(2022-04-21) ZviM Covid 4/21/22 Variants Working Overtime

Zvi Mowshowitz: COVID-19 4/21/22: Variants Working Overtime. The biggest other news is that Omicron variant continues to cycle into new variants.
There’s BA.2.1.12, there’s BA.4 and there’s BA.5.
All seem to be more infectious than BA.2.
Which was more infectious than BA.1.
Which was much more infectious than Delta.
Which was more infectious than Alpha.
Which was more infectious than the original strain.

Covid-19 is here to stay, at least until we can get a nasal vaccine that prevents transmission, research towards which is not currently something we are even willing to properly fund.

Executive Summary
Moderna booster candidate looks great.
Cases and deaths radically down on paper due to Easter, mostly ignore.
Things increasingly returning to normal, travel mask mandates lifting.
China situation is scary, will be covering that in its own posts.

The Numbers

Physical World Modeling

Moderna has a booster candidate, and it is looking remarkably great.

The virus will continue to evolve, but so will our response. Superior boosters are coming, and once again it seems we have an invisible graveyard due to the barriers put in their way but this time the damage is much lower in magnitude. I am not so worried about the medium-term future of the pandemic, leaving more time to worry about the medium-term future of other problems.

We have a drug that has essentially no side effects and cuts down on severe disease and death risk by 90%. Yet most people who get Covid can’t be bothered to take it, and doctors can’t be bothered to fix this or in many cases even know about it. If I got Covid, I would want to take Paxlovid. It is an important fact about the world that many people do not agree with me and would not want this for themselves.

BA.1, 2, 3, 4, 5

Omicron spreading more effectively makes it impossible for us to stop it in practice, but that mostly impacts our perception of our ability to stop it since we already couldn’t stop it, which makes that good news. It also confirms that these will be Omicron variants that we can cover with vaccines and won’t create important new escape and likely won’t be all that much more deadly, all of which is straightforwardly excellent news.

Prevention and Prevention Prevention Prevention

When someone walking by you casually suggests you can do something you might find more pleasant, that is ‘imposing their beliefs on others.’ I think this is a lot of why such folks don’t see a problem actually imposing their beliefs on others and forcing them to engage in physical actions. They do not see a difference between ‘hey man you’d be better off if you did X’ and ‘do X or else.’

Public health broke the social contract. I do not think public health ever had any intention of honoring the social contract, but even so played its hand quite badly and burned an epic amount of political and social capital on all these fronts and more. Yet that should not cause judges to strip it of power. That is not what judges are here to do. That is what the legislature is here to do. The judges, once again, should not be stripping anyone of power. Either public health officials had the legal authority to do a given thing, or they didn’t. If we still had a nation of laws, not making good decisions would not change that either way unless new laws are passed.

Think of the Children

In Other News

we need a program for true mass production of P100 and other superior masks. When the next crisis hits, there is a good chance N95 is not going to cut it, especially in the most dangerous but essential places.