mmarvick

What the poster means is that going from 0.79% to 0.04% means that 0.75% were prevented from getting it due to the vaccine. You go from 79 per 10000 to 4 per 10000, meaning you saved 75 per 10000.

But preventing 0.75% of the population from getting it out of the 0.79% who got it implies 94.9% (0.0075/0.0079) of those who _would_ have gotten it were prevented from getting it. That's the relative ratio.

I agree with the poster that the relative number seems more interesting. There are lots of things going on right now (masks, social distancing, etc.) to prevent people from getting COVID. The fact that only 0.79% of the placebo group got it implies a lot about _other_ mitigation factors, and puts a limiting force on how many can be saved by the vaccine (a number less than or equal to 0.79%). Like OP, I wonder if there's any case where the -0.75% number is interesting in and of itself. In fact, if we weren't social distancing, presumably the prevalence of COVID would be much higher and thus the absolute ratio of people prevented from getting COVID would be higher too.

The 95% effectiveness number should (theoretically) be the same no matter what other measures you're taking. It would reduce 0.79% of population from getting it to 0.04% getting it, and would reduce 10% of the population from getting it to 0.5% of the population getting it. I'm totally ignoring that lots of people getting the vaccine will lead to less people getting sick and less people spreading it (herd immunity), but you get the point.

The difference is that the FiveThirtyEight tool is taking into account the coupling between the outcomes. They project Trump's odds of winning PA at 13%, so if he does win PA it's likely he's doing better than expected in other competitive races. The originally linked tool is just showing all the combinations of outcomes for these 12 competitive races.

Sure, Biden would win the election if Trump won PA and FL but then lost Ohio and Georgia. But what are the odds that Trump wins PA and then loses Georgia? Unlikely.

I am by no means an expert here, but a couple thoughts back from my limited knowledge:

1) I don't think all carbon capture necessarily requires a lot of energy input. Planting trees is a more obvious example of this - of course, the trees rely on the sun's energy so it's not "low energy" in that sense, but we weren't going to harvest that energy any other way anyways. It's possible there are other solutions that are like that.

2) If we have an abundance of zero or low-carbon energy in the future that doesn't exist now, it might not matter that taking carbon out of the atmosphere uses more energy than the energy we got from putting carbon into the atmosphere to begin with.

To be clear, I really wish we'd just spend the money and take the sacrifice to use a lot less carbon right now. It certainly seems like a much easier problem to solve than trying to suck it back out later, and relying on it to work seems like a dumb risk. Even if we're confident that we'll inevitably need some amount of carbon capture and that the R&D will happen to develop it at scale, there's a good chance that it'd be easier and cheaper to put less carbon in the air now than to do more capture later.

> Portland's mass transit is a joke (I can bike downtown end-to-end faster than MAX can crawl through it)

TriMet is currently looking into moving MAX into a tunnel downtown, and with fewer stops [1]. Part of the reason it's _so slow_ right now through downtown is all the stops, and because it has to stop at lights.

[1] https://www.oregonmetro.gov/public-projects/max-tunnel-study