Tag: covid

SARS-CoV-2 Life Cycle

What has emerged from 19 months of work, backed by decades of coronavirus research, is a blow-by-blow account of how SARS-CoV-2 invades human cells. Scientists have discovered key adaptations that help the virus to grab on to human cells with surprising strength and then hide itself once inside. Later, as it leaves cells, SARS-CoV-2 executes a crucial processing step to prepare its particles for infecting even more human cells. These are some of the tools that have enabled the virus to spread so quickly and claim millions of lives.

Moloch

Dominic Cummings on the Sisyphean struggle of getting things done quickly within a government bureaucracy:

Various media organizations have been leaked an email from me, sent at the height of the covid disaster last year, regarding getting cash urgently to Our World in Data. Tellingly, a ‘Whitehall source’ says this is ‘so damaging’ for Cummings because he ‘is just being very blatant that due process, and procedures, are being thrown out the window’. I do not regard it as ‘damaging’ that I tried to throw ‘due process’ out the window. Sticking with ‘due process’ was killing people. I was right to send this email, I sent many other similar messages on PPE, testing, the Vaccine Task Force (see below), and my interventions saved lives / reduced suffering / speeded vital projects like vaccines. I think that if I had NOT acted like this, it would been unprofessional and unethical.

2022-03-06:

Operation Warp Speed was perhaps the most successful government program in more than 50 years but it was funded only because the Trump administration and then the Biden administration finagled the rules, almost certainly breaking some laws in the process. But that is sometimes the only way to get things done today, especially at speed.

Lockdown Effectiveness

1: Various policies lumped together as “lockdowns” probably significantly decreased R. Full-blown stay-at home orders were less important than targeted policies like school closures and banning large gatherings. Talking about which ones were “good” or “bad” is an oversimplification compared to the more useful questions of when countries should have started vs. stopped each to be on some kind of Pareto frontier of lives saved vs. cost.

2: If Sweden had a stronger lockdown more like those of other European countries, it probably could have reduced its death rate by 50-80%, saving 2500+ lives.

3: On a very naive comparison, US states with stricter lockdowns had ~20% lower death rates than states with weaker ones, and ~0.6% more GDP decline. There are high error bars on both those estimates.

4: Judging lockdowns by traditional measures of economic significance, moving from a US red-state level of lockdown to a US blue-state level of lockdown is in the range normally associated with interventions that are debatably cost-effective/utility-positive, with error bars including “obviously good” and “pretty bad”. It’s harder to estimate for Sweden, but plausibly for them to move to a more European-typical level of lockdown in the early phase of the pandemic would have very much cleared the bar and been unambiguously cost effective/utility-positive.

5: It’s harder to justify strict lockdowns in terms of the non-economic suffering produced. Even assumptions skewed to be maximally pro-strict-lockdown, eg where strict lockdowns would have prevented every single coronavirus case, suggest that it would have taken dozens of months of somewhat stricter lockdown to save one month of healthy life. This might still be justifiable if present strict lockdowns now prevented future strict lockdowns (mandated or voluntary), which might be true in Europe but doesn’t seem as true in the US.

6: Plausibly, really well-targeted lockdowns could have been better along every dimension than either strong-lockdown areas’ strong lockdowns or weak-lockdown areas’ weak lockdowns, and we should support the people trying to figure out how to do that.

7: All of this is very speculative and affected by a lot of factors, and the error bars are very wide.

COVID Civilizational Shift

What we have learned — what we were forced to learn — during the COVID lockdowns has permanently shattered these assumptions. It turns out many of the best jobs really can be performed from anywhere, through screens and the internet. It turns out people really can live in a smaller city or a small town or in rural nowhere and still be just as productive as if they lived in a tiny one-room walk-up in a big city. It turns out companies really are capable of organizing and sustaining remote work even — perhaps especially — in the most sophisticated and complex fields. This is, I believe, a permanent civilizational shift. It is perhaps the most important thing that’s happened in my lifetime, a consequence of the internet that’s maybe even more important than the internet. Permanently divorcing physical location from economic opportunity gives us a real shot at radically expanding the number of good jobs in the world while also dramatically improving quality of life for millions, or billions, of people. We may, at long last, shatter the geographic lottery, opening up opportunity to countless people who weren’t lucky enough to be born in the right place. And people are leaping at the opportunities this shift is already creating, moving both homes and jobs at furious rates. It will take years to understand where this leads, but I am extremely optimistic.

