Pictures as Data

A recurring theme of these missives is that fancy inferential methods, frequentist or silly Bayesian, are oft times not only not needed, but simply the wrong approach. Oft times, just looking out the window will tell you what the weather is. Lo and behold, pictures tell us much about Covid-19.

Satellite images of hospital parking lots in Wuhan as well as internet search trends, show the coronavirus may have been spreading in China as early as last August, according to a new study from Harvard Medical School.

Both sophisticated and simple at the same time. Similar, in intent, to excess death analysis. And, just by the way, these researchers used public satellite imaging. Imagine, if you will, what the Intelligence Community imaging was revealing in the same time period. In other words, the IC told The Very Unstable Lunatic's minions what was happening months before it's been admitted.

"Both the idea that hospital parking lots or business can be used can be a relative indicator for something happening in a population," Brownstein said. "We actually published on this years ago where we showed that hospitals in Latin America got super busy during flu season. You could predict flu season just by looking at the parking lots."

A nice way of saying that this isn't their first rodeo.