(2022-05-19) ZviM Covid 5/19/22 The Law Of Five

Zvi Mowshowitz: Covid-19 5/19/22: The Law of Five.Executive Summary
Cases up.
Boosters available for ages 5-11.
No one cares and deaths are not rising yet.

The Numbers

Deaths are rising in the Northeast and flat elsewhere

Enough weeks in a row with 20% weekly case growth and things get out of hand. We’re now triple our low point and back at a point similar to where we’ve been for most of the past year

The rise of BA.2.1.12 (and BA.4 and BA.5) are something I wasn’t predicting would happen, or at least would not happen so fast. Variants are inevitable, but this was unexpectedly quick, and Topol’s note below that this implies more future variants is well taken.

Physical World Modeling

Eric Topol describes our current approach as The Covid Capitulation. That name seems apt

This is repeating ‘the virus mutates a lot’ over and over. It’s worth repeating, as it is central to modeling what will happen in the future. As one would expect, static vaccines and existing immunity decline in effectiveness as we accumulate mutations

The flip side of this is that there have been a massive number of infections, and there will continue to be a lot of them, without many deaths

Topol comes out in favor of a policy of Zero Covid Deaths, as opposed to Zero Covid. The problem is that they’re the same policy. You can’t have a virus running around infecting lots of people and killing zero of them, no matter how good your vaccines and treatments

The second half of the post is called A Delusional Congress and is about congress deciding to fund exactly nothing towards either the current pandemic situation, work to prepare for future variants, or future pandemic prevention. In the opposite of news, I strongly agree with this central call.

What I disagree with is Topol’s characterization of why congress is failing us. Congress isn’t unusually delusional. They know that ‘what they are doing is wrong’ in the relevant sense. They just don’t… care. Not enough to act.

The battle against Paxlovid continues. The most effective weapon is pure ignorance, followed closely by a race between confusion and an obsession with conserving supply and whether someone ‘needs’ it, since Covid isn’t all that dangerous for most people, you see

Boost Your Children Well

If you are four years old, you can’t get the vaccine at all, often with maddening social consequences.

I do not notice that any particular urgency to get my eight year old son a booster

In addition, the FDA said it will convene an advisory committee meeting June 28 to discuss whether the composition of coronavirus vaccines should be modified for use in a potential vaccination campaign this fall

So over a month from now they will convene to discuss whether to reformulate vaccines going forward. Presumably, this allows the FDA to say that there’s no hurry because congress isn’t funding further vaccinations, and the congress to say there’s no hurry because the FDA hasn’t approved updating the virus.
I remember when we said mRNA vaccines could be modified in a week.
I also remember when we designed them in a day.

Every single time the Very Serious People sabotage our pandemic response in the name of ‘impressions’ people correctly get the impression that we are sabotaging our pandemic response. It backfires. Every. Single. Damn. Time. (public health)

Prevention and Prevention Prevention Prevention

FDA Delenda Est has rejected the emergency use application for Fluvoxamine.

New York City issues new mask advisory.

What both these decisions have in common is that those who know better can ignore them. Fluvoxamine is already approved for psychiatric use, so you can still get a prescription if you care enough and work the system. An advisory is a rule you don’t have to follow. The real damage is from rules you have to follow.

The Bob Wachter Chronicles: Paxlovid Postscript

The New Normal

About half of subway ridership has vanished and so far it isn’t coming back. I buy that this is a shift towards massively more working from home and that the bulk of this change likely never reverses.

Whereas hotels represent activity that isn’t going away.

In Other News

Meat packing plants may have been a remarkably large share of early Covid infections.

Ministry of Truth Proves False

Ministry of Truth closes its doors in wake of the sharing of information about the Ministry of Truth, the idea of creating a Ministry of Truth and its new would-be leader who has a history of calling for censorship of any speech she doesn’t like. The framing by the Washington Post was that this was an attack by exactly the kind of misinformation the board was to be deployed against. Which tells you exactly what kind of misinformation the Ministry of Truth was designed to censor.

That the would be 33-year-old leader who has gone around calling for censorship is called a ‘well-respected expert’ in the field of misinformation tells you what it means to be a ‘well-respected expert’ these days

I would like to better understand the mechanisms whereby this backlash resulted in the board shutting down. None of the reactions seem like they should have been unexpected, or like they should have any unexpected impacts. I notice I am (pleasantly) confused that they worked.