(2022-09-22) ZviM Covid 9/22/22 The Joe Biden Sings

Zvi Mowshowitz: Covid-19 9/22/22 : The Joe Biden Sings. When Bob Wachter says it is a judgment call whether the pandemic is over, you know the pandemic is over.

Executive Summary
President declares pandemic over!
Russia mobilizes, there is a Ukraine post.
Head Start kids freed from mask and vaccine mandates.

The Numbers

BA.2.75.2

My read of these developments is that they are surprisingly good news. Convergent evolution means that there is a kind of platonic form of the maximally infectious Omicron subvariant, and we more or less know what it would look like

Am I marginally more concerned because this particular variant exists than I would be if it did not? Yes, it has crossed that threshold for now. A lot of variants cross that threshold for a short time. However I do not think it much rises above the general noise of various potentially scary mutations at this time

Physical World Modeling

New Long Covid ‘study’ finds correlation between Covid-19 and a future Alzheimer’s diagnosis and I trust my readers to figure out why correlation is very much not causation on this one. At this point, yelling about correlations is irresponsible even if it’s not technically wrong

Statistically speaking, absent a singularity it is true that by lowering lifetime incomes and education levels, closing schools shortened lives.

I Lose a Bet

In hindsight, the question of ‘what counts as Omicron’ does have a strong bearing on who had the right side of this wager, and also is a key insight into the mistake that I made here

In Other News

Ezra Klein asks why we haven’t had a new Operation Warp Speed from the Biden administration. The answer is that the Biden administration is against warp speed. They are deeply committed to following the proper rules and procedures and the Science. (Best Practices)

The Lancelot Commission has come out with its report on the pandemic. Origins of Covid are considered uncertain. Failures are blamed on lack of public trust and cooperation with prevention and mitigation measures, and lack of moving sufficiently quickly, while summary does not consider the many failures to deserve public trust and cooperation

Report is not kind to the WHO.

Yet their recommendations are for WHO to be strengthened and given a substantially larger core budget

Needless to say, we should not respond to this by increasing the WHO’s powers and budget, and especially should not do that while not fixing the procedures involved.

Monkeypox

FiveThirtyEight analyzes what went right with Monkeypox.

What happened was that the communities impacted reduced their rate of risky activities, and this effect was far, far larger than vaccination and other official Public Health efforts.

What mattered and gets the credit, however, as simple: Telling people affected what put them at risk, after which they quite rationally adjusted.

Polio

Thread explainer on polio.

Does anyone have a plausible explanation as to why we failed to eradicate polio in Pakistan and Afghanistan? CIA fake vaccine!

This was a historic crime against humanity. It needs to be recognized as such.

Out of a Paper Bag

OurWorldInData has updated their grocery bag impact statistics to respond to critiques.

The places that completely freak out about every bag you use, or won’t give you paper either, or give you things so flimsy you have to worry your bags will fall apart? That is quite a large mistake.

A Virtue Signaling Contest

*there are two kinds of virtue signaling contests.

The kind where everyone agrees on what the virtues are, and the other kind.*

Area locals here means in Martha’s Vineyard. Ron DeSantis at best does not care what these people think. More likely he wants them to be angry.

He wants people talking about how much of the burden of migrants falls on Florida and how liberals are ‘soft’ on immigration.

Don’t take the bait. Have we all learned nothing?

Permitting Reform

People Are Trying To Destroy the Internet

California’s Governor Gavin Newsome signed their bill into law to try and destroy the internet via someone thinking of the children. Lindsey Graham and Elizabeth Warren are doing their best to give bipartisanship a bad name by proposing a new agency to ‘regulate’ the tech industry. Amy Klobuchar’s JCPA bill is back from the dead after a deal was struck with Ted Cruz to ban content moderation in exchange for making tech companies pay for links

We now turn to Texas’s attempt to destroy the internet, via its attempt to ban any and all forms of content moderation. That was signed a while ago and blocked by the Supreme Court. The 5th Circuit decided to outdo itself this week, and decided to uphold the bill.

This is Masnick’s full take, here is a highlight

as 1st Amendment lawyer Ken White notes, it’s “the most angrily incoherent First Amendment decision I think I’ve ever read.”

The crux of the ruling, written by Judge Andy Oldham, is as follows: Today we reject the idea that corporations have a freewheeling First Amendment right to censor what people say.

The good news is it is not merely Obvious Nonsense. It is also Sufficiently Obvious Nonsense. California’s law is also impossible to actually comply with, likely patently unconstitutional and plausibly breaks the internet quite a bit, yet there is worry it is Insufficiently Obvious Nonsense and might go into effect, at which point things get kind of crazy.

An Unexpected Victory Explained

Ryan Peterson went on the Decoder podcast with Nilay Patel and gave his story of what happened with container stacking in the Port of Long Beach.

Ryan portrays the tweetstorm as not part of a carefully orchestrated publicity campaign, and the boat ride as an actual fact finding mission rather than a publicity stunt to help the tweetstorm.

He also emphasizes that ‘get out there in person, see things and talk to people’ is a vital part of understanding any problem.

his proposed port solution is to the unions is to buy them out entirely and start fresh. He shares a similar view of labor union difficulties to mine, which is that we in no way begrudge them higher pay, that is absolutely fine, what we need is the flexibility and ability to innovate and improve things that unions prevent to protect their positions

Do I believe Ryan’s story? Mostly.

Bad News

It seems a large part of Europe’s plan for this energy crisis is to go back to burning wood, because their accounting schemes think this is somehow ‘carbon neutral’ instead of massively bad on carbon, so we are literally chopping down American forests to ship to Europe? Meanwhile, ‘environmentalists’ shut down nuclear power plants and sacrifice the ability to put up solar panels and wind farms to prevent someone from drilling for natural gas, when the gas would take the place of burning coal or literally chopping down trees for firewood.

Reddit’s r/railroading still under the impression that railroad workers have the right to strike. One commentor noted that the railroad workers were asking for 15 days paid time off with no notice at all, which given the damage done when unstaffed would require massive additional reserves to prevent problems.

That is the flip side of ‘time off to get medical care.’ It seems like there should be a way to reconcile ‘we can get time off to go to medical appointments or seek urgent care without retaliation’ with ‘we have a reasonable expectation that employees will give notice before not showing up.’ Why isn’t there?

Berkeley is somehow proposing zoning reform that downzones the area.

The FDA is telling people not to cook their chicken in NyQuil and I very much agree do not cook your chicken in NyQuil. Despite this being Good Advice, I can’t help but wonder why the FDA thinks this will decrease the number of chickens cooked in NyQuil.