(2021-05-13) ZviM Covid 5/13 Moving On

Zvi Mowshowitz: Covid-19 5/13: Moving On. Can life return fully to normal? Yes.

that doesn’t mean quite fully normal quite yet, in the sense that there’s an amount of indoor crowding I’d still be inclined to avoid for the next few weeks or months.

And of course, things may be going well in America and most other highly vaccinated places, but the worldwide pandemic is far from over

The Numbers

India

I mostly believe that things are no longer getting worse.

Vaccinations

We have now approved the Pfizer vaccine for children 12-15.

We had a steady decline in doses, and that decline has at least temporarily stalled out despite less people needing their second dose and despite more people having already been vaccinated, and before the 12-15 year old crowd started getting their shots.

Maybe It’s All a Coincidence

The following series of events occurred a few weeks ago:
The J&J vaccine was suspended for no (good) reason.
A lot less people suddenly got vaccinated in America.
Number of people vaccinated kept going down rapidly.
I and many others concluded #1 contributed a lot to #2 and #3.

There’s a not-completely-impossible case one could thus make that the J&J pause didn’t contribute meaningfully to the decline in vaccinations

I’m going to go ahead and propose this: Law of No Evidence: Any claim that there is “no evidence” of something is evidence of bullshit

The other explanation is that there’s at least some disconnect between what people say on a survey and what they do in practice.

I wouldn’t have predicted the survey results to not show any impact, and was surprised. There’s at least some chance that this reflects something I didn’t understand, but there’s also a chance the survey was flawed, or the curve-fitting used was flawed, or both

In Other News

Bryan Caplan compares what happened to his expectations. His analysis for individuals (which he gives a 2nd percentile grade) is based on the assumption that paranoia about Covid makes no sense and that anyone (such as myself) who spent a year avoiding Covid was acting grade-A stupid

he implicitly saying that people should ignore social effects of their actions – without the actions he’s condemning, there would have been completely uncontrolled spread and either the government would have clamped down super hard or we’d have had a hospital collapse