(2021-06-11) ZviM Covid 6/10 Somebody Elses Problem

Zvi Mowshowitz: Covid-19 6/10: Somebody Else’s Problem. This week’s post includes some non-time-sensitive items from last week, including much of the section on the lab leak hypothesis, as my available time last week was limited

Covid-19 is not quite done with the United States of America. The Indian variant (“Delta variant”) delivering a ‘one last scare’ moment is plausible. But unless there’s a new variant that can escape from the mRNA vaccines and we are unable to respond rapidly enough, a possibility I now put at most at 10%, Covid-19 is mostly done with the United States of America.

Other countries without our vaccine access are not so fortunate.

There’s the question of how we can learn from what happened

Predictions

Vaccinations

The recent vaccination stats are very good news. Previously, we had seen a very clear mostly-constant upward slope until early April, followed by a mostly-constant downward slope until the beginning of June. A sensible projection was that this trend would continue. Instead, we have a very hopeful upward trend.

Delta (Indian) Variant in the USA

Rest of the World

With a better appreciation for control systems, it is now clear that the range of configurations that result in ‘we adjust to remain stuck in limbo for a year’ was remarkably large

The numbers for the new variant are increases on top of increases for the English strain

If we’d had to deal with another similar ramp up in virulence on top of that? We had moves left we could have used, such as fractional dosing, first doses first, approving additional vaccinations, finally rolling out rapid testing properly and shifting focus further to ventilation and away from surfaces, along with some amount of additional restrictions and marginal citizen behavioral adjustments. There’s some chance we wouldn’t have fully lost. But there’s (almost) no way we would have almost fully held the line like we did.

One counterargument is India.

the curve turned around, and cases started declining again.

India peaked substantially lower than North America or the European Union, and was barely higher than South America at the time. Yet it quickly reversed its trend, which I completely did not expect

South America is quietly in a terrible situation, and that’s where we need to be rushing our vaccine doses at this point rather than India, provided they have the ability to distribute them.

Our continuing failure to scale up vaccine distribution remains a horrible scandal, but it’s also worth noting that the issues of distribution in many places are very real. Many third world nations got modest allocations of vaccine doses from Covax and proved unable to put those shots into arms.

This is by far the most important remaining issue: Getting vaccines, any vaccines, out to as many people as possible, as fast as possible, until we’ve vaccinated the whole world.

the faster we finish the job, the less likely we are to face a variant that’s even worse than the Indian one, potentially one that requires a booster shot.

Postmortem

It’s time to fully talk about the origins of Covid-19, and the lab leak hypothesis

I wrote a section about this two weeks ago.

new information has come to light and additional events have occurred, and with that plus time to reflect, it has become clear the implications are important.

The media’s stance, as far as I can tell, is now to deny that they ever treated the lab leak hypothesis as ‘debunked’ in the first place

This has successfully kept all reporters who desire to have ‘credibility’ (as opposed to credibility) away from the story

Nate Silver notes the explicit bury-the-truth-because-politics argument

This is an explicit call for scientists not to say true things or investigate questions, if doing so would be bad for science funding and/or for geopolitics

There is a correct answer to the question of Covid’s origins, from the perspective of those answering this survey, and it is: Not Sure. The confidence level that should be required to select something other than Not Sure in such a survey is highly unclear

I’m not changing my probability all that much. I’m now at something like 55%, up from 40%, now that I see more about how this all went down, but it could still easily have gone down either way.

*All right, suppose it did come from the lab. Does it matter?

Yes, quite a lot.*

One big reason is it transforms our view of the pandemic, in terms of what stories various nations can tell themselves about what happened, and what it implies for international relations.

Another big reason it matters is Gain of Function research, which on reflection seems increasingly like a completely bonkers insane thing to do, and also the need for better lab safety protocols in general.

Against Gain of Function Research

The concept of Gain of Function Research is to take a virus that could potentially mutate or be engineered in a lab into a future pandemic or bioweapon, and engineer it into that new more dangerous form first, in the lab, so we can learn from it.

That alone isn’t definitive proof we shouldn’t do it. One can imagine a world in which our safeguards are good enough, and the threat of a natural pandemic bad enough, and the ability of such research to help us prepare for and prevent that pandemic sufficiently stronger than our alternatives, that (with some sufficiently strong level of precautions) we should go ahead and do it anyway.

To be clear, ‘some sufficiently strong level of precautions’ is something like ‘do it in Antarctica and the quarantine for leaving a 100-mile radius around the lab is a year or more,’ not ‘do it in China next to a city but have additional protective equipment and a second observer present.’

Also, at this point I have zero faith that if we decided on reasonable precautions that were actually reasonable if followed, that those procedures would get followed, even by those who said they were following them.

A sane civilization could reasonably decide that pandemics are a really big deal, and we are willing to take big swings and accept big risks in order to prevent or contain them. Such a sane civilization would be investing billions in pandemic preparedness across a variety of fronts

If we don’t manage to ban gain of function research, even after everything that has happened, then that’s quite a reason to lose hope. It’s not only about letting labs go ahead and create the next pandemic or bioweapon. How would we possibly hope to ban dangerous AI research in the future, if we failed at this much easier problem?

If ‘study of existing function’ research gets shut down, that would indeed be quite bad

In Other News

FDA Delenda Est News

Why would one actively request a shift from measuring actual infections in the lab to measuring patient reported symptoms? That seems designed to introduce extra noise and ensure that the efforts fail, and likely to have a large chilling effect on future research.

This was sufficiently flagrant ignoring of the advisory committee that two of its members resigned. Seems a lot like the FDA is picking which things it wants to approve or disapprove for reasons other than ‘following the science.’