Hannah Recht’s Tweets

Is Paxlovid, the Covid Pill, Reaching Those Who Most Need It? The Government Won’t Say

May 12

NEW 🚨: Los Angeles County has worked hard to ensure its vulnerable residents have access to covid drugs. But without federal data, they don’t know how many have taken Paxlovid or where the latest shipments went. L.A. isn’t alone. 🧵

khn.org

Many public health workers are unable to see how many doses of Pfizer’s antiviral treatment are shipped to their communities and cannot tell whether vulnerable residents are filling prescriptions a…

Ghost kitchens are a new kind of nightmare for those of us with food allergies that we never had to deal with just a few years ago, especially the non-obvious ones. Often impossible to know if your seemingly-safe restaurant has a side operation onsite.

dcist.com

There's A New Food Court In Dupont Circle. It's Probably Not What You're Picturing.

Underground Food Court, a new D.C. eatery serving food from five brands and counting, is turning the food court concept on its head.

12h

Super important! Got covid in DC? You can now get treated for free without leaving your home.

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Chelsea Cirruzzo

@ChelseaCirruzzo

· 13h

D.C. residents can now access Paxlovid via telehealth for free. Eligible residents will either have the antiviral delivered to their homes or to their closest pharmacy. color.com/covid-19-treat

excuse me, come again? 👀👀👀👀

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Orphan Black

@OrphanBlack

· Jul 28

Meet the star and executive producer of #OrphanBlackEchoes, @krystenritter.

John Tozzi

@jtozz

Medical Prices Have Never Been So Detailed, or So Confusing

NEW: “I never knew you could get 22 billion rows in one file.” Health-care price transparency still a work in progress...

bloomberg.com

Hi, it’s John in New York. Prices for medical care in the US have long been hard to find because they were hidden among layers of private contracts between middlemen. New transparency rules that took...

Ironically the default example in

@uscensusbureau

's data site is a search for poverty. Which leads to ACS data. NOT SAIPE. People using the wrong data is a documentation and dissemination failure. I don't blame the data users who really are trying but are misdirected.

Screenshot of data.census.gov main search window, with prompt saying "Try searching for poverty in Georgia in 2017"

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Topics to follow

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Small Area Health Insurance Estimates (SAHIE) Program

But the good news is SAHIE and SAIPE *are* in the APIs with the latest data and so if you're using R censusapi or some other code you can get it just as easily as ACS. There are also downloadable tables with the data.

I have asked the Census Bureau numerous times to update their outdated documentation for these surveys, particularly in the APIs, and to add them to data.census.gov. Unfortunately it's really hard for people who don't know to find the right data. Everything points to ACS.

Yes you can get the single-year state or larger county estimates from the 1 year ACS. But you stillwant to use SAHIE (insurance) or SAIPE (poverty.) Including administrative data makes these estimates far superior to survey data alone. I've been screaming about this for years. 😭

Good resource on why you should be using SAHIE for your county/state health insurance rates and not ACS! SAHIE incorporates administrative data, not just unreliable survey responses, and has 1-year data for all counties. 5-year health insurance data in this post-ACA environment??

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Matthew Rae

@matthew_t_rae

· Jul 28

Replying to @hannah_recht

This poster shows the difference between SAHIE and 5-yr ACS. census.gov/content/dam/Ce

1-year poverty data for states, counties, school districts: census.gov/programs-surve Health insurance data: census.gov/programs-surve Both available by API. Don't use the ACS for these data points PLEASE I beg you.

census.gov

eternal scream into the wind: stop using the ACS for state/county poverty or health insurance data you are looking for SAIPE and SAHIE not ACS!!! 😭

Doctors offices and clinics that need small supplies of Evusheld for their immunocompromised patients can finally now order them, and there's a new phone number for ordering too - mirroring what NYC did on its own months ago orderevusheld.com

The Ambulance Chased One Patient Into Collections

Brett Kelman

@BrettKelman

Jul 27

Three siblings take identical ambulance rides but one get billed more than twice the others. How? "The simple answer is that these bills are all made up."

khn.org

After a car wreck, three siblings were transported to the same hospital by ambulances from three separate districts. The sibling with the most minor injuries got the biggest bill.

