(2021-12-30) ZviM Covid 12/30 Infinity War

Zvi Mowshowitz Covid-19 12/30: Infinity War. Executive Summary
Cases way up despite holiday, and will keep going up.
Testing is increasingly difficult to get.
Too early to know if hospitals will be able to handle it.
See Omicron Posts (#10 from Tuesday) for further details.

The Numbers

Predictions

Deaths

Cases

Vaccine Effectiveness

You know what we still never got anywhere on settling, and which is super relevant right about now? The extent to which vaccines make some people immune to infection while others largely aren’t, versus the extent to which they make most people less vulnerable to infection in each encounter but not fully immune

My model now says it’s a hybrid. People have different levels of antibody and other responses to the vaccines, which means some people are effectively fully immune (at least for a while), others get more limited protections, and you get some Bayesian evidence over time for where you stand based on how much risk you take and whether you get infected

Vaccination and Vaccine Mandates

If you’ve declined to be vaccinated, you’re also likely going to decline to take Paxlovid.

this suggests the vaccine hesitancy largely isn’t about politics or any concrete concerns either. Half the people who aren’t vaccinated have sufficiently strong priors against doing anything new that they’re having none of it, it all sounds super suspicious to them, and you’re not going to tell them different. The alternative hypothesis, which I find less plausible, is that the political divide carries over to everything else automatically at this point, which is functionally the same but has some different implications.

CDC Revised Guidelines Continued

I wrote a post yesterday about the CDC’s revised guidelines on how long to isolate if you test positive for Covid-19. The story very much continues, so consider this a Part 2.

I think the CDC simply does not care about your life and how much they mess it up, they care about ‘public health’ as a sacred value. Except they do care if the metaphorical and also literal trains stop running, or what guidelines people would simply ignore, in which case compromises get made. They care, as Walensky admits, about what people ‘will tolerate’ so the whole game doesn’t fall apart.

And again, that is exactly what we should do. If society wouldn’t run under your rule, you need a new rule

As usual, it’s worth noting that the CDC nuking its credibility is bad to the extent that the CDC is credible, but is good to the extent the CDC is not credible. Better that more people have an accurate view.

I continue to be less sympathetic to the stealth edits that have major practical impacts, and a continued refusal (as far as I can see) to explain clearly what’s going on with the whole ‘symptoms are resolving’ clause. If the rule is ‘no fever’ then that’s a clear rule, why not say that?

Testing, Testing, Hopefully

I wrote an entire post last week about the testing situation and how much it was botched. Vanity Fair notices the hole goes even deeper. The medical establishment’s war on testing is ancient, for testing threatens their turf. By which I mean, it wouldn’t be safe, of course. People might act in response to information without proper medical advice. Perish the thought. Can’t be too careful. (FDA)

Remember the thing Joe Biden ‘wished he’d been thinking about back in October?’ Turns out exactly that plan was explicitly proposed. The plan, in effect, was a blueprint for how to avoid what is happening at this very moment—endless lines of desperate Americans clamoring for tests in order to safeguard holiday gatherings, just as COVID-19 is exploding again. Yesterday, President Biden told David Muir of ABC News, “I wish I had thought about ordering” 500 million at-home tests “two months ago.” But the proposal shared at the meeting in October, disclosed here for the first time, included a “Bold Plan for Impact” and a provision for “Every American Household to Receive Free Rapid Tests for the Holidays/New Year.”

The administration instead, as we all know, chose to mock the very idea.

Most of you already know this, but it’s worth hammering home how different the testing situation is in Europe than in America:

What tests we do get are then going largely to schoolchildren so we can feel better about sending them to school, rather than reserving them to do anything useful.

Even better news is that it seems we have approved an additional rapid test from Roche. And then another, from Siemens. Every little bit helps, even when it’s both too little and too late. Go ahead, take your victory lap, I’ll take what I can get.

While we’re allocating tons of tests to schoolchildren, the hospitals don’t have enough?

Long Covid

*Assuming this is being reported correctly, it’s saying that if you have an unknown infection, you don’t get meaningful Long Covid.

This at least rules out the hypothesis that Long Covid is a threat in asymptomatic cases*

To the extent that Long Covid is a non-placebo Actual Thing, this seems to strongly suggest that it will indeed scale with the severity of infection, so vaccinations and booster shots will help a lot, and if you’re at low risk for Short Covid (as it were), you’re also therefore not at such high risk for Long Covid either

That also implies that Paxlovid and other early treatments will improve Long Covid outlooks.

Think of the Children

A Note on “Remote Learning”

Marginal Revolution linked back to this 2012 post on Why Online Education Works. It is an excellent post, treating online education (as opposed to online school) as an opportunity to improve rather than a burden of mimicry.

Now look at what we did over the pandemic with ‘remote learning’ and notice we got at most two and arguably none of these ten advantages.

Instead, we did our best to duplicate the physical classroom with all its problems not only intact but amplified by having to implement them via screens.

Is it any wonder kids hated it, didn’t learn and became depressed?

We have tons of great educational tools to teach kids things on tablets and computers, including educational games and Khan Academy and lots of other things designed for the medium, or by reading books (yes, books still exist) or playing with physical objects, or listening to the radio or audio books.

In Other News

Gain of function research finally has someone willing to stand up and defend it.

At best, this piece what we like to call ‘complete and utter bullshit.’

and this is Stat News, which is normally excellent

New York City cuts quarantine period to five days for ‘essential workers’ including not only health care workers, but grocery store workers, teachers and nursing home workers.

As the opposition points out, five days either is safe or isn’t, and nursing home workers are the worst possible place to bring people back early, for obvious reasons

Press release announcing Vitamin D makes symptoms go away faster in Phase II trial.

I’ve come around to the position that Molnupiravir should not have been approved because of the danger that it will create new variants.