I didn’t write a post last Monday, but this Monday I am. A few things may have changed in the Covid situation. The most important is that we may have finally seen the peak of this current wave’s surge of new cases.
For the last few weeks we’ve seen cases rising in the five states. Only New Jersey of late had shown a return to declining cases. About the middle of the week before last, we began to see those numbers decline. And so in this past week we did begin to see cases decline in all five states.
New case curves for PA, NJ, DE, VA, & IL.
The thing to watch this week will be that at the very end of last week, new cases ticked up slightly for two or three days in a number of states. It could be an aberrant one-off, but with full vaccinations still well below herd immunity and cases still at high levels, it isn’t difficult to imagine a scenario where the virus begins to surge once again.
Deaths on the other hand, they continue to climb. We aren’t seeing massive increases, instead these are largely marginal. But they are increasing all the same.
Death curves for PA, NJ, DE, VA, & IL.
Encouragingly, if cases can continue to decline, deaths will begin to fall. As a lagging indicator, they will be the last metric we see decline. Consequently, it’s a question of when, not if, deaths begin to decline. On Saturday, we did see a small decline in deaths, but one day before the weekend is insufficient to determine whether or not we’ve seen the inflection point, after which deaths would fall.
Vaccinations remain a broad set of positive news. All three states are now reporting just over 30% of their populations as fully vaccinated. However, the rate of vaccination has begun to slow.
Total vaccination curves for PA, NJ, DE, VA, & IL.
And that worries me and the professionals, because we are still far from herd immunity. Until we reach that level, the virus can easily spread among unvaccinated populations. The charts above don’t show the decline, as they look only at the total, cumulative effect. But the charts that I see make it quite clear the decline over the last week or two.
Moral of that story is, if you haven’t been vaccinated yet, please register to do so or visit a location that allows walk-up vaccinations.
I was not planning on posting this today, because I was—am?—still working on it. But there was some baseball news last night that prompted me to export what I had to try and get this live.
For a little while now I’ve been wondering why a number of baseball stars, albeit in their later years, are still looking for employment. Some are pretty obvious in that they are facing legal troubles. Some may have high demands that ball clubs are not willing to meet. Some may have reasonable demands but the clubs are just being incredibly cheap. Or it may be none of those. Or some combination of those. But when you see some of the players some teams put on the field each night, you can’t tell me some of these free agents wouldn’t be better options.
Separately, I also tend to think baseball needs to expand and add some new clubs. But they won’t until the Oakland Athletics and Tampa Bay Rays resolve their stadium issues.
But what if…
Well a normal expansion would include two teams to keep an even balance. The new teams would likely use some kind of draft to select players from the rosters of other teams, with a certain number of players almost certainly protected. But what if we just used those unsigned ball players?
Anibal Sanchez is the guy messing this up. He’s been a free agent for some time now but is reportedly going to sign by the end of this week, perhaps today. So with him and everyone else, could we field two expansion teams?
Kinda, yeah.
First up, the Charlotte Piedmonters.
The Charlotte Piedmonters could also be looking for a new name.
Not a great team—nor would we expect it to be as all the really good free agents have already been signed. But these former stars, award winners, and fan favoutites may have just enough left in the tank to make for some competitive games if all goes well. My readers who happen to be fellow baseball fans will probably recognise most of these names, though I’ll admit a number of the relief pitchers are new to me. I can figure out basically everything but a centre fielder. But you could probably get somebody from an independent league or international league or just convert somebody.
I used projected Wins Above Replacement (WAR) to determine how good the players would be. For non-baseball fans, WAR is a value you can use to determine how good a player is relative to an average replacement player. Somebody with the value 0 to 1 is a scrub or bench player. Take any average ballplayer and sub them in and you wouldn’t know the difference. 2s and 3s are solid role playing guys, but not likely stars. Stars get into the picture around 4 and your best players are probably 5 to 6 or higher.
