(2022-03-24) ZviM Covid 03/24/22 Respite

Zvi Mowshowitz: Covid-19 3/24/22: Respite.

Executive Summary
BA.2 on the rise, leading to some local rises in cases as in NY.
Federal government is out of funding for Covid.
China looking tenuous but has not lost yet.

The Numbers

As a share of cases, BA.2 rose from about 23% to 35%, as noted in the next section it should continue to increase for a bit but seems unlikely to cause a major wave or crisis. Perhaps modest prevention measures will have to be readopted, perhaps not, but private reaction should be sufficient there.

China

China has put its chips on Covid Zero and not used that time to prepare to lose gracefully, because that would cost face. Now that Omicron is both making it all but impossible not to lose and making losing potentially acceptable, they find they have not made the necessary prep work, and losing would perhaps not be so graceful.

They have done a better job stalling than I expected, but reach an equilibrium with this approach? I remain deeply skeptical.

Physical World Modeling

BA.2 slowly rising. This suggests a relatively small ~16% reproductive advantage over BA.1, while BA.1 continues to decline, implying R0 ~ 1.1 for BA.2 right now. That is of course still enough to create a huge impact on a weekly basis, but seems unlikely to be sufficient for a big surge or wave in the United States any time soon

Federal Funding

The verdict is in. The Covid-19 pandemic was insufficient to cause the United States to take pandemics seriously. We spent trillions, much of it on unnecessary and counterproductive overstimulation of the economy that is now causing lots of inflation. We don’t have billions to stop this from happening again, or even to provide for basic needs.

Prevention and Prevention Prevention Prevention

Liberals continue to be very worried about Covid.

No need to mince words here. That 50% is mostly wrong.

I certainly don’t want to be in a world where I lose points if I don’t wash my hands for no reason every time I do things like walk into a building. If you listened to the recommendations of ‘health professionals’ you would lose several minutes a day washing your hands, and often as a priority interrupt. Yes, you can afford any one such thing, but such things add up. One can always wash more often, or more carefully.

As it turns out, what did hand washing do for us? A lot less than people thought, and the whole effort was almost certainly net negative because it outcompeted other prevention effects such as ventilation, being outdoors, masks and social distancing, all of which are vastly more impactful.

Biden administration releases new guidance on ventilation standards for schools and businesses. Ventilation is one of those things that is a good idea anyway, so a good place to look for worthwhile things to be doing

In Other News

The underlying post here is centrally an attack on Emily Oster for daring to consider things like cost-benefit or quality of evidence at all, using arguments like ‘some right-wing thinkers and some corporations like her arguments’ and ‘her arguments are used to justify policies I do not like’ and even ‘her audience is white.’

At this point, there are large risks to sustaining interventions, and there are no studies to show that these risks are not worth worrying about and good reasons to expect the effect sizes might be very very large

However, I do want to notice that yes, we have made a lot of pandemic arguments entirely about individual risk in many contexts where a lot of what matters is collective risk.