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The United States has purchased about 2B vaccine doses. No one is sure how many vaccines the US is sitting on today, but it’s estimated that the federal stockpile has as many as 100M doses of Moderna, Pfizer, and J&J, plus 60M of AstraZeneca (does not have emergency authorization from

Facebook keeps telling me to add a “frame” around my profile picture to advertise that I’ve been vaccinated from COVID-19. It’s disturbing. What business is my personal medical history to Facebook? Do they also offer the “I had my appendix removed” frame? The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)

The state of Washington has received almost 700k doses of the COVID-19 vaccine, yet has only distributed 34.8% of doses in-hand. What’s going on with the other 65% of doses? Could it be this convoluted distribution plan, which includes four phases, two tiers in the first phase, and 4 sub-tiers?

As Governor Jay Inslee shut down the state during the initial throws of the COVID-19 pandemic, the response by the Employment Security Division (ESD), responsible for distributing unemployment benefits, was to open up the state coffers. Anyone who applied received benefits and Washington ESD didn’t bother validating the identity of

Last week, you heard here that Governor Jay Inslee and Insurance Commissioner Mike Kreidler want to ban the use of credit scores by insurance companies. Their two, flawed arguments are that credit scores aren’t “fair” and aren’t correlated to insurance losses (they are) and that credit scores are racist (they

Washington State Insurance Commissioner Mike Kreidler joined Jay Inslee at his press conference yesterday to advocate the ban of credit information for insurance decisions. I remember 10 years ago when Kreidler wrote an op-ed in the Seattle Times pushing this same, tired policy, and I blogged a response. Here we

Loyal readers! Thanks for sticking with me. Thanksgiving, life, and bad data from King County Public Health are why you haven’t heard from me in a while. But King County FINALLY updated their data yesterday, so we can do some actual analysis. I was very interested to see movement, if

I predicted we would see 600 infections in a day last week, and King County came in with 2 days above 600. Last Wednesday came in at a whopping 689 infections. Thursday was close at 670. So for this week, it’s not out of the realm of possibility to hit

Oh boy. We continue to hit new highs for infections. Last week, I predicted we would hit 500 infections in a day this week, closely followed by 600. Well, last Thursday’s number was revised higher to 494. Hitting 500 is not far off. Hospitalizations and deaths still remain VERY low.

Remember on Monday when I said we breached our previous record high for infections twice in one week? Well, we did it again this week. “We’re #1” has a whole new meaning now. Friday, October 30th was revised higher to 415 infections, and Wednesday hit 402 infections, which will almost