In Charlotte, nobody has a WAR higher than Rick Porcello’s 1.4. In other words, he’s a better than average pitcher, but not by much. Tyler Flowers: a better than average catcher, but not by much. Homer Bailey: barely better than average starting pitcher. Everyone else, generally you could sub them out and not know the difference. But, crucially for our purposes, they are not below average players. Some of those are still on the market, but I didn’t assign them to Charlotte.
Now if Charlotte gets a team, so does Portland, Oregon: the Portland Lumberjacks.
Again, I’m open to name suggestions.
Here you can see Anibal Sanchez as the third man in the rotation. You can also see that the rotation here is the weakest part. For Charlotte you could get away with a bullpen game every five days. But two bullpen days? Well, take a look at the Boston Red Sox in 2020 and that pitching dumpster fire and you’ll see what having only two or three starters can do. (Though the relief starters they did use were all worse than the people on these lists, which just makes my point that there are talented if not star-level players available.)
Neither of these teams would be good. You can imagine a team like Charlotte getting beat almost every night in the AL East—except by Baltimore. The NL East might be a bit easier. And Portland in the NL West would be similarly a punching bag—except by Colorado probably. But dump either into the AL or NL Central and who knows.
Two teams is clearly a stretch. So what if we just made one? What if we brought back the Montreal Expos? Sure, it messes up the schedule, but we get to pick the best players from Charlotte and Portland.
No new name needed.
The result is a team that is significantly improved. That doesn’t mean very good. These Expos wouldn’t make the playoffs. But the rotation is full of guys who could be, at best, solid middle- to, more likely, back-end starters. The lineup, well, the lineup would still be mostly replacement level players, a.k.a. scrubs, with two exceptions. But with past track records, it’s not impossible to imagine a few of these players having a better than projected year.
On paper, they still wouldn’t be as good as the worst team in baseball (by WAR), the Pirates. But Pittsburgh also doesn’t have a centre fielder, so…
Anyway, I was going to try and do some more analysis beyond using WAR, but I wanted to get this out before Sanchez signed this week.
I also got to add Oliver Perez, who despite having a good year was released by Cleveland today. Boston needs a solid lefty reliever for the middle innings, and I hope they pick up Perez and option Josh Taylor down to Worcester.
I don’t know if this is a trend, but I’ve now seen a few graphics appearing using arrows to show the direction or trend of the data. This graphic in an article by Bloomberg prompted me to talk about this piece.
I should add, after rereading my draft, that I’m not clear who made this graphic. I assume that it was the Bloomberg graphics team, because it appears in Bloomberg and all the data is presented to recreate the chart. But, it could also be a chart made by someone at Goldman Sachs that credits Bloomberg as a source and then someone at Bloomberg got hold of a copy. And a graphic made for a news/media outlet will typically be of a different quality or level of polish than one made perhaps by and for analysts. (Not that I think there should be said differences, as it does a disservice to internal users, but I digress from a digression.)
All the things going on in this chart.
The arrow here appears above the peak quarter, i.e. the second of 2021, for both the Goldman Sachs Economics forecast and the consensus forecast. But what does it really add? First, it adds “ink”, in this case pixels. Here, every pixel consumes our attention and there is a finite number of available pixels within the space of this graphic.
When I work with authors or subject matter experts, I often find myself asking them “what’s the most important thing to communicate?” or something along those lines. If the person answers with a long laundry list, I remind them that if everything is important, nothing is important. If everything is set in bold, all caps text, what will look most important is the rare bit of text set in regular, lower-case letters.
In the above graphic, there are so many things screaming for my attention, it’s difficult to say which is the most important. First, I’m fairly certain that “US QoQ annualised GDP growth” could move to the graphic subhead or data definition. Allow the graphic’s data container to contain, well, data. Second, the data series labels can be moved outside the data container. The labels here have an inherent problem is that the Goldman Sachs Economics numbers are in blue, and that blue text has less visual weight than the black text of the Consensus label. Consequently, the Goldman Sachs Economics label recedes into the background and becomes lost, not what you want from your legend.
