(2021-07-01) ZviM Covid 7/01 Don't Panic

Zvi Mowshowitz: Covid-19 7/01: Don’t Panic. The case numbers this week were clearly bad news. The raw count was somewhat bad news, and the positive test percentage increase was very bad news. It would be easy to treat the whole shift as fully ‘real,’ attribute it all to Delta variant, and panic.

I do not think that is the correct interpretation. What we are seeing matches what we saw a year ago, so a lot of this is a seasonal and regional change that has nothing to do with Delta

It’s also going to be tempting to attribute seasonal weather effects to the local vaccination rate, since the two are highly correlated

Still, I miss the confidence I had two weeks ago.

The Numbers

Last year at this time we saw an explosion in cases. This year we are seeing a halt in the decline in cases. That’s not good, but it’s also not a reason to panic

official Very Serious Person narrative wants to worry as much as possible about Delta, so it would ignore alternative explanations

Vaccinations

We picked up an additional 0.8% of the population getting their first dose, and 1.3% of the population got their second dose

essentially zero side effects other than some people being knocked on one’s ass for a day or two, which occasionally got considered severe

In other good news, mix-and-match vaccines, as one would expect, work quite well, and we finally have a study on that

Delta Variant

Going forward, one should expect the share of old strains to be cut in half every ten days or so, and Delta to be almost all infections in most regions by August 1.

Olympics in Japan

Any athlete going to the Olympics who wants to be vaccinated, one hopes, has already been vaccinated

What’s crazy is allowing a bunch of spectators who aren’t vaccinated into indoor events, and it looks like there will be 10,000 spectators per event, whether indoors or outdoors.

It’s always important to think about base rates…

where Japan continues to outperform the United States. If Delta wasn’t involved I’d say that this is all basically fine, but it remains to be seen if Japan can handle Delta in its current state

In Other News

Thread in praise of the excellent Microcovid project. I disagree with some of the Microcovid calculations but having any plausible calculations at all was the important element here, giving certain types of people a way to both do any of the things ever and not do many of the stupider things

A good way of framing what Zeynep and I both point out about the question of the origins of Covid-19: What matters is how such an event could have occurred, rather than the way it actually did occur. If the plane could have crashed due to a faulty part, but it turned out something else caused this particular crash, the part is still faulty and we need to fix the root cause of that failure

If Gain of Function research puts us in danger, that’s enough reason to ban it, whether or not it actually did kill millions of people this particular time around

Marginal Revolution previews/reviews the new Michael Lewis book about those preparing for a pandemic, and what they did during the early days of pandemic they’d prepared for. The book, titled The Premonition, if Tyler’s summary is accurate, holds the CDC (Delenda Est) in even lower regard than I do, as our heroes who see the pandemic coming are stymied every step of the way, preventing them from having most of their potential impact, while we don’t so much as quarantine or even test those returning from China, let alone take reasonable precautions. As Tyler notes, it’s weird to have a (true) story of lone heroes fighting the good fight against the system to stop a global catastrophe, who then completely and utterly lose. A story at least as worth telling as when they win, but definitely hard on the cliche structure.