(2022-03-31) ZviM Covid 3/31/2022 More Of The Same

Zvi Mowshowitz: Covid-19 3/31/2022: More of the Same. BA.2 became the majority strain in the United States this week, as expected. Mostly things are continuing as expected, with unsurprising news on a variety of fronts. The biggest surprise is that the second booster shot was approved

Executive Summary
BA.2 now majority strain but for now it changes nothing.
Ultraviolet light confirmed as effective.
Lack of federal pandemic funding having real world impacts.
Second booster approved for those 50+ or who are immunocompromised. (2022-03-31-ZviMTheyDontKnowAboutSecondBooster)

The Numbers

Physical World Modeling

Vaccine effectiveness data for BA.2 has come in. Meet the new vaccine effectiveness, same as the old vaccine effectiveness

week, a clinical trial called TOGETHER produced two potentially important conclusions: A little-discussed experimental drug called peginterferon lambda cut in half the number of Covid-19 patients who ended up going to the emergency room or hospital. And the much-discussed antiparasitic drug ivermectin failed to prevent hospitalization for Covid patients at all.

the budget for TOGETHER was also $10 million. And it didn’t come from the National Institutes of Health, a big drug company, or a major charity. Instead, one of the major funders of the trial so far has been Patrick Collison, co-founder of payments firm Stripe

Doing More

Prevention and Prevention Prevention Prevention

White House is continuing to push air quality, a welcome development, perhaps partly motivated by their lack of funding for doing anything else while previous stimulus that mostly had nothing to do with anything health-related could be used to upgrade air filtration.