Third, I don’t believe the data labels here add anything to the chart. They function as sparkly distractions from the visual trend, which should be the most important aspect of a visual chart.
Finally, we get to the arrow, the impetus for this post. First, I should note that it is not clear what growth it shows. The fact the line is black makes me think it reflects the Consensus forecast whereas a blue line would represent the Goldman Sachs forecast. But it could also be the average of the two or even a more general “here’s the general shape”. The problem is that the shape matters. If you look at the slope of the actual forecasts, you see a sharp increase to the peak followed by a slower, more gradual taper. The arrow in the original graphic shows a decelerating curve that is shallower in the lead up to the peak and that is not what is forecast to happen.
Now we get to the issue I mentioned at the top, the extraneous labelling and data ink wasted. If we look at the chart as is, but remove the arrow, we see this.
Immediately to the right of the peak, we have have some blue data labels and then just a bit to the right of that, but sitting vertically above the label we have the bold blue text labelling the data series. But further to the upper right we have a dark and bold block of text that draws the eye away from the peak and into the corner. It draws the eye away from the very element of the shape the peak needs to be a peak, the trough in the wave. Consequently, it makes sense with the eye being drawn up and to the right that the designers threw an arrow in above the peak to show how, no, actually your eye needs to go down and to the right.
But what happens if we then strip out the data series labelling? Do we still need the arrow? Let’s take a look.
I would argue that no, we do not. And so let’s strip the arrow out of the picture and take a look.
Here the shape of the curve is clear, a sharp rise and then a gradual taper to the right. No arrow needed to show the contour. In other words, the additional labelling wastes our attention, which then forces us to add an arrow to see what we needed to see in the first place, but then further wasting our attention.
There are a number of other things I take issue with in this chart: the black outlines of the blue rectangles, the tick marks on the x-axis, the solid border of the container, the lack of axis lines. But the arrow points to this graphic’s central problem, a poorly thought out labelling structure.
So because the chart provides all the data, I took a quick stab at how I would chart it using my own styles. I gave myself a 3:2 ratio, less space than the original graphic had. This is where I landed. I would prefer the legend below the chart labelling, but it felt cramped in the space. And with so few data points along the x-axis, the chart doesn’t need a ton of horizontal space and so I repurposed some of it to create a vertical legend space.
I mixed typefaces only because my default does not have a proper small capitals and I wanted to use small capitals to reduce and balance out the weight of the exhibit label in the graphic title.
I could still tweak the spacing between the bars and perhaps the treatment of the years below the quarters could use some additional work, but the main point here is that the shape of the curve is clear. I need no arrow to tell the user that there is a peak and that after the peak the line goes down. The white space around the bars and the line does that for me.
Credit for the piece goes to either the Bloomberg graphics department or the Goldman Sachs graphics department. Not sure.
Last week I wrote about how we may have been beginning to see divergent patterns in new cases, i.e. how New Jersey in particular had seen its new cases numbers falling whilst other states continued with increasing case counts.
One week later, that may still broadly hold true.
Emphasis on may.
New case curves for PA, NJ, DE, VA, & IL.
If we look at the new charts, we can see that broadly, New Jersey did continue its downward trend as Pennsylvania and Delaware experienced significant rises in new cases. Virginia remained fairly stable, but with a slight trend towards increasing numbers of new cases.
But New Jersey and now Illinois present some interesting trends to watch this coming week. Illinois reminds me of New Jersey in that despite rising numbers most of last week, the last few days (and of course the weekend) saw numbers lower than preceding days. You can see from the slightest of dips at the tail of the line the trend has flipped direction. Will the direction hold, however, once we start receiving weekday reporting figures starting Tuesday?
