(2021-09-09) ZviM Covid 9/09 Passing The Peak

Zvi Mowshowitz: Covid-19 9/09: Passing the Peak. Labor day muddies the data a bit, but it seems that Alex Tabarrok was correct and the current wave has peaked

The primary question now is how and if we return to normality

Executive Summary
Top points this week:
Covid case numbers peak.
Australia’s dystopian nightmare deepens, hopefully we can avoid this.
Schools are acting crazy in name of prevention.

The Numbers

Cases

Was this the peak? I think it likely was a peak, whether or not there’s another coming in several months

The Johns Hopkins data confirms this. The share of positive tests is down from peak, which makes me confident the true peak has come and gone

Vaccinations

Another study has come out showing vaccines greatly reduce spread of Covid even when someone is infected. Link to study here.

Vaccine Effectiveness

This post goes over how effective the vaccines are. Mostly it’s good information and not far from my estimates, but it’s important to emphasize that no, we didn’t all know all along that vaccine effectiveness against mild but not serious illness would fade over time in about this way. I don’t even think we should be confident in that finding now

If we develop new vaccines, or new versions of vaccines, how will we know if and how well they work? It is increasingly plausible we won’t, because the ‘ethics’ people and the logistics and regulatory departments will combine to prevent any useful studies from being run unless something changes. We need the ability to run comparison studies and we don’t currently have it.

FDA Delenda Est

I could call this section ‘booster shots’ but at this point the alternative title seemed more appropriate. The FDA is determined to prevent booster shots

Vaccine Mandates

Nate Silver did a highly virtuous thing, and laid out his views explicitly.

I am very much in the same camp on pretty much everything on his list.

NPIs Including Mask and Testing Mandates

The Tragedy of Australia

Australia continues to prove that there are worse things you can choose over getting Covid. There’s a new article in The Atlantic detailing how far they’ve gone, and the answer is way way way too far. You can’t enter, you can’t leave the country, you can’t leave your house without an Official Approved Reason, all enforced by the military.

More to the point, will it ever end? We’re getting mixed messages on that.

Meanwhile, Australian authorities have taken upon themselves full surveillance state powers, including the right to delete or modify social media posts during investigations (also known as ‘when they feel like it’) without informing anyone including the target.

Think of the Children

Lip service is being given to safety in class, but mostly parents are (correctly, if you believe school is good and important) viewing the problem as how to protect their children from being forced to quarantine

Yes, that means that if any child says they have essentially any symptom at all, you lose an entire classroom for a quarantine period.

College really is a bizarre package of goods.

Worrying about students going to bars is highly reasonable. Worrying that they’re socializing in cars, friends’ rooms or apartments is different, but is being roped into the blame department. It’s also sending a clear message to students that the rules are about as worthy of respect as the rule that if they’re under 21 they shouldn’t drink

Maybe We Should Try To Prevent Future Pandemics

Biden wants $65 billion for what he is calling a pandemic preparedness Apollo program. This is a great idea if it can be executed reasonably at all, even if only a small portion of funds end up going to this reasonable execution. The question is, can we execute

The fifth test, of course, would then be whether, if we had useful pandemic preparedness, would we be able to actually use it? Or would the FDA and CDC, combined with various partisan bickering, short term outlooks, accusations of racism and other such things, prevent us from deploying our tools even when we have them?

look at what’s in the actual proposal.

Sounds great when stated like that, but there’s an obvious problem, which is no plan to pass test number five. What good is having vaccines you’re not able to use?

We can add a sixth test, I suppose, for ‘doesn’t fund a bunch of research likely to directly cause a pandemic’ (growth of function)

None of these concerns mean we shouldn’t do this. We should absolutely do everything we can, even if we expect the FDA and CDC are going to act next time around as if they want as many people as possible to die

Ivermectin

The media has not, shall we say, covered itself in glory when dealing with all things Ivermectin. The poison control story turns out to be rather exaggerated.... Someone really, really does need to be fired for this. This kind of error is very much Not Okay

How easy was this to catch? I kind of caught it purely because it didn’t make sense, and I think I should get a highly mediocre grade for not calling bullshit further.

I totally should have then jumped to ‘these numbers are not what they appear to be, whether or not they’re blatant lies,’ and I’ll work on making sure that’s how I react next time. I still highly doubt Ivermectin does anything useful against Covid, and certainly the fraudulent studies don’t help matters on that front (here’s a thread about what might be going on there), but would the media and health officials be acting differently if I was wrong about that?