficult, and achieving such a unification is one of the major outstanding problems in theoretical physics. To understand why, let me first give you a whistlestop tour of some topics in physics.