1. In a podcast with Russ Roberts, John Cochrane says,
We can talk about medicines and vaccines–those maybe could go wrong–but a test cannot hurt you unless you take this extraordinarily paternalistic view that you might do something bad with the information that you get with the test, which is in fact the kind of view that they take.
He is questioning the way that the FDA is conservative about approving tests.
To this day, I cannot understand the failure to do regular random-sample testing. I really want to send our public health officials walking across a live minefield wearing blindfolds, so that they can get a sense of how they are providing us with information that would be helpful.
2. A well-known COVID tracker is shutting down. They say that the CDC is now a better data source. The 7-day moving average daily death rate is the number I watch. I really would like to see it take another dive like it did the week after Valentine’s Day.
3. Israeli health officials are effusively praising the vaccine. But the overall numbers for cases and deaths in Israel are not plunging. Maybe in another couple of weeks?
Allowing people to test their own status would have conflicted with governmental ability to track case counts – conflicting with desire (demand?j to centrally manage..
4.
Gov. Ron DeSantis took a different approach and was pilloried. “Florida Man Leads His State to the Morgue,” read a June headline in the New Republic. “Ron DeSantis is the latest in a long line of Republicans who made the state a plutocratic dystopia.”
A year after the virus hit the U.S., Mr. Cuomo’s luster has faded, and Mr. DeSantis can claim vindication. The Sun-shine State appears to have weathered the pandemic better than others like New York and California, which stayed locked down harder and longer.
Mortality data bear out this conclusion. The Covid death risk in-creases enormously with each decade of age. More than 80% of Covid deaths in the U.S. have occurred among seniors over 65. They make up a larger share of Florida’s popula-tion than any other state except Maine. Based on demographics, Florida’s per-capita Covid death rate would be expected to be one of the highest in the country.
Nope. Florida’s death rate is in the middle of the pack and only slightly higher than in California, which has a much younger popula-tion. Florida’s death rate among seniors is about 20% lower than Califor-nia’s and 50% lower than New York’s, based on Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/vindication-for-ron-desantis-11614986751?st=2u6ef11gv2ecil1&reflink=article_copyURL_share
Happy one year anniversary everyone! Only two (more) weeks needed to slow the spread.
I’m really not sure what to make of Israel. I expected their deaths to plummet but they’ve come down at pretty much the same rate as everywhere else, regardless of how many people were vaccinated.
I wonder if this is further evidence for herd immunity having been reached already. Cases are dropping everywhere – including Israel – because there aren’t enough susceptible people left for the virus to maintain its numbers. Vaccinating the elderly – who probably weren’t spreading the virus much anyway – isn’t adding much on top of that in terms of blocking transmission chains.
It’s not just further evidence but proof that herd immunity has been accelerating around the world from early January when Northern Hemisphere cases peaked. The WHO changed its definition of herd immunity last summer to only include vaccinations getting there, which is Orwellian. I can’t believe there is a single epidemiologist who thinks the new definition is better than the old one, but there it is.
“Seeing Like A State” is the explanation for the FDA’s reluctance to let people buy and use cheap and fast tests at home by themselves.
Those tests blind the all-seeing eye of providence, like Ulysses stabbing Polyphemus. That’s why they want you to need a “””prescription””” and have to do a silly Zoom call with some health care provider.
The state wouldn’t be able to see who is getting tested and react to all the positive results, and it insists on being able to. It has nothing to do with “safe and effective”.
If the FDA lets people do that, then just like with pregnancy tests – or glucose measurements, or ketosis strips, etc. – anyone wanting a test will obviously do it that way rather than go through the giant hassle involved with doing it the typical way.
Not to mention having to wait out the egregious delays in getting results that are still being reported, when time is of the essence, and also being told to ‘self quarantine’ on the honor system in the ignorant interim, every time, which many clearly won’t.
So, the problem is, when people use the cheap, fast, and easy tests by themselves, they can (and will) decide to keep the results to themselves, and the state won’t accept that.
To give an example of the thing the state is worried about, in many areas if you go in to get a test, the result is first reported to your state’s and county’s health department, and then to your local school district, who will often get a hold of you days before the ‘lab’ gets around to it, to tell you your kids have to stay home from in-person instruction for two weeks, no exceptions. I know a couple who showed symptoms two weeks apart to whom this happened. When the second of them got sick, there was no test, because a positive test result would not remain private and it would mean another two weeks of kids getting kicked out of school.
Regardless of how one judges such behavior, one can understand the incentives on all sides, and for the state, the ideal that almost every positive result will fly under their radar in the same way, and they won’t be able to know, contact, kick-out, etc. is genuinely horrible.
