(2022-08-11) ZviM Covid 8/11/22 The End Is Never The End

Zvi Mowshowitz: Covid-19 8/11/22: The End Is Never The End. The biggest development this week in things-relevant-to-my-interests was that PredictIt’s no action letter was revoked, effectively forcing it to shut down its prediction markets in February 2023 unless something changes by then. The most credible story is that this is new prediction market website Kalshi performing a hit job to take out the competition, but I have not had the time to look into it yet. Whether or not that was the reason, the shut-down is quite bad, speaks quite badly of everyone who let this happen, and is something worth fighting against if there is a practical way to do that. PredictIt was far from perfect, but it was a dim light in a dark world.

Executive Summary
Reports from people on their quest to get Paxlovid.
PredictIt was shut down, will cover that at some point.
Monkeypox growth slowing worldwide but not in America.

The Numbers

The Quest for Paxlovid

Physical World Modeling

Another pointer to Long Covid failing to create unexplained workforce absences or other signs of poor population health, which continue to track acute Covid cases. His analysis that finds very few people reporting being involuntarily out of the labor force due to illness

Monkeypox

Exponential growth is not yet slowing much here in America. If we didn’t have the example of other places, or this was spreading into other communities more, I would be a lot more worried.

Washington Post covers the continuing debate about whether or not to give people these obvious physical facts, with the other side of the debate saying that warnings and admonitions ‘don’t work’ and that ‘it is futile to tell people to have less sex.’ Which is partly true, in the sense that many people will ignore them. And mostly Obvious Nonsense, in the sense that many other people will not ignore them and adjust their behaviors, at least on the margins, in ways that make everyone better off

What does it mean that monkeypox is now an official public health emergency and what are we up to? Mina is a big fan of the switch to lower vaccine doses, which should not have required an emergency. Then of course he moves on to at-home or rapid testing, where he confirms:
Rapid tests for monkeypod exist.
Those tests are illegal in America because FDA, probably for a year or more

Vaccination and its Discontents

Work continues on a universal Coronavirus vaccine, but the FDA is back to its usual glacial pace and is being profoundly uncooperative, slowing progress greatly

New York has a polio outbreak. Score one for wastewater monitoring

Not Covid

unsurprising-on-any-level theory of why insulin costs so much. Spoiler alert, it’s the United States Government again

Food expiration dates don’t have much science behind them, ‘and are responsible for about 20% [of the 31% of all food] wasted at home.’ The awful truth is that they are numbers someone made up and could be based on anything at all.

The dates are highly useful, and in my mind one of the most successful mandates, exactly because they do not have to mean anything. The important thing is that they do have relative meaning

IRS is adding a bunch of funding and new employees, including agents. This is badly needed

My personal experience is that I am damn well trying to pay the taxes I owe and the IRS has managed to make a supremely confusing series of mistakes. It took me and my accountant quite a while to figure out what they had done, because they do not explain what is going on.

Everyone thinks they hate the taxman, but what they actually hate are the taxes. Both the money owed, and the giant mess that is dealing with them