Back to New Jersey, though. The downward trend continued most of the week. But, the last several days could portend a reversal of sorts. For most of the last week, the state saw daily new case numbers increasing day after day. But the trend line, as it should, remained heading downwards. Until just a few days ago. If you look at the tail of the line there, you will see a slight uptick. This too will be something to watch in the coming week.
Deaths also need careful attention this week.
Death curves in PA, NJ, DE, VA, & IL.
Last I asked the question, will deaths follow rising cases? After a week of data, the answer is unmistakably yes. However, unlike new cases, the increases are largely of a marginal number. Look closely at the ends of the lines for Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, and Illinois and you will see last week’s shallow rise continued.
Virginia bucked the trend with decreasing numbers of deaths. And of course marginal increases could easily give way to marginal decreases. Now I try not to mention too many daily numbers in these posts because I take the weekly view, but I will be closely following Pennsylvania this week. For the last several weeks, the Commonwealth regularly reported deaths on Sunday and Monday in the single digits. Yesterday Harrisburg reported 40. Is this a one-day surge of reports? Is the state resuming reporting more deaths at the weekend? Or does it portend something worse, a mores significant rise in the number of deaths?
Vaccinations continue apace. Although, I would expect to see some slowdown as the Johnson & Johnson vaccine pause ripples out across the vaccination programme.
Fully vaccinated curves for PA, NJ, DE, VA, & IL.
For now though we continue to see increasing numbers. Indeed, the three states I track have now all reached or should reach today 25% of their population as fully vaccinated.
One, that is good news.
But, two, this is just the beginning.
Last week in some tense questioning about when we can expect resumption of “normal”, Dr. Fauci provided a figure of 10,000 new cases per day across the US. (Currently we are about at 60,000 or so.) Vaccines will impede the transmission as they become ever more widely administered and fully implemented—remember that a first dose of a two-dose regimen does not mean you should be heading out and socialising.
At present, we have Pennsylvania averaging 5,000 new cases per day. In other words, Pennsylvania alone represents half of Dr. Fauci’s target. We are clearly far from that reopening level.
What I will be curious about in the coming weeks though is that interplay between new cases and vaccinations. If Illinois does begin to see a downward trend in new cases this week, how much of it is due to the state being 25% fully vaccinated?
That’s a complex question to answer, but at some point, increasing vaccinations will force new cases to reach an inflection point. First they will begin to bend downward, increasing more slowly instead of exponentially. Then with even more vaccinations a second point will be reached at which this new surge begins to finally turn and new cases drop.
This time last week I wrote about how we should not be surprised at rising levels of coronavirus in the states of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Virginia, and Illinois. After all, our elected officials reopened economies despite data saying they should do otherwise. On top of that, people have been engaging in reckless behaviour and seemingly abandoning the very behaviours that had been leading to declining rates. With those two failures, our last hope is that vaccines will come quickly and be widely taken by the public.
A week hence.
Well, we are beginning to see some divergent patterns, especially with new cases.
New case curves for PA, NJ, DE, VA, & IL.
Last week there was some evidence that New Jersey might be bucking the trend and headed downwards after weeks of rising new cases. And now that appears to be a more sustained trend as the line for the Garden State’s seven-day average clearly began headed the right direction this past week.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that we continue to see rising numbers of new cases in Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Illinois. Although if we want to try and find the positives in the bad, we can see that Delaware’s upward trend remains fairly shallow. Illinois, while steeper, is rising from a lower base as the Land of Lincoln managed to reach low, summer levels of new case spread earlier this year. And in Pennsylvania, there is a bend in the curve, an inflection point, that could indicate growth in the number of new cases is slowing. We still need to see it turn negative, but slowing growth is better than increasing growth.
Virginia splits the difference between those sets. It remains at an elevated level of new case transmission, but the upward tick we saw—unlike the other states—was not followed by a general surge in new cases. The little rise we did see, in fact seems to have perhaps shifted back downward.
