(2022-02-03) ZviM Covid-19 2/3/22 Loosening Bounds

Zvi Mowshowitz: Covid-19 2/3/22: Loosening Bounds. Executive Summary: Cases declining quickly. My people are being let go in some places but not many yet, mostly slowly.

The Numbers

Predictions

Deaths

Cases

That’s an even bigger decline than I expected, and it is happening across 49 states and all four regions

Vaccinations

Pfizer is officially applying to the FDA to allow them to vaccinate children as young as six months.This is vitally needed, because everyone involved is responding to the inability to vaccinate those children by acting completely crazy given that these children are at essentially zero risk

is it worth it if it lets everyone involved relax? If it means the preschool lets them take their masks off a lot faster and we don’t have to test constantly for no reason? Then yes, of course it is worth it.

The CDC attempts to tout vaccines in children.

the first statement is saying that only 2,200 kids were even hospitalized, total, in two years. Only a third of those needed the ICU or a ventilator. That doesn’t make me jump to vaccinate or boost my young child.

The link goes to PoliMath’s outrage at how misleading the statement is as a summary of the linked study, but this is what good behavior from something like the CDC looks like. Within the rules of bounded distrust, this is far better than the baseline I expect.

Vaccine Mandates

NPIs Including Mask and Testing Mandates

Let My People Go

Matthew Yglesias... right in this Twitter thread about many interventions having high costs and low benefits going forward, even if they arguably made sense in the past

Ministry of Truth

Joe Rogan has been a target for a long time, originally for reasons unrelated to Covid and more the standard things that get people censored these days. Rogan is a person who is trying in good faith to construct the most accurate model of the physical world he can and who is willing to listen to people with rather out there beliefs.

There was the whole thing earlier where Rogan didn’t get vaccinated because he thinks healthy people shouldn’t have to

leading to the podcast with Gupta, where Gupta tried to convince Rogan to get vaccinated and Rogan tried to convince Gupta that CNN were acting like a bunch of assholes, and alas they could not figure out they were both right. ((2021-10-21) ZviM Covid 10/21 Rogan Vs Gupta)

It’s no surprise that many want to censor him for it. At first it was for social justice issues where he disagrees with left-wing Shibboleths. Now the beefs are mostly about Covid-19.

This round is mostly about the fact that Rogan recently had two doctors on his program. Those doctors have what look on paper like excellent credentials, and shall we say they Have Concerns about the Covid-19 vaccines. And those concerns are not what I would call accurate. One might plausibly call them ‘dangerous misinformation.’

There’s no question in my mind that Rogan is importantly wrong about vaccines and other aspects of Covid-19, and also that he’s entertained guests who expressed views that are rather more wrong than Rogan’s, and that these mistakes can have serious real-world consequences when five million people are listening.

Of course, I don’t think that we should be in the habit of censoring ‘dangerous misinformation’ and that goes double when it’s truth seeking in good faith.

Spotify decided to slap warnings on the two episodes in question. I don’t love the slipperiness of the slope and don’t have any urge to compromise on free speech.

I was debating whether this all rose to the level of being worth mentioning at all, but then the White House Press Secretary said that Spotify needed to Do More.

Permanent Midnight

A meta-analysis concludes lockdowns did not even save lives, let alone do so cost-effectively. I decided not to do a dive here

Everyone’s ok with masks on public transport, what we’re not ok with is them being mandatory. Although the call for extra HEPA air filters everywhere seems sensible and I can get behind that as a ‘this makes sense permanently’ strategy. We’ve almost certainly been underinvesting in air filtering since at least the invention of air filters.

You can be in pandemic logic mode or you can be in endemic logic mode. When we move from pandemic logic to endemic logic, we go from one new case now meaning many new cases over time to one new case now plausibly implying fewer future cases over time due to immunity.

The argument for periodic but not permanent midnight, we can treat precautions against infection like precautions against weather and ramp them up and down appropriately. Yet people somehow use this to suggest we sometimes mandate those precautions, as opposed to pointing out people will do this on their own. You don’t have to mandate umbrellas to get people to use them when they’re raining. Also it helps that this is one of the few places they effectively allow price gouging.

Think of the Children

Report from the relatively sane (but not as good as usual at football) Clemson is not substantially different than reports from other campuses, and indicates that the pandemic has already mostly run its course there since 28% is doubtless a large understatement of the true case count.

And these are all young students so it’s all fine anyway. The response? To demand they Do More, of course.

You know who is doing more? Yale U. They’re doing a lot more, like having students report one another anonymously for not wearing masks when alone in a room, locking them within their rooms during the ‘investigation’ and then threatening them with expulsion from campus should it happen again. This is to ensure that they are guarding them against the dangers of such activities as outdoor dining.

In Other News

What should we be doing? More. More what? That’s the thing. No one knows.

Prediction Updates

Noah Smith, affirms that pre-k is daycare but says we should offer it for free anyway. (2022-01-25-SmithPreKIsDayCare)

Once again, can someone please explain to me why the solution to this problem is not to give parents money? Why should we impose this severe financial penalty on the parents who want to actually teach their children, which we’re acknowledging here is actively better for them? This is the opposite of acknowledging the free labor being asked of parents, it’s making them suffer financially even more.