(2022-06-02) ZviM Covid 6/02/22 Declining To Respond

Zvi Mowshowitz Covid-19 6/2/22: Declining to Respond. Executive Summary
Paxlovid and Fluvoxamine remain hard to get.
Time is not a flat circle, that’s a dumb expression, but history rhymes.
Covid-19 is a good excuse to work on curing aging, let’s do that.

The Numbers

Variants

Trevor Bedford thread confirming BA.4/5 will likely outcompete BA.1.2.12, confirmation at least a lot of that is immune escape, and the note that a BA.1-based vaccine update would be helpful but a BA.4 or BA.5-based update would be much better at this point

Big Time Surge Story

How is the other half not living? It’s calling another big time surge.

Permanently avoiding infection is for most people not a good plan, and if you did need to have that as your plan then yes it’s time to step up your game and pull out that P100.

on the question of whether the unvaccinated should be worried right now, Matt Yglesias points out the graph versus NYTimes story differential here. (the narrative is bullshit)

Let My People Go

There are no standards. There are no criteria. There is only emergency.

Meanwhile CDC continues to recommend the full ten days quarantine period for children under the age of two, because they are unvaccinated and couldn’t mask. Words, I have none. Maddening lack of connection with the physical realities of life.

The juxtaposition of ‘we don’t know the long term effects of Covid so we need to destroy life indefinitely’ and ‘we don’t know the long term impact of child masking but eventually there will be studies and we’ll know’ could not be more clear.

FDA Delenda Est: Approved Treatments Edition

Tyler Cowen reminds us that Paxlovid remains remarkably hard for regular people to get and that this (OF COURSE!) is largely the FDA’s fault since they could allow pharmacists to prescribe it themselves

CDC Delenda Est

Remember when Trump complained that the problem was that we had all these cases because was did all those tests?

The quote is from this Kelsey Piper post about Monkeypox, including that we’re still doing the whole ‘downplay the situation so people don’t panic’ thing

Think of the Children

Fund Anti-Aging Research (life extension)

aging is also the primary risk factor for Covid-19, so perhaps we can market our anti-aging solution as a Covid-19 treatment?

So why not try drugs that make bodies young again?

Now that Covid-19 is around suddenly we have this bold idea to solve the problem, which is to cure aging by making people younger. And no, there is no hint of noticing that maybe we should have been trying to do this anyway?

One More Note About That Long Covid Study

if the mean age in your study is 71 years old that’s an important point when deciding how to use the results of that study.