(2021-12-16) ZviM Covid 12/16 On Your Marks

Zvi Mowshowitz: Covid-19 12/16: On Your Marks. The main action continues to be at the Omicron Variant post.

Executive Summary
Omicron is here and will take over soon.
We might not do much about it until far too late.
And that’s probably better than the alternative.

The Numbers

Deaths

Deaths are straightforward, no reason to expect major change. Paxlovid remains illegal, Omicron isn’t here yet for long enough.

Cases

Paxlovid Remains Illegal

So now we have four questions:
When will Paxlovid become legal?
How much Paxlovid will be available?
While supply is limited, who gets that supply?
When supply isn’t limited, how do we get it to people in time?

The answer to when is around the end of the year. As of writing this the prediction market now again has it as a favorite at 55%, I hope some of you are making yourselves some money

Given supply will be limited at crunch time, who gets that limited supply?

Then there’s the big problem. There’s two 70-year-old women, each positive for Covid-19. There’s only one difference between them, which is that one is vaccinated and the other is not vaccinated. You have one set of doses. Who gets it?

In other contexts, this choice has already been made in favor of the vaccinated, but this makes it that much more stark. My preference would be to announce the policy now, especially if it’s going to be vaccinated first. If you’re going to go for motivation and good incentives over the in-the-moment saving of lives, make it count.

Vaccine Effectiveness

Boosters seem to create not only a larger but a broader antibody response, which may be why they help so much with Omicron. Previous infection also works, and quite well, and all that, says study.

Vaccine Mandates

The Metropolitan Opera here in New York is requiring boosters.

NPIs Including Mask and Testing Mandates

Colorado Governor Jared Polis lifts mask mandate, promises not to institute a new one for Omicron

if people aren’t vaccinated at this point, it’s their “own darn fault” if they get sick.

There is a catch. If Omicron wasn’t about to hit us I’d be fully on board with this, but given it’s hitting about (check notes) right now I am deeply curious how far ahead he has thought this through.

Just 13 companies are authorized to sell over-the-counter tests in the U.S., though many more are still waiting to get green-lighted by the FDA.

I have a feeling that if the government started buying tests at good prices, and/or didn’t make many potential Covid-19 tests illegal (including many that are used a lot in Europe) that we would see expanded supply.

It’s also worth noting that a lot of the tests we do have are being used on very low-value things, like testing four year olds once a week.

Before, support rose and fell largely based on how bad things were. But even before Omicron, things were starting to get worse. Yet support for countermeasures was falling. There’s a general sense of having had enough, even more so than before. The question is, will that matter when the logic of exponential growth starts hitting like a truck?

Think of the Children

In Other News

Words of wisdom from my old friend William Eden on how we’ve navigated the pandemic, and the choices facing us going forward. Here’s Eric Weinstein’s endorsement

I could quibble but mostly I’m on the same page. The exception is that Omicron is about to come on stupidly fast, and that’s one curve that there could be a lot of value in flattening this (hopefully last) time, including to buy time for Paxlovid, but it doesn’t look like there’s that much capacity coming in time, the Omicron boosters are way too slow to make a difference, and generally the few ways to use the time we might buy have been ignored. It’s time to accept that it’s over

Whether or not the virus came from a lab (and whether or not Omicron came from a lab), the gain of function research going on is stunningly irresponsible and we’re doing nothing to address this. Except it’s not merely a project that risks ‘millions of lives,’ it’s an existential risk that could potentially wipe out humanity or civilization

Meanwhile, this week there was a lab leak of Covid out of a BSL-3 lab in Taiwan.

Not Covid

FDA will make hearing aids less illegal, which is expected to increase availability while decreasing price, who knew? So in this case, the FDA has indeed stopped beating its wife. Which is good.