(2021-08-05) ZviM Covid 8/05 Much Ado About Nothing

Zvi Mowshowitz: Covid-19 8/05: Much Ado About Nothing. Getting into the weeds on the CDC’s new guidance and scaremongering, and the study they cited as justifications, caused this week’s post to get rather long. That was necessary, but if you don’t need the details, by all means skip the sections in question in favor of this summary: The CDC’s failure to apply Bayes’ rule, correct for base rates or locate sufficiently large or remotely representative samples knows few if any bounds, and their conclusions are still mostly the same conclusions my model had reached weeks ago. Very little has changed. Our new model of Delta variant is almost entirely the same as our old model of Delta.

The Numbers

Death rates are far lower than they were in previous waves, and are still rising slower than cases, but the hope that we’d see only +20% this week was fully dashed.

Vaccinations

I am slightly worried that the rise in vaccinations largely represents booster shots – I don’t know if that would mess up the statistics or not. If the numbers represent only first and second doses, they are very good news. Third doses aren’t useless (again, I’d happily accept one), but they’re less valuable than first or second doses by a lot

A theme this week, as we’ll see with the CDC’s new data, is that when you ban good data collection, you end up obsessing over what little data collection you happened to be able to do instead

Vaccine Approval

The FDA still has not fully approved the Covid-19 vaccines. Why?

Previously, at most some hands were on deck, but soon all hands will be on deck, or at least more hands will be on deck than one would otherwise expect. (2021-07-30) Fda Plans Sprint To Accelerate Formal Review Of Pfizers Covid19 Vaccine

The application process was sufficiently onerous, and/or required sufficiently robust data, slash didn’t feel sufficiently urgent to Pfizer, such that Pfizer didn’t submit until May 7. It can be debated how much of that part of the delay is on the FDA, versus how much is on Pfizer, or on Moderna who waited until June 1.

The FDA also still hasn’t given its approval for mRNA booster shot follow ups to the J&J shot, despite it being quite overdetermined that this is a good idea

There also are not any officially approved tests for Covid-19, either, although that does not seem to bother people in the same way so it is not an urgent matter.

Getting the approval in December would be almost completely too late.

The good news is that after this happened, the timeline seems to have moved up:

What about fears that this will ‘further undermine confidence’ or look ‘rushed?’ I estimate those costs at exactly zero, versus the benefits of getting rid of the quite valid and successful ‘the vaccines are not approved’ argument.

Regardless of how many more weeks or months we must wait, these delays are unacceptable, and entirely unnecessary. Authorize these vaccines today, and demand resignations as needed to make that happen.

Vaccine Mandates

The mandates we are actually discussing and implementing are ‘if you want this job where you interact with people in person you need to be vaccinated’ which I’d put at somewhat less coercive than even requiring vaccination to board an airplane, which now has 70% support.

Noticing and caring (correctly) that mandates have a much higher burden of proof than ‘the thing is typically a good idea’ puts one in a much smaller minority even than that.

Mask and Testing Mandates

In New York, and in many other places, the teachers’ union is strongly opposed to this, with any testing of the unvaccinated to be covered fully at taxpayer expense, while they previously insisted on keeping schools closed until teachers could get vaccinated no matter the case level, which is a hint as to what game they are playing to win

It’s mind boggling that 40% of teachers in NYC schools remain unvaccinated

Vaccine Hesitancy

There’s the top four all which are big,

The big two are the first two, because they’re both not coercive and they’re free. Full FDA approval would be helpful for fully half the remaining people. Getting the vaccine to personal physicians, which also should have happened a long time ago many times over, also helps with half of people.

Delta Variant

There are three core messages here.

Two of them are that Delta is more transmissible and causing a new wave, and that vaccinations work. Those are true and important.

The third is that we have the power to stop it, and defeat the virus once and for all. That one seems to me to be false

*Are we going to be willing to mandate vaccinations and if necessary booster shots sufficiently effectively to get paid off for buying all that time?

It seems like the answer is clearly no. That doesn’t mean it’s senseless to take reasonable precautions on the margin, but this is mostly only a battle worth fighting if one can win. If failure is inevitable, and we’ve mostly gotten as many vulnerable people vaccinated as we’re going to get, it would be better to fail fast.*

there are also reports that Pelosi has violated the house mask mandate on at least three occasions

The CDC Reinstates Its Mask Mandates

They waited days to publish the data. The CDC initially did the infuriating thing of refusing to release their data, which even the mainstream media like WaPo pointed out was terrible but they did then release the data, and we have it now.

The CDC’s new mask mandate is in areas with sufficient spread, which means it’s constantly expanding in scope each day in ways that are completely inevitable, so it would have been better to bite the bullet for everyone at the same time:

The Provincetown Study

For those not looking to get into the weeds, this was an outlier situation, there were tons of base rate errors that the study makes no attempt to correct for, we learned very little, and mostly the CDC is making a big deal over all this for no good reason.

This might mean that the viral load of vaccinated and unvaccinated persons infected with SARS-CoV-2 is also similar. However, microbiological studies are required to confirm these findings.

so what’s actually going on here in this study?

So there are essentially two ways to interpret this data.

Method number one is to become The Man of One Study, think that vaccines suddenly have entirely stopped working

Of course, none of the rest of that scenario makes any physical sense either. Wrong Conclusions Are Wrong

I didn’t quite explicitly Defy the Data on the Israeli vaccine effectiveness measurements, but I did point out the data didn’t make any sense even internally

That’s a roundabout way of saying that taking the study’s data is, when taken at face value, Obvious Nonsense, and thus we will be using method number two.

Method number two is to ask what could have caused the study to get these answers that on their face are Obvious Nonsense, realize that this has everything to do with base rate fallacy

This thread looks at the basics under method two, points out how much worse things would have been in Provincetown without vaccines, and concludes the study doesn’t tell us much.

The cohort being 85% male makes it clear that the virus did not spread to the area’s general population much, and stayed focused on the people who travelled there largely in order to have sex

The Leaked CDC Slides

Interestingly not present in the slides are the Ct values for non-breakthrough infections outside of Barnstable County, MA’s outbreak. I find this absence quite odd.

In slide 19 they uncritically report the Israeli data that has been shown to come from faulty statistical methodology (and which never made sense in the first place).

This Chise thread on Twitter makes it clear things are worse than I realized upon first reading

The war has not changed in the past two weeks

The only explanation I can come up with is that previously the CDC had and/or was painting a very wrong picture that vaccinated people were fully immune…

Thinking of the Children

There’s a video at the link, he definitely said this, and I’d hope this would illustrate how completely and utterly insane the whole thing is: "Even within your own household, children too young to be vaccinated are too vulnerable to allow you to show them your face. Ever."

In Other News

Your periodic reminder from Scott Alexander: FDA Delenda Est. He’s in full righteous fury form, which is reliably top quality

Lamda variant said to show vaccine resistance in the lab in a preprint. I can’t find any way to distinguish the things said here from a harmless situation or from signs of the next big thing, but it’s not a good sign. Need to keep an eye on it in any case

Not Covid

Gain of Function research needs to stop, but it’s not the only thing we shouldn’t be messing with. You know what else we really shouldn’t be doing and is actually an existential risk to be messing with? Creating mirror life.