(2021-02-25) ZviM Covid-02/25 Holding Pattern

Zvi Mowshowitz: Covid 02/25: Holding Pattern. It was a quiet week, with no big news on the Covid-19 front. There was new vaccine data, same as the old vaccine data – once again, vaccines still work. Once again, there is no rush to approve them or even plan for their distribution once approved. Once again, case numbers and positive test percentages declined, but with the worry that the English Strain will soon reverse this, especially as the extent of the drop was disappointing. The death numbers ended up barely budging after creeping back up later in the week, presumably due to reporting time shifts, but that doesn’t make it good or non-worrisome news.

Using the Wikipedia numbers we do see continued declines in death rates, but still highly disappointing ones. The English Strain might be substantially more deadly, but it’s too early for that to account for this. It’s definitely odd and I not only see no explanations and lack a good one to offer, I don’t see anyone noticing that it is odd.

New York continues to test robustly, but many other places are not following suit.

Vaccinations

It is hugely disheartening to see our weekly rate decline from 1.61 million per day last week to 1.3 million per day now, with no signs yet of a full recovery let alone getting back on our previously accelerating path

Pfizer and Moderna claim to have solved their bottlenecks and pledge massive boost to US supply (WaPo). They are promising 140 million doses over the next 5 weeks, more than double the recent pace of vaccinations

On the first doses first front, yet another group of experts is out in favor of this obviously correct approach

The English Strain didn’t change the right answer. Instead, it puts additional pressure on the answer to be correct, giving a sufficiently short time-horizon problem slash scary downside scenario to allow ‘experts’ to come out in favor of the better answer over the worse answer. Whatever prevents the most infection, hospitalization and death is the right answer either way, and that’s far and away first doses first.

The English Strain

If we are only up to 6.2% now versus 2.7% for all of January, then the variant isn’t on pace to take over for another few months. That would be enough time to offset the increased infectiousness via additional vaccinations. Alas, data elsewhere in the country is not as promising. This is another data source, this one covering sequencing in the United States, showing us in the 15-20% range.

The South African Strain

Also good is that South African cases have fallen dramatically down, which should lower our worries about this strain on multiple levels.

Johnson & Johnson

The FDA has announced that the Johnson & Johnson vaccine meets the requirements for emergency authorization. You might think this would mean it is now authorized for emergency use. You would be wrong. You can’t rush meetings.

You might think that would mean we have a plan for what to do when it is so authorized. You’d be wrong again. Remember when Biden complained that Trump didn’t have a plan?

Vaccines Still Work

Latest confirmation that vaccines work, in this case one shot of AstraZeneca

Meanwhile, America continues to sit on a massive unused supply of AstraZeneca doses. What is the right way to describe that FDA decision?

There are no CDC guidelines for what vaccinated people should do.

There will come a day when there is once again a pivot, from everyone must take precautions to everyone must do their part to restart the economy

People like Dr. Fauci will instantly transform from ‘even fully vaccinated you can’t see a movie’ to ‘it’s important for our economy and mental health for us to get back to our regular lives.’ And then, if necessary, they’ll transform back, as many times as necessary.

Our continued closing of outdoor spaces and preventing outdoor activity is actively counterproductive on every level, so doubtless it will continue until this is fully over.

Adding daily tests to border quarantines into zero-Covid areas like New Zealand seems like it more than passes every possible cost-benefit test, but even there, nope, not testing.