(2022-01-20) ZviM Covid 01/20 Peak Omicron

Zvi Mowshowitz: Covid-19 1/20/22: Peak Omicron. The Omicron variant and Weekly posts are now combined, so this includes the last day’s Omicron developments. This week was the peak.

Executive Summary
If you live in USA and haven’t done so yet, order your free Covid-19 tests.
We are at or past the peak in Omicron infections in the United States and UK, but that doesn’t mean it’s over yet, next few weeks still rough.
UK lifts all Covid-19 restrictions, midnight is perhaps temporary after all

The Numbers

Even with Omicron being milder, the lack of more deaths is very good news here.

Vaccinations

if the Food and Drug Administration decides to update Covid-19 vaccines to take better aim at Omicron or other variants, it is unlikely to go it alone. Instead, a senior FDA official told STAT, the agency expects to take part in an internationally coordinated program aimed at deciding if, when, and how to update Covid-19 vaccines

the system for determining flu vaccines that this is modeled on works reasonably well as far as I can tell, so perhaps it will be fine, and also the alternative was perhaps a true nightmare?

Vaccine Effectiveness

Vaccine Mandates

Mandates are popular, but this does change somewhat when the proposed details are completely insane. Somewhat

Almost half of Democratic voters want to fine or imprison those who publicly question vaccines, but that means that the other half don’t. And forty percent of Democrats don’t want to place the unvaccinated under semi-permanent house arrest.

I’ve seen objections to this poll on the grounds that Rasmussen Reports is a right-wing polling organization. It’s definitely that

they certainly chose to ask these questions because they think the questions are to their benefit, but I don’t believe that they are making things up

We see this a lot, including outside the context of Covid-19 or vaccination. Any refusal to cut ties and payments to those engaging in X is seen as paying for X, or as support for X, as opposed to thinking there is more to life than X.

NPIs Including filter Mask and Testing Mandates

Domino’s is not pizza. It is a substance almost, but not quite, entirely unlike pizza. At a minimum, within the confines of New York City it is definitely not pizza.

The thing is, here, that’s an advantage. Domino’s is in the non-pizza delivery business. That’s exactly what we need, to deliver non-pizzas as quickly and efficiently as possible

There’s also another delivery coming soon, they’re sending us N95 masks. That’s also a very good idea. It comes from the Strategic National Stockpile, which hopefully we will rapidly replenish.

As government interventions go, creating lots more and bigger Strategic National Stockpiles of goods that are highly valuable in a pinch seems like an excellent plan, and a 1-out-2-in general rule might even be justified. If we’d had enough masks in reserve in March 2020, things would have turned out very differently.

If left to its own devices Capitalism Solves This because private actors would invest in stockpiles to sell at a profit, but we have a variety of official and unofficial price controls that prevent this.

So, same as it ever was, once we ban the market from solving the problem we need to solve it collectively.

I’m Sorry, Sir, This is The Centers for Disease Control and/or a Wendy’s

It should be the job of the CDC to control disease.

if we hope to control disease in a crisis when it matters most, your OODA loop has to be measured in days or hours rather than months or years

Supreme Court

The Supreme Court upheld the federal vaccine mandate on health care workers, but rejected Biden’s attempt to use OHSA to impose a similar mandate on all large employers.

The mandate for federal workers was being imposed without the proper authority to do so, and while I am not a lawyer, I’m weird in that I still believe that should matter when things go before a court of law.

Left-wing voices generally seemed to be of the opinion that the Supreme Court has no business deciding what is and is not allowed under the law, and instead their Very Serious People should decide via Expert Opinion. Or on a more basic level, they cared about the practical effect of the restrictions the President wanted to impose, but didn’t seem to care at all about the rule of law or whether the President had the legal right to impose the restrictions in question.

The alarming philosophy in question, that a minority of justices endorsed here, is that if the Federal Government wants to impose a law, it must first pass one. Scary, I know.