Jul 27

Especially tuning in to the sessions on Quarto, knitr advancements, Github integrations 👀

rstudio::conf is live streaming for free with closed captions in English, Spanish, and Chinese. This is how you do accessibility, folks. So excited to be able to listen in without the covid risk. rstudio.com/conference/str

RStudio

@rstudio

Jul 27

Welcome to day one of rstudio::conf talks + keynotes! If you're not in Washington D.C., join us online for a day full of great content, learning, and meeting new data science community members. A couple highlights in today's schedule are in the thread below. 🧵 1/3

Absolutely horrific.

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Kelly Johnson

@makefinestories

· Jul 25

She was illegally billed for a rape kit. She waited 7 years for debt collectors to stop calling about it. @aneripattani npr.org/2022/07/25/111

Jul 25

I don't have plans to incorporate the microdata API tabulation capabilities because this just isn't usable syntax. But um, this is a thing you can do with the raw APIs if really want to.

Screenshot of Census documentation about the tabulate data API query. The resulting JSON does not conform to any known standards.

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censusapi now documents how to use the microdata APIs. There are several hundred of them! I still stan IPUMS forever but the APIs are very nice for working with brand new data.

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Release v0.8.0 · Issue #85 · hrecht/censusapi

· Feb 9

Fun easter egg for true R + Census nerds only: You can use censusapi to get Census PUMS data with the same syntax for getting summary data.

I'm not going to document it because it's an incredibly dumb way to get the microdata & those APIs are unstable. But it does work!

Big upgrades so far: you can now get variable labels to make a complete data dictionary, which is especially helpful for working with microdata. Plus some bug fixes and working on years old documentation. hrecht.com/censusapi/news

Good morning #RStats censusapi users: v0.8.0 is in active development. If you have feature requests that are within the package's scope or have encountered bugs, now is the time to speak up. Submit a Github issue so I can track it. Remaining todos:

github.com

For changes already made see the changelog Remaining todos Finish cleaning up listCensusMetadata(type = "variables") - don't remove predicates, remove unnecessary code Bin...

Getting in some open source work while it's too hot to do anything else. #rstats censusapi users, now is the time to submit your bugs and feature requests. #cranxiety

GIF

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This survey seeks to gather new data on how the field of journalism is evolving, as well as who makes up the news nerd community and other groups served by OpenNews.

OpenNews

@opennews

Jul 21

It's deadline time: Take the News Nerd Survey today: opennews.org/2022-survey We're aiming to close the survey this week and we need to hear from YOU!

opennews.org

2022 OpenNews Survey

Ask me about hospitals that jointly report to CMS if you really want to see me yell

today in: very niche data things that have made my skin crawl for nearly a decade!!

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David Anderson

@bjdickmayhew

· Jul 20

As part of the data cleaning, looking at counties where a single corporate parent (ie UHC or UPMC) offers multiple distinct subsidiaries on Healthcare.gov @xpostfactoid @charles_gaba @LouiseNorris @michaelannica @farrahmadanay @AssumeNormality

Emma Carew Grovum

@emmacarew

Jul 20

Once again, if your newsroom does not provide access to tools like: - 1password or similar - DeleteMe - TallPoppy If you aren't using software like: - Signal - Protonmail or similar - SecureDrop Good resources exist to help modernize your journalism:

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Emma Carew Grovum

@emmacarew

· Jul 20

If you need help building a digital security program for your newsroom (whether you are a manager, an exec or someone who is tired of not being supported institutionally), here are some resources to get you started (from people much smarter than me). THREAD: (1/?)

