Tag: covid

COVID-19 predictions

  1. 75% chance that there will be a new wave peaking in March or April, with a peak at least half again as high as the preceding trough.
  2. 66% chance that sometime this year, the South African and Brazilian strains – or other new strains with similar dynamics – will be a majority of coronavirus cases in the US.
  3. 55% chance that later, when we have great evidence on this, we’ll find that P/M, Novavax, AZ, and J&J all cut deaths from all extant strains by at least 80%.
  4. 60% chance that in 2022, public health officials recommend that you get “your yearly COVID shot”, even if you have previously been vaccinated against COVID
  5. 90% chance that on an average day in mid-2022, on an average street in the SF Bay Area, fewer than 10% of people will be wearing face masks.
  6. 50% chance that sometime in 2021, the FDA grants a pharmaceutical company general approval for coronavirus vaccines which can adapt to changing virus strains without going through the entire FDA approval process again, and that whatever fast-track lane they get takes less than 3 months between creating the vaccine and it being approved for general use.

COVID-19 bifurcation

The result is that the amount of cash households have in the bank has absolutely exploded. I don’t even know if that word does justice. American households have $1 trillion more in checking accounts today than they did 1 year ago. For perspective, they held $800B in checking accounts a year ago. So it’s more than doubled. In 1 year. in many ways the American consumer is in the best financial shape in modern history, with minimal debt burdens and eager to spend their record savings.

Libertarians in a Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic had barely taken hold in the United States when principled libertarianism was reported to be among the early fatalities. “There are no libertarians in a pandemic,” Atlantic writer Derek Thompson quipped on Twitter on March 3. But that doesn’t mean libertarians haven’t made valuable contributions to the discourse surrounding COVID.

Paul Romer argued early on that government investment in massively expanded testing would be a bargain compared to the costs of letting the pandemic rage unabated. And this is one subsidy that many libertarian public voices eagerly endorsed. Yet the government is doing worse than nothing about these tests. Not only has the government neglected to subsidize them, it has put up obstacles so citizens can’t pay for them. Regulations are actively denying individuals access to valuable information about their own bodies that would help them avoid unknowingly spreading the disease.

More than 800 regulations were waived in response to COVID. While some of these will eventually come back into force, the pandemic has revealed how we’re better off without them.

Is there anything specifically libertarian about different dosing strategies? Not inherently. But the ideas owe much of their currency to the advocacy of George Mason economist Alex Tabarrok, and the debate centers on whether the bureaucratic decision-making processes of the FDA are adequate for responding to the current crisis. FDA procedures are designed for drug development and the certainty provided by time-consuming randomized control trials. As with early advice on masks and current restrictions on at-home testing, these standards may not serve us well in a rapidly progressing pandemic.

Doctor Do-Little

Fauci’s gambit — which was to play a shrewd inside game to preserve an illusion, from the outside, that science and facts were safe from political contamination — had the effect of delegitimizing science and precluding the possibility of a political solution. By fudging the facts to assuage the president and moving the goalposts to manipulate the public, Fauci, however inadvertently, helped to undermine public trust in the medical response, creating openings for conspiracy and demagoguery to fill the gap. Meanwhile, by lending legitimacy to the White House’s approach, he forestalled a political showdown — one that could have seriously altered the course of the past year.

Orphan Vaccine Carriers

humanity was a lot braver / ingenious 200 years ago. today, people sit on their fat asses debating useless things, like whether human challenge trials are “ethical”:

At the end of the 18th century, smallpox was probably the scariest disease on Earth. It spread alarmingly quickly, and every cm of people’s skin, including their face, would erupt with 1000s upon 1000s of painful, pus-filled sores. Edward Jenner observed something strange, however: People who caught a related disease called cowpox never came down with its deadlier cousin. So in 1796, he began giving people cowpox intentionally, rendering them immune to smallpox and creating the first vaccine.

But the breakthrough introduced another dilemma: How could doctors deliver vaccines to people who needed them? The real trouble started when doctors tried to vaccinate people who were far away. The lymph could lose its potency traveling even the 350km from London to Paris, let alone to the Americas, where it was desperately needed: Smallpox outbreaks there were verging on apocalyptic, killing up to 50% of people who got the virus. Every so often threads of dried lymph did survive an ocean journey—a batch reached Newfoundland in 1800—but the lymph was typically rendered impotent after months at sea. Spain especially struggled to reach its colonies in Central and South America, so in 1803, health officials in the country devised a radical new method for distributing the vaccine abroad: orphan boys.

The plan involved putting 24 Spanish orphans on a ship. Right before they left for the colonies, a doctor would give 2 of them cowpox. After 10 days at sea, the sores on their arms would be nice and ripe. A team of doctors onboard would lance the sores, and scratch the fluid into the arms of 2 more boys. 10 days later, once those boys developed sores, a third pair would receive fluid, and so on.

Better Masks

We need the CDC and the FDA to step up and provide simple, clear, actionable, and specific information that would allow the public to know which masks are reliable and where they can get them, as well as how to upgrade and better wear their existing options.

instead of sitting on their hands running out the clock on vaccine approvals (astrazeneca is still not approved), some mask guidance would be good. instead, everyone at these agencies seems to be playing virtue signaling games to impress their coworkers.

COVID-19 not over

The new issue is the potential for a really massive spike in Covid cases, where medical systems break down completely. So much of the economic/political status quo seemed to depend on the (largely irrational) optimism that followed the initial vaccine approval. If this gets replaced by a universal “OMG we are so fucked” the damage could be catastrophic–stock market, many industries that have been hanging on the edge, rage at media, doctors, politicians–any “voice of authority”. Even if (rationally) it turns out to be a 2-month issue that the vaccines could have reversed.

Obviously Biden won’t be up for this challenge but no other current or recent politician would have either. I don’t think events will fit any current narratives, and MSM attempts to spin them will fail. The general public won’t specifically blame either Biden or Trump. But if another 10M people are suddenly out of work, no one will understand why it suddenly happened, and no one will trust anyone’s ideas about what to do next.

New variants

Many virologists thought this very unlikely, you could never know that a new variety had higher transmission from mere incidence data: you must understand the biological mechanism. Are they correct? Obviously not.

Why did they think that a new, more transmissible variant of COVID-19 was unlikely? There are several reasons. One, they typically deal with viruses that have been around for a long time, like measles ( > 1000 years). An old virus is going to be pretty well-adapted to to humans. Probably it’s at a local optimum, where small changes would reduce infectivity. But you don’t expect that high degree of optimization in a virus that’s brand new in humans: while spreading to very many people, more than 100M, greatly increases the chance of transmission-increasing mutations. Fisherian acceleration.

Like most biologists and MDs, most virologists don’t know any theory, and in fact don’t _believe_ in theory. For this they occasionally pay a price.

WFH whistleblowers

The work-from-home phenomenon has triggered a fresh frustration for US corporations: Americans are blowing the whistle on their employers 31% more. The isolation that comes with being separated from a communal workplace has made many employees question how dedicated they are to their employers. What’s more, people feel emboldened to speak out when managers and co-workers aren’t peering over their shoulders.