One of the big questions in this current wave of new cases is will deaths rise? We are seeing increasing numbers of new cases and hospitalisations, but will deaths follow? The hope is that we have vaccinated enough of the most vulnerable populations to prevent them from suffering the most serious of results.
Death curves for PA, NJ, DE, VA, & IL.
So far so good. While death rates remain slightly elevated over summer levels, we do not yet see any signs of rising numbers of deaths. The only possible exception is Virginia, where cases bottomed out after the state added delayed death certificates from the holidays, but have risen in recent days.
Finally we have vaccinations. Here is the best news at which we can look. We can now say that at least 20% of the populations of Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Illinois are fully vaccinated. To be clear, that is still a long way from herd immunity levels, but that’s 20 percentage points more than we had four months ago.
Total full vaccination curves for PA, VA, & IL.
One big outstanding question is how much, if at all, can vaccinated people spread coronavirus? This is why we need to continue to wear masks and socially distance even those who have been vaccinated. But at some point—I don’t know when—these increasing levels of full vaccination should begin to flatten the new case curves. Could that be what’s flattening the curves in New Jersey, Virginia, and Pennsylvania? It’s too early to say, but one can hope.
This morning I read a piece in Politico Playbook that broke down President Biden’s $2.25 trillion proposal for infrastructure spending. A thing generally regarded as the United States sorely needs. $2.25 trillion is a lot of money and it’s a fair question to ask whether all that money is really money for infrastructure.
Because, it turns out, it’s not.
Please, sir, may I have more train money?
That isn’t to say money spent on job retraining or home care services wouldn’t be money well spent. Rather, it’s just not infrastructure.
But politics and the English language is a topic for another day. Oh wait, somebody already did write about that.
Last week I wrote about how the inevitable rise in new Covid-19 cases was occurring in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Virginia, and Illinois. Now, one, in the last week, we saw no evidence of states preparing to reinforce their public health and safety restrictions. And two, whilst we have no data on people not following guidelines, anecdotally a large group of people threw a party in my building’s common amenities space so it does seem like people are feeling less inclined to wear masks, socially distance, and isolate to their own households.
Those two conditions, of course, do not help reduce the case count. Instead they add to it. So it should come as no surprise that Covid-19 continues to rapidly spread in our five states, though some are doing worse than others.
New case curves for PA, NJ, DE, VA, & IL.
New Jersey and Pennsylvania arguably performed the worst. If we look at the peak to trough decline from early winter’s surge to late winter’s nadir, we can see that New Jersey has reached 40% of that peak. Pennsylvania enjoyed a better decline and so has a large gap, but is still nearing 20% its previous peak.
Illinois is also remarkable—again not in a good way—as its peak to trough fall was even greater than Pennsylvania’s, however it’s also now clearly rising. The Land of Lincoln, however, did manager to reach late summer levels of new cases—good. But those are now rising—bad. Delaware too is seeing a rise, albeit at a slower rate than its two tristate neighbours.
Only Virginia’s rise remains slight, barely discernible in the chart.
Deaths, while not exactly good news, aren’t exactly good news either. Last week I mentioned how they had stalled out and stopped declining. That is better than rising death rates, but the levels of deaths per day is still higher than we saw last summer. In other words, things could be significantly better even in pandemic terms.
Death curves for PA, NJ, DE, VA, & IL.
Last week? Deaths continued to stubbornly persist at those elevated levels. We remain vigilant, looking for any indication that deaths will follow the rates of new cases and hospitalisations and begin to climb.
The hope, of course, is that we have vaccinated enough of the most at risk populations to prevent a surge in deaths. But, we just don’t know yet. The only good news is that vaccinations continue to progress.
Vaccination curves for PA, VA, & IL.
Illinois has surpassed 18% of its population being fully vaccinated. Virginia is not far behind at 17.75%. Pennsylvania, because of the bifurcated nature of its data reporting, remains unclear. It sits at 17.8% fully vaccinated, but Philadelphia has not posted updated data since late Thursday. It’s likely that the Commonwealth has joined Illinois in surpassing 18%, but it’s not fully certain.
