(2021-08-12) ZviM Covid 8/12 The Worst Is Over

Zvi Mowshowitz: Covid-19 8/12: The Worst Is Over. Good news, everyone! Andrew Cuomo has resigned, and Andrew Cuomo is the worst. The title this week does not as reliably or fully refer to the Delta variant or the Covid-19 pandemic. Things are still steadily getting worse.

Main event this week was continued arguments over mandates, both for vaccines and for masks and other NPIs. I’m making one last attempt this week to explain my reasoning on vaccination mandates

The Numbers

I’d estimate a 35% chance that within two weeks we get about as high case counts as we’re going to see in this wave, and 55% it happens within three weeks.

Deaths and Cases

Grouping these together, because there’s a combined mystery to solve.

This is a substantial slowdown in new cases, cutting the growth rate in half.

We went from 2% positive tests to 15% positive tests, which indicates our testing is not keeping pace with our cases. In fact, it’s not keeping pace at all?

I am confident that a large majority of cases, especially asymptomatic or mild cases, are being missed entirely by the system

If cases have grown much more rapidly than our numbers naively indicate, then our hopes for containing this in a meaningful way, rather than waiting for enough people to get Covid that things die down afterwards, are much worse.

Vaccinations

This week’s thread on relative infectiousness of the vaccinated versus the unvaccinated. As you would expect, when you do random population samples, you find lower average viral loads in vaccinated people

Vaccine Mandates

Nate Silver broke down people’s current stance on Covid into a categories, and I think this is mostly accurate

I’d like to take one more stab at addressing various arguments against vaccine mandates, explain my perspective on it, and then move on to what’s actually happening

A real concern is that (D) they got this one right, vaccines happen to be safe and effective, but it’s not clear that we wouldn’t be in a similar position in the future where the thing in question wasn’t safe and/or wasn’t effective. In this case, I actually don’t think this is true. I think both that the vaccines are safe and effective based on the evidence, and also that if the evidence did not strongly say they were safe and effective, we wouldn’t be contemplating such policies. The level of pushback we have now is when, scientifically, the case is overwhelming, and if the vaccines were instead not safe but still much safer than not getting vaccinated, we’d not only not make them mandatory, they’d be forbidden. We ran that experiment.

The high correlation of positions on all these points is, of course, both expected and suspicious, on all sides including my own.

In conclusion, I’m strongly in favor of employer mandates, and on imposing the kinds of restrictions we’d otherwise impose on everyone (e.g. travel, indoor dining and so on) only on the unvaccinated, although of course we should be smart about it, and I’m happy that so far no one I’ve seen is suggesting excluding the unvaccianted from beaches or playgrounds

For now, lack of FDA approval is holding many mandates back, even as increasingly many go forward anyway.

So, what are this week’s new mandates?

Meanwhile, the question as always with children is, should we forbid vaccinations as horribly unsafe, or should we stop doing that and turn on a dime to mandate them outright, with not vaccinating as horribly dangerous?

Yelp is doing something interesting, which is that you can search restaurants by ‘All Staff Fully Vaccinated’ and by ‘Proof of Vaccination Required.’

In contrast to NYC’s teachers, the head of the American Federation of Teachers came out strongly in favor of a mandate.

Think of the Children

The request here comes from the American Academy of Pediatrics, representing 67,000 physicians

When concerned physicians tell you to stop demanding so much child safety data and Get On With It, that is the opposite of the mistake they are most likely to make, and thus this is strong evidence that a lot more Getting On With It is urgently needed. (FDA)

reminder, air quality improvement in schools would be urgently necessary and worthwhile even if it didn’t matter for Covid or the moment to moment experience of breathing the air). (see CO2)

The core of the argument, later in the thread, is the risk of Long Covid. You have to raise the specter of Long Covid when talking about children, since the risk of anything else is clearly not worth worrying about even without vaccinations

As usual, the procedure in this thread was to gather together every possible symptom, of any severity, and any duration longer than a few weeks, that happens after someone has Covid (and that may or may not actually have anything to do with Covid) and count them all as Long Covid together, with no attempt to quantity what it means for someone if they get it.

The New York Times was also its usual self and did its best scare piece on Long Covid in children, but it’s only one of a chorus of such claims. That doesn’t mean Long Covid isn’t real, it’s clearly a thing and the primary risk factor for younger people, but it must be kept in perspective.

From an excellent post about the question of what to do for kids who it is illegal to vaccinate, here’s a chart of what happens if they do get Covid.

Long Covid is real and important, but so is Long School. Most people I know are permanently traumatized by it. (deschooling)

The problem, in all these cases, is that some threats are put in a special category where any bad events are unacceptable, whereas other things are part of life, such as getting lots of people into close proximity in this thing we call a ‘city.’

At some point we will need to learn to live with Covid, or make an extraordinary effort to somehow live without it by vaccinating everyone and then moving on. Or we could doom ourselves to a young adult dystopia in yet another way, the same way kids are no longer allowed to play outside and are told not to talk to strangers and pretend periodically to hide from gunmen roaming the building, plus whatever you consider a baseline ‘school’. That’s also an option.

Ministry of Truth

in this case, the post wasn’t censored, merely given a warning label

It’s about the new definition of misinformation, which as far as I can tell is information used to lead to a conclusion we don’t like

There’s so many different things dangerously wrong here.

Up front they are clear why they are doing this – it’s because the claim is being made in order to minimize the importance of vaccination. The fact is a soldier for the wrong side, ergo false.

Here’s the argument that if you have the best data available, you should ignore it, because there’s some factors it didn’t account for, and thus you should throw out all numbers and have no idea whatsoever. Which is a fully general argument against ever knowing anything at all:

More generally, the official reasoning remains the supremely broad claim that any disagreement with health authorities is not allowed. As we are periodically reminded, this is despite the health authorities changing their opinions over time as (A) the facts change, (B) we get better evidence and (C) they update to take into account new information and incentives and priorities. Usually their truth tracking improves over time on a given issue (and stays the same on average because they add new issues), but not always.

Provincetown Follow-Up

Nate Silver offers some thoughts on exactly how hard it is to compare vaccinated to unvaccinated people, even in relatively ideal conditions for such comparisons

Provincetown was the opposite of an ideal situation.

Thus, the focus shifts from the study and its claims to the actions of the CDC and media, and updating on what they did in response to this information.

Delta Variant

In Other News

What’s the difference between an EUA and full approval? Hundreds of thousands of pages of paperwork and a bunch of site inspections, among other things

Again, could be worse, you could be the WHO analysts and still, this week, be telling people Covid isn’t airborne. Delenda est indeed.

Not Covid

In Free Britney news, the system is even worse than you think. There was serious risk of having Britney Spears committed involuntarily, because of the supposed mental health strain of trying to free herself in court, and the strain of having her father as her legal enslaver against every scream she can muster:

I’d also like to point out another parallel of horribly inefficient action that got highlighted this week, which is the War on Bags... You know what costs vastly more energy and carbon to produce than paper bags? Food. Even a tiny risk of food being wasted is much worse than using extra bags. Yet what happens when bags break?