(2022-06-16) Zvi,M Covid 6/16/22 Do Not Hand It To Them

Zvi Mowshowitz: Covid-19 6/16/22: Do Not Hand it to Them.

Executive Summary
You can get Paxlovid and/or travel without testing if you want to, but you still can’t quite get permission to vaccinate your young child.
Don’t leave your friends behind.
Even if they don’t dance, they’re still friends of mine.

The Numbers

Deaths

Cases

Travel is Back

Tests are no longer required to enter the United States. We were far behind the sanity curve on this one, as Europe has long since gotten over the testing requirement

In other news, Justin Trudeau has Covid-19 (as does Tony Fauci), which is interesting timing. Remember when we used to worry when world leaders got Covid?

Prevention Prevention

The Only Reason You Have to Hand it to the FDA is They Ruled That You Have to Hand It to Them

Paxlovid Chronicles

Paxlovid is often available if and only if you push for it hard enough. The pharmacists still can’t prescribe it

Paxlovid use among states correlates with vaccination rates, implying the main mechanism for differences is patient demand

Meanwhile, hundreds of people die each day of Covid, and most people who could benefit from Paxlovid continue not to get it.

How’s it going, Zeynep Tufecki?

Win-win solutions are not something anyone with power believes in or cares about, so they get neglected. Or alternatively, they are used as excuses for everyone to try and leverage them into win-lose outcomes, and with all sides doing that nothing gets done.

I don’t consider the problem to be Covid-specific

The Paxlovid Paradox

The new data, however, showed a 51% relative risk reduction in standard-risk groups, which the company said was not statistically significant.

A 51% relative risk reduction sounds like a big deal. If it’s not ‘statistically significant’ yet then the logical thing to do is keep enrolling patients until the sample size gets big enough to fix that.

In Other News

New Bob Watcher thread, largely about Long Covid. He naively buys the ‘this is going to cripple tens of millions of people’ interpretation of the studies, not seeing any flaws in the studies and also not checking to see if that interpretation matches the world he observes, and he continues to be cautious. Included for fairness between perspectives

Not Covid

Saudi Arabia to spend a billion dollars a year on anti-aging research. That’s pretty cool

Reminder that we continue not to prepare vaccine prototypes in case there is another pandemic, because congress will provide no pandemic funding of any kind

A reminder this week that the Red Cross is so perverse that they will throw your perfectly good blood away, while there is a shortage of blood, if you have a health condition whereby donating blood benefits you

I do not understand why many people have this pathological an opposition to trade and to positive sum interactions. They literally seem to think that it would be unethical for both parties to benefit from a transaction.