(2020-12-24) Zvi Covid 12/24: Were F'ed Its Over

Zvi Mowshowitz: Covid 12/24: We’re F**ed, It’s Over. A year ago, there were reports coming out of China about a new coronavirus. (COVID-19) The media told us it was nothing to worry about. This past week, it likely happened again.

A new strain of Covid-19 has emerged from southern England (B117), along with a similar one in South Africa (B1351).

all signs point to it being about 65% more infectious than the old one.

There is no plausible way that a Western country can sustain restrictions that can overcome that via anything other than widespread immunity.

This isn’t about proof via experiment, or ruling out all possible alternative explanations. This is about likelihood ratios and probabilities. And on that front, as far as I can tell, it doesn’t look good.

Let’s run the numbers

Why are we no longer expanding testing? It seems clear now that our capacity hasn’t been expanding in December

The big news this week is that England has identified a new strain of Covid-19 that is ‘up to 70% more infectious’.

what the hell does ‘70% more infectious’ mean?

One sensible definition of this is that 70% more people get infected each day, so it raises R0 by that percentage. If previously things were stable, 70% more infectious would cause infections to rise 70% each serial interval, which I’ve been approximating at about five days. So if it was this, things would about double each week.

this refers to the sensible thing of “percent rise in infections each cycle” R0 thing:

this seems rather like it can be summed up as: We’re fucked, it’s over.

Does that sound like something any Western country could possibly accomplish from here?

Under such dire circumstances, a phase 4 lockdown has been invoked. What does that mean?

The missing restrictions that stick out are not shutting down houses of worship, and allowing people to move house. Also funerals can go up to 30 people, whereas weddings are capped at 6. Also ‘support groups’ can meet up to 15 people and I don’t see anything saying it needs to be outdoors.

The rules are porous enough that they aren’t enforceable against the things that are risky but enforceable enough to shut down the relatively safe actions that keep people sane.

And with weird exceptions for remarkably large indoor gatherings for certain events that are textbook superspreaders.

If the estimate of 65% more infectious is correct: The strain doubles every week under conditions where other strains are stable

My father sent me this video (24 min) that makes the case for all of this being mostly a nothingburger

Alas, as is often the case with academics that are good at learning and explaining scientific things, the epistemology is bonkers.

All of which is not how knowledge or Bayes’ rule works. It’s not how any of this works.

Experiments are not some special class of thing that are the only way one can make predictions or assign probabilities, and it’s weird that people can be so good at academic scientific thinking while not understanding this, and in fact it seems that when we train people to do academic science we also train them to not think about other information and to be careful not to use Bayes’ rule and to ridicule anyone who tries to use non-academic information in order to know things.

With that in mind, we look at the evidence and think about possible explanations, and mostly I find that there aren’t other plausible ones worth assigning much weight to.

This definitely does qualify under “hot damn, look at this chart.” This is a huge, dramatic increase in infections happening very quickly. A doubling in one week.

The other plausible causes of such a rapid rise are not present. England didn’t suddenly relax its conditions this much

*If my understanding of the situation is correct, there is only one conclusion:

This variant cannot be stopped short of mass vaccinations. It is not going to be stopped short of mass vaccinations*

It seems that Pfizer executives are sitting around baffled that they have millions of additional doses of vaccine

Then there’s the issue of that second dose. The science behind why you need two doses is strong and makes sense, except for the little matter of the data. It’s clear that the first dose alone is much more than half as effective as two, and we don’t have enough doses

Multiple sources confirm that there is no reason to expect a six-months-later second dose to be any less effective a booster.

The decision to balk at buying extra doses might be the worst single decision of the last four years, of any kind

Quest for the Test

The good news is a $5 paper test strip has been approved by the FDA for home use. Of course, doing so legally will require an additional $25 so a digital MD service can watch you do it, which also means all sorts of coordination problems and activation energy and having to be observed by medical people silently judging you.

What Happens Now?

The biggest question is, instead, is the new English strain (or another similar strain like the one found in South Africa) really 65% more infectious as measured by infections per infected individual?

On the potentially very good news front is the other big question. Is the new strain less virulent (dangerous) than the old one, and if so by how much?

When this starts to happen, how will the authorities react?

there is not that much room to move faster without much more aggressive disregarding of barriers put in to prevent action, which would cause a ton of cognitive dissonance, and is not Biden’s style.

The question is what our actual, present authorities will do.

We could probably start this on January 20 and still make it.

To be clear: We won’t attempt to do this, and it won’t happen. But it’s important to note that we still could, in at least some sense, still win, while also noting that we will lose.