(2023-02-23) ZviM Covid 02/23/23 Your Best Possible Situation

Zvi Mowshowitz: Covid-19 2/23/23: Your Best Possible Situation. Every week, when I set out to write the Covid update, I held out the hope that at some point, perhaps soon, you would never read one of these again. There would be nothing to report. That the reports would no longer help anyone. I could go think about and write about something else. Today is that day.

From this point forward, I am no longer going to actively seek out Covid information. I am not going to check my Covid Twitter list.

will continue to compile what Covid and related information I come still across

Unless something changes a lot, that will be a lot less common than weekly.

The Numbers

Physical World Modeling

In Other Covid News

State Senator in Idaho introduces a bill that makes providing or administering any mRNA vaccine a crime. I have learned not to be all that concerned by ‘politician introduces terrible bill,’ almost none of them go anywhere. Still, wow

A fun note: Bret Stephens says in his column that the conclusions of new study on the efficacy of masks were unambiguous. The study says ‘relatively low adherence… hampers drawing firm conclusions’ and ‘there is uncertainty about the effects of face masks.’ Same as it ever was.

Remember the Vaccine

In terms of death, once you were vaccinated, Covid was irrelevant.

Now there has been convergence between death rates for the Covid and non-Covid groups, and when there was a recent modest surge of cases, neither line responded. This suggests that Covid simply isn’t a substantial risk of death anymore, even for the unvaccinated.

Going forward, Covid is one more disease in your life. Infectious diseases are bad for your day, for your week, for your health. Sometimes people have persistent issues afterwards. We should cure them, prevent them, vaccinate against them, treat them. Will we learn that lesson more generally? No, of course that. Oh well.

Is vaccination still worthwhile going forward? Yes, I believe that it is. The benefits continue to exceed the costs. What I would not do is boost on a regular basis, or apply the kind of pressure that causes a drop in willingness to get vaccinated for other things

Other Medical and Research News

Some observations from Scott Sumner on obesity. He notes that income and obesity are correlated for women - the more income, the less likely to be obese - but not for men

*Another hint at what might be happening can be found in this primer on the concept of ‘food neutrality,’ which I found via an NPR profile.

Food neutrality is the understanding that no single food holds superior nutritional or moral value over another.*

*If anything, this is worse than my extrapolation from basic concept, because it includes ‘dismissing rules about moderation’ and literally ‘there is no such thing as unhealthy food.’

This doesn’t answer the question of how we have reached the point where people can advocate for such things with a straight face. Such attitudes do go a long way towards explaining why one might have a large obesity problem.*