(2021-06-03) Zvi M Covid 6/03 No News Is Good News

Zvi Mowshowitz: Covid-19 6/03 : No News is Good News. Infections and deaths continue to decline. There is no sign that the change in mask policy or anything else is going to blunt that, or that the control system is attempting to reassert itself. We’re winning. If you’re reading for ‘news you can use’ there isn’t any beyond ‘news is good.’ It’s safe to relax.

The Numbers

The situation in India continues to improve, and it no longer requires its own section to track the numbers there.

In Other News

Post on the early UK plan to aggressively pursue herd immunity, and how the media has rewritten history to pretend that the plan never existed or wasn’t a plan for herd immunity. It looks at several of the ways in which journalists are pulling off this memory hole. Repeatedly we’ve seen the words ‘herd immunity’ change in definition to suit elite preferences, and the fact that having been infected makes one immune is almost entirely being ignored.

What’s the inflation rate? Depends how you count, and here’s one more angle

A hedonic adjustment seems in order. One concern is that the CPI makes ‘hedonic adjustments’ to inflation indexing when products and services improve (TV gets bigger), but mostly doesn’t when they get worse (plane shrinks your seat), and to get an accurate answer one must pick a side

Another piece of evidence that newer variants, while sometimes more infectious, show no sign of overcoming the vaccines. Ratio of infections in vaccinated versus unvaccinated are similar to the ratios for previous variants

Thread on the recent rise in cases in the United Kingdom (full of excellent graphs), which follows a similar pattern. B.1617.2 is fueling a new wave of Covid infection in many parts of the UK, which has seen case counts double in the last two weeks, rising to match the average new rate in the USA. The good news is that the new hospitalizations are among younger groups that are less vaccinated, and the vaccines appear to be holding strong.