(2022-07-21) ZviM Covid 7/21/22 Featuring ASPR

Zvi Mowshowitz: Covid-19 7/21/22: Featuring ASPR. What’s happening with Covid-19? More of the same old stuff, basically, and nothing that it is vital to know short term. The quiet news is that Biden intends to elevate ASPR to coordinate pandemic response rather than the CDC or FDA. My hunch is this will only make things that much more convoluted and worse.

The Numbers

Physical World Modeling

Chance of reporting Long Covid after 12-16 weeks given you also are reporting Covid around 4%. Seems broadly compatible with previous estimates

the Long Covid two-step, where one asserts lots of chronic fatigue and then tries to do numbers without it. I strongly agree that if there was tons of Long Covid causing lots of people to be unproductive that would do a lot of economic damage. It is exactly the lack of sufficient damage there that makes me confident it isn’t happening

FDA Delenda Est

no, there will be no review of the FDA procedures that massively messed up the pandemic. Those parts are fine. The issue is the food supply.

You see, when you mess up the food supply or tell people they can’t vape, people notice. Especially when there is still no timetable for ending the formula shortage.

The FDA might not recognize that the pandemic response wasn’t great, but the Biden Administration does, and their solution is to elevate a department of the HHS to coordinate the response next time?

This is a strategic mistake and will create more confusion, indecision, and delays in responding to pandemic crises,” said Scott Gottlieb.

Ultimately, CDC needs to own this, and if they can’t execute well, that needs to be fixed.”

Scott also says flat out that ASPR did not exactly cover itself in glory during the pandemic

I do not agree that the CDC has the tools of response, because it can’t stop the FDA from making things worse. I do not agree that it has the expertise, because I’ve seen its work and also because it doesn’t understand that it should stop making things worse

Court Versus Court

Either virtual learning is torturous and awful and completely unacceptable (ding!) or it isn’t. There is no solution that everyone is going to feel is acceptable to everyone all the time. But then, there never was. That’s what school is about

Your child ‘doesn’t feel comfortable’ with some crazy arbitrary stupid requirement of the school so they think it should go away? Oh boy do I have news for you.

In Other News

New York City may implement air quality standards. (CO2, etc)

Oh no. Air quality, ventilation and filtration is important. It is important to pandemics, and it is important to ordinary life.

Still. Oh, no. We all know that in practice what fires codes are for is to make the homes of poor people illegal, and to put a bunch of additional burdens on having places to exist

Thread about legal efforts to limit the powers of public health authorities. It turns out that if authorities do things that people do not want them to do, and that cause a lot of disruption for not much benefit, those people will sometimes look to find ways to stop them from doing those things. And yes, that will make it tougher to use such powers when they would do more good, but is also evidence that the system was going to use them way too often