(2021-09-30) ZviM Covid 9/30 People Respond To Incentives

Zvi Mowshowitz: Covid-19 9/30: People Respond to Incentives. Executive Summary: About what you’d expect. No key takeaways this week.

The Numbers

Vaccinations

My read is that this mostly reflects that the mandates have lacked teeth, as discussed below.

Vaccine Effectiveness

No one wants to do effectiveness studies. Once you know something is effective, how dare you experiment with it rather than blindly using it

Booster Shots

CDC director Rochelle Walensky overruled her advisory panel. She didn’t overrule it much, but she did change its recommendations to match those of the FDA, presumably because I still don’t know anyone who has said what would have happened if the two decisions hadn’t lined up with each other

Vaccine Mandates

The overall vaccination rates have risen very little since August 24, so most of the rise from 77% to 92% (let’s say the rise from 78% to 92%) is plausibly due to the mandate.

United Airlines reports extremely high compliance rates as well

Yes, as I predicted, it turns out if you raise the stakes to ‘you will lose your job’ then most people will fold rather than stand up for what they believe in.

On the first day of the policy, zero health care facilities were forced to close, and 92% of health care workers had at least one dose.

NPIs Including Mask and Testing Mandates

How to reconcile these large effects with the low number of vaccinations taking place right now? My presumption is that it’s for the same reason that I can find news articles linking to particular companies and hospitals, that most places aren’t yet serious about enforcement, and people are not stupid and will wait until the mandates are going to hit them in particular before they react.

Australian Front

Asked if the delay in the roll out of at-home tests until vaccination rates in Australia were higher was a deliberate strategy, Professor Skerritt said “correct”.

Think of the Children

In Other News

Not Covid

my main project remains the upcoming Tezos blockchain clean-NFT trading card game Emergents.