It’s great to see more thoughtful posts proposing new global health and development interventions. Upvoted.
Just sharing as an FYI—one of the key papers you cite for the cost-effectiveness analysis issued a correction, and the revised estimate of DALYs averted is 149 thousand rather than 14.9 million. It looks like there was an order of magnitude error somewhere along the way in their calculations.
Thanks for letting me know! I’ll change the takeaways. Yes, that is a key change. I thought it seemed very high, but I am not an expert in DALY estimation, and it’s easy to get reckless with numbers plucked from other people’s work...
I’m still concerned because 149,000 DALYs seems very low when compared to the GBD’s estimate of 66,000 premature deaths. Even if those deaths were all elderly people who would have lived only one year, that means only 83,000 DALYs were lost from exposure of (a comparable number of) children, pregnant women, etc to massive spikes in pollution. That doesn’t seem right—the rest of that study seems to indicate that a large fraction of the burden comes from disease rather than death. I suppose I don’t understand this kind of study enough!
This 100x change is huge, and I think deserves a prominent note in the main text, either significantly rewriting the cost-effetiveness section based on this number, or at least putting something like [EDIT: this cost-effectiveness calculation is no longer endorsed by the author, due to a mistake in the paper cited].
That said, I think this is not as irreconcilable as it seems, as the new 149k DALYs figure is only referring to Punjab, Haryana and Delhi, which account for ~5% of India’s population, whereas the 66k deaths figure is for India as a whole. It is not as simple as just multiplying through by ~20 to get the DALYs for the whole country, as the impression i get is that those states are unusually bad for crop residue burning.
Great post though, I would be excited to see more work on this :)
Yes, I will make the change prominently after Christmas. Even though it’s in three states, those are the states that experience the vast majority of pollution, so I’m still very surprised.
It’s great to see more thoughtful posts proposing new global health and development interventions. Upvoted.
Just sharing as an FYI—one of the key papers you cite for the cost-effectiveness analysis issued a correction, and the revised estimate of DALYs averted is 149 thousand rather than 14.9 million. It looks like there was an order of magnitude error somewhere along the way in their calculations.
Thanks for letting me know! I’ll change the takeaways. Yes, that is a key change. I thought it seemed very high, but I am not an expert in DALY estimation, and it’s easy to get reckless with numbers plucked from other people’s work...
I’m still concerned because 149,000 DALYs seems very low when compared to the GBD’s estimate of 66,000 premature deaths. Even if those deaths were all elderly people who would have lived only one year, that means only 83,000 DALYs were lost from exposure of (a comparable number of) children, pregnant women, etc to massive spikes in pollution. That doesn’t seem right—the rest of that study seems to indicate that a large fraction of the burden comes from disease rather than death. I suppose I don’t understand this kind of study enough!
This 100x change is huge, and I think deserves a prominent note in the main text, either significantly rewriting the cost-effetiveness section based on this number, or at least putting something like [EDIT: this cost-effectiveness calculation is no longer endorsed by the author, due to a mistake in the paper cited]. That said, I think this is not as irreconcilable as it seems, as the new 149k DALYs figure is only referring to Punjab, Haryana and Delhi, which account for ~5% of India’s population, whereas the 66k deaths figure is for India as a whole. It is not as simple as just multiplying through by ~20 to get the DALYs for the whole country, as the impression i get is that those states are unusually bad for crop residue burning. Great post though, I would be excited to see more work on this :)
Yes, I will make the change prominently after Christmas. Even though it’s in three states, those are the states that experience the vast majority of pollution, so I’m still very surprised.