Show this thread

Jul 18

have been in a hole of nightmarish data cleaning for too many weeks no brainpower left for good tweets send tweet

Conservative blocs unleash wave of litigation to curb public health powers

Lauren Weber

@LaurenWeberHP

Jul 18

Meet the trio of conservative legal blocs that has rolled back public health authority at the local, state and federal levels, recasting America's ability to fight infectious disease. My latest

investigation w/

A coalition of religious groups, conservative think tanks, and Republican attorneys general have chipped away at local and state authority, altering how the nation can respond during health crises.

386

377

News nerds: share your salary (anonymized) for this incredibly important resource

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OpenNews

@opennews

· Jul 14

Thank you so much to everyone who has already taken our survey! We've heard from over 200 respondents, which is amazing(!!). We're aiming to hear from 400 people from the OpenNews community and would love to reach many more people. Help us reach our goal opennews.org/2022-survey

Hospital-Acquired Pneumonia Is Killing Patients. Yet There Is a Simple Way to Stop It.

Jul 14

In a sea of news don't miss this great article about how brushing the teeth of hospitalized patients saves lives, by

@BrettKelman

khn.org/news/article/h (But medical insurance considers dental care to be a totally separate thing, of course.)

khn.org

Hospital-acquired pneumonia not tied to ventilators is one of the most common infections that strike within health care facilities. But few hospitals take steps to prevent it, which can be as simpl…

Jul 14

Texas complaint says the guidance is an "attempt to use federal law to transform every emergency room in the country into a walk-in abortion clinic." Absolutely not what the CMS guidance lays out.

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Alice Miranda Ollstein

@AliceOllstein

· Jul 14

BREAKING: Texas is suing the Biden administration over its guidance to doctors on the obligation to provide abortions in emergency medical situations. Story tk... justsecurity.org/wp-content/upl

Kyle Walker

@kyle_e_walker

Jul 13

Geodemographic classification is a popular spatial #DataScience technique for marketing, customer segmentation, and understanding regional dynamics. In my book, learn how to use

@uscensusbureau

data and #rstats / #rspatial for geodemographics! A thread: walker-data.com/census-r/model

curly hair cuts for women: $700 and your first born, $400 extra for wash and diffuse curly cuts for men at the same salon: $50 🤔

Online Abortion Pill Provider Hey Jane Used Tracking Tools That Sent Visitor Data to Meta, Google,...

Jon Keegan

@jonkeegan

Jul 1

Online abortion pill provider Hey Jane used trackers that sent visitor data to Meta, Google, and others. We also found personally identifying information, including a customer's Instagram profile in their reviews data. Story w/

@darakerr

: themarkup.org/pixel-hunt/202 (fixed link) 1/2

themarkup.org

Personal information from reviewers was also exposed until The Markup’s inquiry

New York City Will Offer Paxlovid at Mobile Testing Sites, a First in the U.S.

The New York Times

@nytimes

Jul 1

New York City is creating the first mobile testing units in the U.S. that will allow people who test positive for the coronavirus to immediately receive for free the antiviral treatment Paxlovid.

nytimes.com

Mayor Eric Adams says that offering immediate prescriptions to people who test positive at the mobile sites will help address concerns over inequities in distributing antiviral treatments.

656

2,613

Even Exceptions To Abortion Bans Pit A Mother’s Life Against Doctors’ Fears

For this story,

and I spoke to a woman who woke up in pain, losing eyesight and vomiting uncontrollably at 8 wks. Doctors told her they couldn't treat her bc she was pregnant. She had to find/arrange an abortion on her own.

fivethirtyeight.com

Medical professionals, legal experts and researchers we spoke to said abortion exceptions for the life of the mother are usually vague, creating an environment where patients have to meet some...

Mira Rojanasakul

@rjnskl

Jun 30

always ✨inspect the element✨ great investigation on greenwashing in the fast fashion industry by

@AShendruk

👇

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Amanda Shendruk

@AShendruk

· Jun 30

Attention programmers

Code can be greenwashing, too. Here's an example: On H&M's site, we found code with non-variable placeholder text that assumed only the best, and ignored negative signs. Our investigation: qz.com/2180075/hm-sho