(2022-01-06) ZviM Covid 01/06 The Blip

Zvi Mowshowitz Covid-19 1/6/22: The Blip. No question it’s annoying, and for those in health care it’s overwhelming and terrible. I don’t want to minimize it. And if you care about avoiding this it’s going to be a lonely few months. But compared to March 2020, this is nothing. We got this.

Executive Summary
Record high case numbers likely to continue for a few weeks.
Hospitals under pressure but holding, deaths strangely low.
If you get sick you should still do your best to get a negative test before ending your isolation no matter what the CDC says.

The Numbers

Predictions

Deaths

Cases

Vaccinations

it’s one thing that we haven’t approved Novavax, we have plenty of supply ourselves so we don’t need it. It’s another thing that we haven’t approved the manufacturing of Novavax?

Vaccine Mandates

Paxlovid

In order to get Paxlovid in New York, you need to have mild to moderate systems, be able to start treatment within five days of symptom onset, be over the age of 12 and weigh at least 40kg, and have one additional risk condition. I’d have preferred a much higher age minimum, but otherwise that seems sensible. Then the question that seems to have no good answer. Give it to the vaccinated, or give it to the unvaccinated?

Given the options of giving to each according to their needs or judging by the content of their character, they took at third option and went with the color of one’s skin.

Ministry of Truth

NPIs Including Mask and Testing Mandates

Think of the Children

Should we mandate boosters for young children? I mean, obviously no

you think typical schools are dystopian nightmares, you’d be inclined to welcome a break from them. The thing is, even if schools are such nightmares, remote learning as implemented by the United States was clearly much worse

Normally when kids are in school, they are more likely to kill themselves. This year, when we closed the schools, kids killed themselves less. Then, when we went to ‘remote learning’ kids killed themselves more.

Zeynep’s First Law

CDC Guidelines Revision Part 3

That’s a lot of words that effectively say ‘isolate for 5 days, then mask for 5, and if you have an actively positive test after 5 days, then isolate for the full 10 days.’

It’s a sign both of the CDC’s inability to cleanly communicate, and the amount of trust they’ve lost, that everyone is calling this complicated, and calling for ‘simpler’ things that are more complicated than what this is trying to do.

Meanwhile, the CDC’s own guidelines say that 31% of people are still infectious on day 5.

Hospitals

Long Covid

Claiming to have Covid-19 was correlated with claiming to have Long Covid. Actually having Covid-19 was not correlated with anything other than anosmia.

I’m updating quite a bit in the direction of Long Covid mostly (not entirely) being people often having health issues, and them then blaming those health issues on having had Covid, rather than on Covid causing long term symptoms often in people who didn’t have severe disease.