(2021-07-22) ZviM Covid 7/22 Error Correction

Zvi Mowshowitz: Covid-19 7/22: Error Correction. Three weeks ago, in One Last Scare ((2021-06-17) ZviM Covid 6/17 One Last Scare), I ran the numbers and concluded that most places in America would ‘make it’ without a big scary surge from Delta variant. It’s time to look at what went wrong with that calculation, which I believe to be a failure to sufficiently integrate different parts of my model

Then there’s the question of what we are going to do about this, and whether we are going to destroy some combination of free speech and the ordinary day to day activities that constitute our lives and civilization, perhaps indefinitely, in the face of this situation. Such collateral damage has the potential to be far scarier and more deadly than the direct threat from Covid-19.

The Numbers

There’s no sign yet that people are dying from the new wave of cases. Most of the rise in cases came in the last two weeks, so we wouldn’t expect a dramatic increase yet, but seeing a 5% rise over the last two weeks is still at least somewhat reassuring that what we’ve seen in places like the UK, where the IFR was dramatically reduced versus previous waves, will also happen here.

Vaccinations

Vaccination rates are now roughly stable at about 500k/day, so about 1.5mm people/week going from unvaccinated to vaccinated, or about 0.4% of the population, and a resulting 1% or so decrease in R

The good news is that we are seeing more Republicans stepping up and telling their constituents to get vaccinated

Not Necessarily the News

When X is reported on the news, we learn at least three claims to evaluate: X happened. X was noticed. X was news.

If you see a plane crash reported and don’t know that crashes always get reported, it’s good news because you learn crashes are rare enough to be news.

This brings us to this week’s reports of infections taking place at a wedding.

Similarly, we have the headline that 27 vaccinated people (it says “nearly 30” but actually it’s 27) in Louisiana died of Covid. The vaccines are so effective that 27 deaths was news, which is rather good news. If you run the numbers on Louisiana, I find roughly 900 deaths in the ‘vaccine era’ starting some time in March, so we’re talking roughly 3% of all deaths, from a group that includes most of the old people for most of that time. Yet I saw people freaking out about this, or wondering whether or not or how much they should be freaking.

Delta Variant

An interesting and hopeful theory that came up was that Delta might be spreading so quickly in large part because it is faster.

I’m not fully sold, but it seems likely this is right. We are seeing super duper fast spread of Delta in some places, and not in others, and in some times and not others, such as when India went suddenly from an out of control epidemic to everything stabilizing quickly. Speeding up transmission makes all of that make a lot more sense

How worried should a vaccinated person be about Delta?

In terms of death, seriously not very much, vaccinated people don’t die of Covid and Delta doesn’t change that

The question is entirely one of the unknown unknown risks of Long Covid. Getting data on this, or being confident in a position, is incredibly hard, whether it’s on how big the Long Covid risk was to begin with, or how much the vaccines reduce that risk

My guess is that we’re talking about a small but non-zero chance (3%?) of some amount of lasting effects of some kind for the vaccinated, most of which are minor and temporary, but yeah, who the hell knows.

For young kids, that’s even more true – the danger is purely Long Covid. There’s a good ‘what’s up with Delta and kids’ analysis up this week, although it doesn’t offer us anything concrete that’s new, and it points out that the Long Covid risks haven’t changed and that other diseases also have similar long tails, we just don’t talk much about them

It is well known that city living leads to more infectious diseases than non-city living, to a very large degree.

One of the periodic reminders, as we move into the next phase of the pandemic and beyond, is that if you are worried about Long Covid as a vaccinated person, why aren’t you completely panicked about living in a city?

One Last Scare: Re-Evaluation

This week, I was persuaded to add a post-mortem to my big We’re F**ed, It’s Over post from the end of 2020. Reading it over again, I believe the core logic of that post was solid* ((2020-12-24) Zvi Covid 12/24: Were F'ed Its Over)

I predicted a 70% chance that we had such an infectious strain and that if we did, we would face this crisis and have no reasonable options

It didn’t happen. Instead we had a 40% more infectious strain, and faster vaccinations, which combined as that post’s model said it would, to prevent the wave

The prediction here is then saying something about what happens if we return to the behavior patterns we had when cases were declining rapidly. The extra vaccinations would be sufficient, in most places, to compensate for Delta. The problem is that we’re not doing anything close to that, haven’t for some time, and it would be a hell of a thing to try to return us to that state.