Also this past week, the CDC updated its guidance for the fully vaccinated, saying that it was safe for them to travel. I take some issue with this, primarily on the messaging front.
First, we need to be clear about what fully vaccinated means. It means two weeks after your final dose. For Johnson & Johnson’s vaccine, that means two weeks after your shot as you only receive one. For both Pfizer and Moderna, you are only fully vaccinated two weeks after your second shot—not before. And keep in mind with Pfizer you need to wait three weeks between first and second dose. With Moderna it’s four weeks. In other words, with J&J you need to wait two weeks after your first (and only) shot before you can begin to follow the loosened guidelines. If you receive Pfizer’s, you need to wait five weeks from your first shot, assuming you do receive your second three weeks later, and with Moderna it’s six weeks, again assuming the recommended four week gap.
The problem is that only about 20% of the US population is fully vaccinated. And with the virus spreading at high rates and at high levels, it poses a significant risk as the newer, more lethal, and more infectious variants could take root in the United States and overwhelm the healthcare systems of the 50 states. We do not yet know if fully vaccinated people can spread the virus if they do become infected.
I think the advice should have remained to refrain from all but essential travel until we reached a high percentage of fully vaccinated folks. I ballparked earlier this week something like 2/3 the estimated amount of full vaccinations required for herd immunity (est. at 75%). In other words, keeping restrictions on travel until at least 50% of the US becomes fully vaccinated.
We remain several weeks away from that milestone, unfortunately. I understand the desire/urge people have to get out and do things and enjoy spring after a year of isolation. Sadly, if winter was the darkest/hardest part of the pandemic, I think that makes spring and early summer the most challenging. Because we see progress, we see the light at the end of the tunnel, and it coincides with warmer weather and we want nothing more to get out and do things and see people. But that is the last thing we need to be doing at this point.
I’ve often described the vaccination as the marshmallow test. In a study, scientists presented kids with a marshmallow. They could eat the marshmallow immediately, but if they waited 15 minutes, unsupervised, they could then have an additional marshmallow. We are all just grabbing that first marshmallow whilst the promise of a more normal summer is ours if we can wait just 15 minutes.
Two weeks ago I wrote about how new cases in the states of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Virginia, and Illinois were stalling out, i.e. no longer declining. Additionally, with the exception of Illinois, they were stalling at rates far higher than what we saw last summer. I wrote
This means that the environment is ripe for a new surge of cases if people stop following social distancing and begin resuming indoor activities with other people. Sadly, both those things appear to be occurring throughout the US.
Two weeks hence, one of one thing inevitably occurred.
New cases are now rising in all five states. I wrote about the flat tails of the curves for the seven-day averages. A quick look at the chart shows those have swung upwards, in some cases sharply.
New case curves in PA, NJ, DE, VA, & IL.
Two weeks ago I referenced Europe as a cautionary tale. Governments there eased up on their restrictions, cases surged, and then as hospitalisations rose, governments had to reimpose restrictions and effect new lockdowns. Europe has typically been 3–4 weeks ahead of us throughout the pandemic. So that we are now at a point where we are seeing rising cases, absolutely none of this should be surprising.
The evidence has been in our faces for weeks, plus we have the European example to look at. Reopening makes no sense until we can get case numbers lower, especially with new more virulent and lethal strains of coronavirus now circulating.
Deaths too have been trending the wrong way over the last few weeks.
Death curves for PA, NJ, DE, VA, & IL.
We have seen the curves largely bottom out. And if you look closely, these bottoms are higher than the rates we saw last summer, in some cases more than 3× as much. This flattening occurred just a few weeks after cases began to flatten. The question becomes, will they rise in a few weeks time? Or have we vaccinated enough of our most vulnerable populations?
That’s the real wildcard.
Right now, we have only fully vaccinated about 15% of the populations of Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Illinois.
Vaccination curves for PA, VA, & IL.
