Tag Archives: IHME

New estimates of total global COVID-19 deaths from IHME

Posted on May 10, 2021 by colinmathers

A few days ago, the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) released estimates of total COVID-19 deaths for countries based on comparisons of total deaths from all causes during the pandemic period with the expected total deaths based on … Continue reading →

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Are the Lancet authorship criteria adequate?

Posted on September 27, 2020 by colinmathers

In May, the Lancet published a peer-reviewed study claiming to analyse data from nearly 15,000 patients who had received the drug hydroxychloroquine for treatment of Covid-19. The study concluded that patients who received the drug were dying at a higher … Continue reading →

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WHO and global health statistics

Posted on August 25, 2020 by colinmathers

My paper “History of global burden of disease assessment at the World Health Organization”  has just been published in Archives of Public Health. It reviews WHO work on Global Burden of Disease over the last 20 years and the challenges … Continue reading →

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COVID-19 projections and reality

Posted on May 6, 2020 by colinmathers

On 27th April, I posted some short-run projections of COVID-19 cases and deaths. The plots below show how the daily new cases per million population and deaths per million population compare with reality (at least the confirmed case rates and … Continue reading →

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COVID-19 short-run projections

Posted on April 27, 2020 by colinmathers

Purely statistical predictions of future trends in COVID-19 deaths or cases, even including predictive covariates, have been unable to make sensible forecasts that are not highly sensitive to slight additions of data. The only useful models have been the more … Continue reading →

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Critics agree that IHME COVID-19 projection model is flawed

Posted on April 18, 2020 by colinmathers

I downloaded the latest IHME update of its COVID-19 projections yesterday to do another evaluation. Their projections still look very problematic. Other disease modellers and epidemiologists are coming to the same conclusion. An article just published in Statnews was much … Continue reading →

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How useful are IHME projections of the coronavirus pandemic?

Posted on April 14, 2020 by colinmathers

The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), based at the University of Washington in Seattle, caused considerable alarm on 7 April when it released projections of Covid-19 deaths which predicted total deaths for the UK would be the highest … Continue reading →

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WHO and the Global Burden of Disease

Posted on May 7, 2019 by colinmathers

As a former WHO staff member, who played a key role in the production and clearance of WHO health statistics over the last 15 years, and a long-time collaborator with the Global Burden of Disease (GBD) enterprise and with the … Continue reading →

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Child mortality continues to decline, but large disparities remain

Posted on October 25, 2017 by colinmathers

The United Nations Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation (UN-IGME) released new data last week showing that the world has made substantial progress in reducing child mortality in the last several decades. The total number of child deaths has dropped … Continue reading →

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