I happen to disagree on the merits here, because I do think that Congress authorized this when it said it could require things that guard the health of Medicare and Medicaid recipients, so if you want to object you’d have to object to the whole broader structure, and they’re not doing that here

There is one other note I am very sympathetic to here, which is that this rule of law kick only seems to properly and fully apply when a Democrat is occupying the White House.

The liberal justices did not appear to be in as good standing as members of the reality-based community as one might have hoped. They said some things that are not.

• We have over 100,000 children, which we’ve never had before, in serious condition,” Sotomayor added.
• Here’s Breyer, also saying that which is not. When Breyer waded into the fray, he suggested the OSHA rule was needed because “hospitals are full almost to the point of maximum” and that “750 million new cases” had been reported in the US yesterday

More disturbingly, no, seriously, what is the law? Perhaps more disturbingly, Sotomayor said at another point in the argument that “I’m not sure I understand the distinction why the states would have the power” to institute a rule like the one being pursued by the Biden administration, “but the federal government wouldn’t.”

There was no specific command from Congress for OHSA to address Covid-19, so the implication is that anything that impacts health is fair game in the workplace and can be regulated without further authority from Congress. I am not a lawyer, but as I read this, since almost everything impacts safety, this effectively means we would no longer have law with respect to large businesses, only regulations that the President can change at will.

Hospitals

Where things are over capacity, they’re not wildly over, and our worst fears are not going to come to pass.

I don’t say this to make light of the situation. As per reports like this, conditions in many hospitals are terrible and overwhelming. There’s still a world of difference between this and the types of conditions that were feared as recently as a few weeks ago

Some Kind of Djokovic

So, yeah, whatever else is going on, let’s be clear, f** that guy. He played with fire while also pissing off the fire department, and then his house burned down. That doesn’t mean that it’s fine for the government to go burn down his house*

*the grounds used: That his presence in the country might ‘incite anti-vaccine sentiment and “civil unrest.”’

That is very different from saying that Djokovic lied on his application, or that he might get infected and spread the virus. The danger they’re pointing to is his symbolic meaning.*

what is Djokovic doing that is so provocative or likely to incite sentiment? Seems mostly like it’s ‘not getting vaccinated.’

The judges clearly showed what matters in this Australian court, and it wasn’t the rights of individuals or the rule of law.

Think of the Children

Permanent Midnight

One can interpret this in a number of ways. In the sensible metaphor, you keep masks in your house and take them out when you are sick or when there is another pandemic. That makes perfect sense, and I support this idea, so we won’t have a mask shortage if and when this happens again. I do think from the details here that this is the intention.

One can also interpret this type of thing as a request to always carry a face mask, forever, and use them in some places like transport, forever. That makes a lot less sense.

Long Covid

Some of these deserve more detailed treatment, I intend to address that in another post when I have time. Hopefully next week.

Report from Israel that breakthrough cases of Covid-19 after double vaccinations are not more likely to lead to Long Covid symptoms than not having been infected at all. So weird to say ‘we know it can happen after mild infection’ when there’s a ‘baseline rate’ of it happening without an infection at all, even in the worlds where it is mostly the result of Covid-19.

Katja Grace, whose thinking I generally respect, has a post making the case for taking Long Covid more seriously. You have to consider the post’s arguments in light of it being a steelman case for taking Long Covid seriously, from a reference class of thinkers I’ve observed to be likely to be inclined to take such things seriously. One does still have to also update on her decision to write the post.

In Other News

Life must resume, and soon. As much as I’m sympathetic to ‘this is not the week to do that’ one must reply with some version of ‘if not now, when?’ and have a concrete answer. Next week or two weeks from now is totally acceptable as an answer to when, if you mean it. Under a hundred thousand cases a day is too conservative but understandable. Real Soon Now is not.

Not Covid

New paper shows that EBV (the virus that causes “mono”) is the leading cause of multiple sclerosis (paper, gated). I haven’t read the paper but everyone seems to think it is the real deal, and the basic case seems ironclad. This is huge. A million Americans have MS.