(2021-03-04) ZviM Covid-03/04 Declare Victory And Leave Home

Zvi Mowshowitz: Covid-19 3/4: Declare Victory and Leave Home. Our progress here suddenly looks great. I expected a surge to happen in March and am pleasantly surprised to see it happen this large and this quickly.

Now that we were provided a sufficiently urgent excuse that we were able to show that mRNA vaccines work, we’ve adopted them to create a vaccine for Malaria. Still very early but I consider this a favorite to end up working in some form within (regulatory burden) number of years. It’s plausible that the Covid-19 pandemic could end up net massively saving lives, and a lot of Effective Altruists (and anyone looking to actually help people) have some updating to do.

Can we please please please do some challenge trials and ramp up production in advance and otherwise give this the urgency it deserves? And speed up the approval process at least as much as we did for Covid? And fund the hell out of both testing this and doing research to create more mRNA vaccines? There’s also mRNA vaccines in the works for HIV, influenza and certain types of heart disease and cancer. These things having been around for a long time doesn’t make them not a crisis when we have the chance to fix them.

Test counts bounced back this week and that’s likely accounting for the bumps up in raw positive test counts in the Northeast and South. The situation is still clearly improving. Doesn’t mean I would start lifting mask mandates.

Vaccinations

Our progress here suddenly looks great. I expected a surge to happen in March and am pleasantly surprised to see it happen this large and this quickly.

The English Strain

is showing up in the case numbers! It’s showing up as a 20%-30% increase in cases

The switch to primarily B.1.1.7 infections seems to be poised to happen in early to mid March, which is later than I feared but clearly in the middle of the expected range.

We can all agree Andrew Cuomo is the worst, it seems, due to claims of sexual harassment. We were going to let the causing of and then covering up of thousands of deaths slide – I mean what politician hasn’t done that sort of thing this past year – but we have a zero tolerance policy for sexual harassment that reaches a threshold level of social media prominence.

It appears Operation Warp Speed had to be funded by raiding other sources because Congress couldn’t be bothered to fund it. As MR points out, this is a scandal because it was necessary, rather than because it was done. It’s scary, because it implies that under a different administration Operation Warp Speed could easily have not happened at all.

Doctor Fauci’s defense against First Doses First is a combination of pure FUD and… that it would be a messaging problem?

Zeynep article in The Atlantic about how our public health messaging has been a disaster... Post is excellent, and does a great job driving home the central things that went massively wrong with public health messaging. My only quibble is that harms from terrible regulation are treated as beyond scope and not discussed, which is reasonable in context but also feels like ignoring the elephant

And yes, she points out, still doing it

That’s all an excellent summary of the biggest failures, but I am not convinced it is fair to call them ‘mistakes.’

CDC guidelines for citizen behavior have always been at best aspirational (you could also use the word ‘crazy’) and mostly ignored. This never seemed wise to me, since once one realizes one is not going to do what the authority demands, one often ends up doing little or nothing

The danger is that we may have entered a new mode where people might actually listen to the CDC guidelines and make serious attempts to get people to follow them, perhaps indefinitely. “Infectious disease specialists” are like any other ‘specialist’, and think everyone should pay dearly to solve the particular problems they think about all day regardless of whether the cost/benefit analysis would make any sense if someone ever did one.