The paper describing the method used to obtain WHO excess mortality estimates is here: faculty.washington.edu/jonno/space-st… This is the revision of the submitted paper. Joint work with Victoria Knutson,@aleshings,Ariel Karlinsky and William Msemburi Supplement is also at link

Jon Wakefield talks to Saahil Menghani abt Ministry of Health 's bogus attempts to rubbish World Health Organization (WHO) 's Covid mortality data for IND

I am teaching in the UW Biostatistics summer institutes this summer. Bayesian Statistics with Ken Rice, Spatial Statistics with Lance Waller and Small Area Estimation. Full details here: si.biostat.washington.edu if you're interested in attending

We are pleased to announce that International Biometric Society (IBS) will name Dr. Elizabeth Thompson an Honorary Life Member. See details here: bit.ly/3ytEaMV

The UN’s 2022 World Population Prospects #WPP2022 just released: population.un.org/wpp led by @Patrick_Gerland: World population to exceed 8B on November 15, India to overtake China in 2023. Probabilistic projections using our University of Washington group’s methods bayespop.csss.washington.edu/index.html

Katie Wilson & Jon Wakefield describe a computationally efficient model-based approach that allows summary birth history and full birth history data to be combined into analyses of under-5 mortality in a natural way. demographic-research.org/volumes/vol47/…

Peter Gao and I have a new paper on variance smoothing in small area estimation (SAE) arxiv.org/abs/2209.02602 The models we propose should allow more widespread use of robust SAE models, particularly in the context of health indicators in low and middle income countries

Yunhan Wu and I have a new paper on how to acknowledge urban/rural stratification in small area estimation: arxiv.org/abs/2209.10619 We estimate spatial HIV prevalence in women of age 15-49 in Malawi using the stratification/aggregation method we propose

Our department is offering a pre-application review service (PARS) initiative to provide support and mentorship to PhD applicants from historically marginalized groups. See details here: stat.uw.edu/pre-applicatio…

Just a friendly reminder that the deadline to be fully considered for our Tenure-Track Assistant Professor position is today (10/24). apply.interfolio.com/110545

WHO Nature paper on excess mortality for 194 countries is out: nature.com/articles/s4158…

In the supplement to the WHO Nature paper nature.com/articles/s4158… we examine the relative excess mortality rate of the UK, as compared to 27 EU countries, by month. This in response to intense political debate, as we discuss.

While on a summer visit at our Institute Yuan Hsiao and Lee Fiorio started to work on a recently published paper co-authored by Jonathan Wakefield University of Washington and our Director Emilio Zagheni. They propose a new method to combine digital data and official statistics. journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.11…

Finally, Lancet published 5(!) letters of concern on the reliability of IHME's excess death estimates. Mistakes happen, but while flawed WHO estimates were publicly admitted & corrected within days, IHME dragged their feet for 10 months and still doesn't own the problems. 🧵

Global estimation is a massive task – bugs will happen. So the question is, do you have a culture that allows you to publicly admit and correct mistakes. The WHO team under Jon Wakefield had this culture. The IHME, in this instance, had not.nature.com/articles/d4158…

The paper on the WHO excess mortality methods is out: projecteuclid.org/journals/annal… Thanks to my co-authors: Victoria Knutson, @aleshings, Ariel Karlinsky, William Msemburi. This is a snapshot of where we were, and the work continues...

Yunhan Wu & Jon Wakefield formalize a framework that accounts for urban/rural (U/R) 🏙️🏞️ stratification in unit-level SAE models based on household surveys 👉doi.org/10.1093/jrsssa… 🧵

Work led by PhD students Qianyu Dong (qianyu313.github.io/qd33/), Yunhan Wu, Andrea Boskovic; and Jon Wakefield. ShinyApp version to come soon!

And while on this thread, more📦news: check out the new functions in *survey* package on SAE created by Peter Gao: cran.r-project.org/web/packages/s… These are wrappers for similar functions in *SUMMER* package, but tailored to users familiar with survey package.