Is that enough to prevent hospitalisations and deaths in what looks like will be a fourth wave?
Or just shake my hand, because today marks the second St. Patrick’s Day spent in isolation. I am lucky, of course, because two years ago I spent the holiday in Dublin. One of those bucket list kind of things. There I ran into a(n American) friend who was coincidentally in town. Then the next day I took the train to Cork to visit another friend. If you don’t count weddings, I think that was the last big trip I took.
Two years hence, I am here in my flat alone on a holiday meant to be spent with family and friends. But in the last year, I made significant progress on my Irish genealogy. For part of that progress I took two additional DNA tests. So this St. Patrick’s Day seems like a good time to reflect on those tests.
For those that don’t know, I do a lot of genealogy work as a hobby. Primarily I focus on paper records, but DNA is an important piece of the puzzle. In a sense, it is the only record that cannot lie. It will reveal your biological connections to family that may have been otherwise lost. And it cannot be faked.
But that’s only true for your genetic matches. Those are the real power of taking a DNA test. I would bet, however, that most people initially take the tests for the ethnicity estimates. On a day like today, how Irish are you? How Irish am I?
That’s a lot of green.
Not surprisingly, I’m pretty Irish.
Of course, if you look at me, those Irish values do not quite equal each other. So what’s the deal? After all, the underlying DNA does not change from spit tube to cheek swab.
The first thing to know is that in one sense, ethnicity is, like so many things, a social construct. Super broadly, every individual is unique—except twins. Of course humans have spread across the globe and in that spread, certain regions have evolved incredibly slight differences between the populations. In addition to those genetic differences, the populations created civilisations and cultures. An ethnicity, in a sense, is a group of people who share that culture, civilisation, and genetic similarities vis-a-vis genetic differences across the world.
Importantly, within those groups, we still have differences. The Irish, for example, are known for freckles and red hair. But not all Irish have those traits. Instead, again super broadly, we say that for a group of people, a certain percentage will share a certain set of features. Consequently, within an ethnic group, you will still have variations and outliers. In some cases because generations ago a traveller from a different group entered the gene pool for some reason or another. And while the offspring might identify entirely with their new civilisation and culture, their genes don’t lie and a DNA test would reveal their traits from their ancestor’s foreign gene pool.
The second point to make is that Ireland is a fairly modern creation. Ireland did not exist as a sovereign state until 1922. Before then, the idea of Ireland existed. The country, however, did not. A better example would be German or Italian. Neither Germany nor Italy existed until the 1870s and 1860s, respectively. If you have “German” ancestors who arrived in Philadelphia in 1848, you don’t have German ancestors. You have ancestors from one of the various principalities or bishoprics comprising the German Confederation. Italy had the Venetian Republic, the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, and many others. Being Irish, German, or Italian is thus a modern construct.
The third point is that identifying anyone as any of these ethnic groups requires a baseline for a comparison. To do that, you need a reference population in the area you are going to define as Ireland, Germany, or Italy. But humans have migrated throughout history. Ireland was conquered by the English. Germans…well, let’s just say Germans have a history with conquering parts of Europe. And so you can see exchanges of genetic information among populations pretty easily. And over time, those genetic populations evolve.
Take those three points and add them together in admixture test and your results are really only good back to about 500 years. And even then, you may find yourself belonging to something incredibly vague and all-encompassing because, especially as with France and Germany, there’s been too much mixture to get so granular as to fit ourselves within the borders of modern political states.
In the above results, you can see my “Irishness” varies from 63% to 75%. Though, as far as I know 21/32 (66%) of my 3xgreat-grandparents arrived from Ireland. That’s why I say I’m 2/3 Irish. But, genetically, I may be more or less because those 21 might have English or Scottish ancestors. Ancestry says I may be 18% Scottish, but whilst I have ancestors who lived in Scotland, I’m not aware of any ancestors born and raised for multiple generations in Scotland.
