(2021-03-18) Zvi M Covid0318 An Expected Quantity Of Blood Clots

Zvi Mowshowitz: Covid-19 3/18: An Expected Quantity of Blood Clots. Europe suspended administration of the AstraZeneca vaccine over reports of blood clots. This was ludicrously stupid several times over.

The WHO and EMA said there was no evidence there was an issue.

None of that mattered, as one by one countries suspended injections as part of a blame avoidance strategy

Meanwhile, in the United States, deaths are happily way down, but case numbers have stopped dropping due to the rise of the new strains, and will likely start ticking upwards once again for a while. Whether or not this will count as a last surge/wave is unclear, it looks like the strains aren’t as additionally infectious as we feared and vaccinations are going well, so it might not be so bad.

Results from WaPo Covid page, which I picked last week as the data source

*Europe halted AstraZeneca vaccinations. And that’s terrible.

Then again, at least they started doing AstraZeneca vaccinations, without which halting them would have been impossible. America didn’t even start them, and have been holding hostage tens of millions of doses?*

makes me think about blame incidence, especially now that I (may? have begun to?) understand how central blame is in decision making.

The English Strain

Curve fitting gives a rise in R0 from the new strain of only 35%. If that’s accurate, then the model predicts that the new strain prolongs our pain, but there is never a last surge.

What that model isn’t doing is drawing any distinctions between regions

That could plausibly mean that we’re underestimating the danger substantially and will see surges in the harder hit places.

Six Feet Good, Three Feet Acceptable In Pinch

The CDC suggests child prison social distancing requirements could soon change, and be reduced from six feet to three feet. You see, there was one recent study that said with full and proper masking that three feet distancing was “safe.”

As always when thinking about child prisons, it’s hard for me to get behind putting our children in child prisons, but given that the alternative is virtual child prisons that are very clearly even worse, and the economic aspects of all this, I’m fine with treating the desire to reopen the child prisons as legitimate. Given that need, and the real physical risks involved, the previous guidelines were wrong and the potential new guidelines are better.

We Must Protect This House

The House of Representatives has a problem. They would like to return to normal operations, but 25% of their members are being idiots and refusing to get vaccinated

If I were in charge of the house, I’d tell everyone to get vaccinated because starting in a few weeks I was going to expel anyone who wasn’t, or at least bar the doors and not let them in until they fix it, whether or not there’s a way to let them do remote voting anyway