From here on in, mostly the unvaccinated will be infected, and most of them will be young. Last week, we had 240k positive tests and vaccinated about 1.5mm people. With rapid weekly case growth, it won’t be too long before we’re giving immunity to our unvaccinated youth the hard way, via infections, faster than we can vaccinate people

The question is, to what extent are we willing to accept those consequences, versus willing to accept the costs of not accepting them?

Ministry of Truth

Google is blocking your access to private documents, based on them containing the wrong statements about vaccines. This implies that they are checking your private documents in order to see if they contain such information.

A call from the executive branch, for social media platforms to coordinate, and if you’re banned on one of them for ‘misinformation’ you need to be banned on all of them, or the government will take action to break up this private monopoly of a public platform. Also, they need to ‘work harder’ to ‘fight the spread of misinformation’ via censorship and bannings of this type, or again, they will take action to break up this private monopoly of a ‘public platform.’ If they don’t do that, they are ‘killing people.’

Such policies have often taken aim at anything that ‘contradicts the CDC guidelines’ or used other such principles, despite such guidelines often being obvious nonsense.

As gentle reminders from earlier in this epidemic, this ‘misinformation’ would at one point have included the fact that masks work

It’s almost as if the government and ingroup establishment are using the ‘emergency’ and the excuse of the pandemic in order to further their goal of becoming the thought police and telling us what we can and can’t say to each other.

Vaccine Hesitancy

When we ask whether persuasion works, I mean, of course it works. The issue is that you’re not the only one doing persuasion, and also you’re not doing that great a job of it, in the sense that this thing has been massively botched several times over.

You know how uninterested we are in persuading people? Not only did we suspend the J&J vaccine over nothing, and recently put another warning on it over another nothing, we’re not even bothering to fully approve the vaccines, with all that this entails. Let alone the other low hanging fruit mentioned at the link.

This is no different than anything else. Vaccine persuasion is about persuading others that we are Very Serious People who have made the proper sacrifices, rather than asking what would work.

A better question is, how much does persuasion at the margin, now matter? The persuasion that mattered most largely happened by January.

One big piece of evidence is that most old people went ahead and got vaccinated.

implies that much of the remaining ‘hesitancy’ or even refusal isn’t ‘I’m never doing this no matter what’ and it’s more like ‘I don’t have enough skin in the game so I’d prefer to play it what looks to me like safe and/or not bother and/or not deal with the temporary side effects and/or continue signaling to my in-group.’

Which is great news, because if Delta ends up everywhere, where chances of getting infected if you’re not vaccinated get very high, then one would expect a lot of people to cave and get vaccinated rather than accept getting infected.

That the same 50% of the unwilling believe both that vaccines have been shown to cause autism and that the US government is using them to microchip the population is suggestive that such people are not processing such statements as containing words that possess meanings

Thus, my best guess is that about half the ‘hesitant’ are getable through some combination of things getting bad and us picking the low hanging fruit like approving the vaccines, and the other half likely require stronger stuff.

Once and Future Lockdown

Could it happen again? Janet Yellen thinks so.

If things get bad enough, it makes perfect sense that we’d potentially see lockdowns but not vaccine mandates, and that those lockdowns likely won’t make exceptions for vaccination, because we’ve also made it unacceptable to check someone’s vaccination status in most contexts and places.

Where I think Yellen is clearly wrong is in expecting the places with low vaccination rates to be the ones that lock down. It’s almost certainly the opposite

Meanwhile, Biden tells us our young children will be wearing masks, whether they like it or not:

In Other News

Your periodic reminder that Gain of Function research needs to stop and this is a major test of our civilizational adequacy

Whereas you know what we’re not funding much, even now? Pandemic preparedness.