No Financial System

As much as 50% of all unemployment monies, or $400b might have been stolen. Unemployment fraud is now offered as a service, much like ransomware. States without fraud-detection services are targeted the most.

This may be scare mongering by interested parties like the id “theft” cottage industry, but seems directionally correct. Terrible identity and financial infrastructure has consequences.

Absurdist France

perhaps the extreme bureaucracy nonsense of the french will finally catch up with them?

With the announcement of the third Paris lockdown last month to try to control the spread of Covid-19, an apotheosis of the absurd was reached.

A dense, 2-page version of the notorious “attestation,” a government form to be completed anytime one leaves home, was so convoluted that it tied the Interior Minister’s spokeswoman in verbal knots trying to explain it. The document had metastasized with each lockdown into an ever more ungainly monster.

Which of 15 boxes to check? That you planned to walk 1 kilometer with your dog, the maximum allowed, or up to 10 kilometers with your children? Would you be allowed 11 kilometers if you took the kids and the pet? What if Fido wanted to walk 10 kilometers and little Mathilde none?

Expert COVID-19 long-haulers

Most of the other treatments haven’t had the funds for extensive trials, and without proper research, some drugs run the risk of getting overhyped based on limited information. “The early bets financially were made on investing in vaccine trials and investing in monoclonal antibodies. What received relatively less funding and attention were drugs that were already FDA-approved that could be repurposed for COVID.” his goal with COVIDSalon is to provide a dedicated hub of treatment information so people don’t have to sift through a barrage of old articles. A large segment of COVIDSalon aims to help COVID long-haulers. At the moment, only a small number of trials are focusing on long-haulers. James also highlights drugs like fluvoxamine that have alleviated long-term symptoms in a test of COVID-19 patients, plus others such as the nutritional supplement GlyNAC, which is worth watching but is still in very early-stage trials. The way that long-haulers have organized throughout the pandemic—discussing their symptoms in Facebook and Slack groups, and pushing medical professionals to pay attention to their ailments—echoes the patient advocacy that James helped popularize during the AIDS epidemic. Through publications such as ATN, many people with AIDS knew as much about the latest niche medical findings as licensed doctors did. “I think that’s the same with the long-haulers. Everyone is learning about the long-term consequences of this in real time.”

Virtual Courts

In July the Conference of Chief Justices and the Conference of State Court Administrators jointly endorsed a set of “Guiding Principles for Post-pandemic Court Technology” with a blunt message: The legal system should “move as many court processes as possible online,” and keep them there after the risk of infection passes. The pandemic, they wrote, “is not the disruption courts wanted, but it is the disruption that courts needed.”

Tenants facing eviction in Arizona and parents threatened with losing their children in Texas also proved much more likely to make their court dates when they could do so online. Likewise citizens summoned for jury duty: In Texas, 60-80% show up online. That’s 2x as many as formerly appeared in person. The trend bodes well for diversifying juries, which tend to skew white and affluent.

As these trade-offs become clearer, some initial consensus is emerging as to what virtual courts should and shouldn’t do post-pandemic. Just about everyone, even a skeptic like Douglas Hiatt, agrees that they should keep handling the routine business—from scheduling and settlement conferences to contested traffic tickets and uncontested divorces—that fills most court time.

Kati Kariko

Kati is a leading candidate for a Nobel. Amazing work.

1 fateful day, the 2 scientists hovered over a dot-matrix printer in a narrow room at the end of a long hall. A gamma counter, needed to track the radioactive molecule, was attached to a printer. It began to spew data.

Their detector had found new proteins produced by cells that were never supposed to make them — suggesting that mRNA could be used to direct any cell to make any protein, at will.

“I felt like a god,” Dr. Kariko recalled. [..] On Nov. 8, the first results of the Pfizer-BioNTech study came in, showing that the mRNA vaccine offered powerful immunity to the new virus. Dr. Kariko turned to her husband. “Oh, it works. I thought so.” To celebrate, she ate an entire box of Goobers chocolate-covered peanuts. By herself. Dr. Weissman celebrated with his family, ordering takeout dinner from an Italian restaurant, “with wine”. Deep down, he was awed.

“My dream was always that we develop something in the lab that helps people”. I’ve satisfied my life’s dream.” Dr. Kariko and Dr. Weissman were vaccinated on Dec. 18 at the University of Pennsylvania. Their inoculations turned into a press event, and as the cameras flashed, she began to feel uncharacteristically overwhelmed.

A senior administrator told the doctors and nurses rolling up their sleeves for shots that the scientists whose research made the vaccine possible were present, and they all clapped. Dr. Kariko wept.