And then that’s just how Ancestry defines it. Compare that to my results from My Heritage. Because of the aforementioned difficulty in separating out certain population groups, they lump the Irish, Scottish, and Welsh together. Add my Ancestry Irish and Scottish together and I have 81%, not far from My Heritage’s 85% estimate. Then look at my results from Family Tree. They estimate me as 75% Irish, but add in the 10% Scandinavia and I’m up to 85%.
That brings me to my last point about DNA tests. It’s probably fair to say that I’m something like 80–85% genetically from the British Isles/North Sea region. What about the other 15–20%?
You will often hear you receive half your DNA from each of your parents. And they get half from each of theirs and so on and so forth. I’ve had conversations with folks who take that to mean they get 25% from each grandparent and 12.5% from each great-grandparent et cetera. But that’s not quite true.
You do receive 50% of your DNA from your father and the other 50% from your mother. But that 50%, well that’s a sort of random sample from the share your parents received from their parents.
My maternal grandfather was 100% Carpatho-Rusyn. For generations, his ancestors lived, reproduced, and died in the Carpathian Mountains. If we received exactly half from each previous generation, I should expect 25% of my DNA from my grandfather. But Ancestry, which has the best representation of this small ethnic group, says it’s 17% (though they give it as a range of being between 2 and 27%). In other words, I’m missing seven percentage points.
And so if you take a DNA test and you know you have a great-great grandparents of Irish descent, you may only see a small fraction in your results. If your connection to Ireland (or anywhere else) is even further back, the result becomes smaller still. In fact, beyond 5–7 generations back, you may not even inherit any genetic material from a specific ancestor in your family tree.
But ultimately, for today, as I wrote in one of my very first posts here on Coffeespoons, back in 2010, on St. Patrick’s Day, we’re all at least a little bit Irish.
Hopefully next year we’ll be able to celebrate in person.
Last week I wrote about how our progress in dealing with Covid-19 was stagnating. To put it simply, this past week did not get any better on that front.
New case curves for PA, NJ, DE, VA, & IL.
In Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Illinois we see that the flattened tail I described last week, well remained a flattened tail. In Delaware, we see more movement, but the average of the average, if you will, is flat over the last two weeks. And in New Jersey, where I mentioned some signs of rising numbers, we see a clearly rising number of new cases over the last week. Only in Virginia are numbers heading down, and those are shallowing out.
The problem here is that in Pennsylvania and Delaware, the new case rate, whilst flat, is well above the summer rate of low transmission. This means that the environment is ripe for a new surge of cases if people stop following social distancing and begin resuming indoor activities with other people. Sadly, both those things appear to be occurring throughout the US.
In Europe we see a cautionary tale. They too saw their holidays peaks decline and the national governments began easing restrictions on their populations. Within the last several days, however, new cases have begun to surge. Italy has gone so far as to announce a new lockdown. Other governments are considering the same.
If the United States cannot resume pushing its numbers of new cases down, it could well follow Europe into a new wave of outbreaks that would threaten lockdowns and push back our eventual return of normalcy.
None of this would be an issue if vaccinations were nearing herd immunity levels. However, in the states we cover, nowhere is above 12% fully vaccinated.
Vaccination curves for PA, VA, & IL.
Pennsylvania now lags behind the other two states. But at least the Commonwealth is over 10% fully vaccinated.
And of course, the problem under this dire scenario is that deaths could rise once again, though at this point the most vulnerable are in the middle of being vaccinated. Indeed, if we look at the last week, we see the good news for the week, that deaths are headed down in all five states.
Death curves for PA, NJ, DE, VA, & IL.
Previously, Virginia had been working through a backlog of death records, but those appear now cleared. We are not quite back to summer-level lows, but we are steadily approaching them.
The big question this week will be what happens to those new cases numbers. Today’s data, Monday, will likely show lower numbers because of lower testing on the weekend. But starting Tuesday, what do we see over the course of the next five days?