Yes, additionally, people will cheap, easy, fast, personal tests will also do a lot of cheating and faking of test results, and there is also the ‘danger’ that they might invent circumventions around clumsy zero-tolerance lockdown measures and try to discriminate against people based on test results. You can imagine maybe something like a bouncer at a club or dockside operations for a cruise ship asking people to take tests on the spot in order to be allowed into a non-infected environment. Just imagine the state’s horror at things like that.
But those are still entirely secondary concerns compared to being blind.
I have a solution for this and I wouldn’t be surprised if someone is working on it right now: Place a bunch of true and placebo thin test strips alongside each other to make a encrypted bar code. In the alternative, make text-pixels in a matrix and have something that can be scanned as a QR-code. Then to know what the actual result is, you have to use an app to scan it, that you got when registering your personal information. The app will tell you the answer, but at the same time, it will also tell the state.
Until we have something like that, the state is just not going to voluntarily relinquish the power to see results, even knowing of all the bad incentives, counterproductive consequences, and the fact that those results represent a distorted a picture of actual reality.
Stratify your analysis or waste your time, choice is yours.
Show me the Israeli data amongst vaccinated and unvaccinated. They began vaccinating during a surge and had low level immunity prior. I suspect there are a lot of Arabs and orthodox who haven’t been vaccinated or were vaccinated later and are driving the plateau.
Between making vaccines illegal and making instant tests illegal, the FDA, or at least the law they were operating under, deserves complete responsibility for hundreds of thousands of deaths in the United States.
If both vaccines and at home tests were legal in the spring of last year, experience would have built up that would — or at least should — have accelerated FDA approval of both, but that would have at least accelerated the actual usage of both.
I will grant that there are reasons that the FDA makes such things illegal. But the examples of harm from unapproved pharmaceuticals cannot be reused forever. Between a million lost years of life from coronavirus and several million lost years of life from the overreaction to coronavirus, the deaths on the other side of the scale have seriously piled up in the past year.
Multiple links will probably get this in spam for a few days, but worth doing.
One year ago, Time Magazine:
Dr William Schaffner nine months later
The original article went on:
Surgeon General Dr. Jerome Adams, four months later:
For what it’s worth, it took a lot less than nine months for William Schaffner to change his tune. I live in Tennessee, and he’s sort of a known media hog. Whenever there’s some public health or infectious issue, he’s on television. He has a national reputation also. He’s incredibly polished, and I believe (but am not certain) that he has given instruction to Vanderbilt students and professors about media interactions.
I was on a local committee that had a couple of Zoom interactions with him early in the pandemic. It was absolutely eerie how confident he sounded, no matter what he was claiming or arguing for. When he (correctly) flipped on the mask issue, he seemed to completely memory-hole his previous comments in a jarring sort of “We’ve always been at war with Eastasia” kind of way. It was like they had never happened, and he took no time to grapple with the reversal.
I am well left of the median askblog reader and commenter, and most of my family is in the “trust the science” camp. I use this experience to explain to them not just the fluid nature of ‘The Science” but also the mistrust that the non-left rightfully have in the scientific establishment after this whole episode. Dr. Schaffner was speaking to a larger, friendly, and well-informed audience. He could easily have laid off the early mistakes on the fog of war, and just shown a touch of humility about trade-offs, or the challenge of decision-making when confronting the unknown. Along with the very obvious mis-calibration of the safety analysis by the FDA that delayed approval and thus distribution of these miraculous life-saving vaccines – and they are incredible, thank you science – this experience helps me communicate to my circle that “Trust But Verify the Science” makes a whole lot more sense. It is definitely a point in the whole “politics as religion” shtick that’s ascendant right now; trusting the science while failing or refusing to engage with the underlying data or previous mistakes is as faith-based as it gets.
We need a term for ‘distrust pollution’, the negative externality of the cost to general credibility and social trust levels resulting from high status people getting caught in lies then not facing any personal cost of accountability. There is no convincing response to the overly skeptical when they say that “Well, the one thing we know for certain is that they all lied to us last time, so why wouldn’t they do so again?”
Indeed, one of the problems of a civilization to which all questions must make ultimate appeal to ‘Science’, is that its self-defining as a collection of beliefs that are all permanently provisional permits much greater leeway for getting away with “We have always been at war with Eastasia” abuses and related intellectual errors.
Now, there is also the interpretation that many experts and other influential authority figures were participating in a decentralized noble lie. Global purchases of masks skyrocketed in January, and by the time government and health sector purchasers caught on to the need to secure large supplies, it became almost impossible.
New York officials seem most clearly to have been behaving in this way, trying desperately early on to get their hands on hundreds of thousands more masks (obviously they thought they were good for something), and when those orders were cancelled as impossible to fulfill for lack of supply, then pleading with the public to stop buying them because they “don’t work”. Lots of people apparently picked up on the fact that high status and powerful people wanted this meme repeated, and were happy to affiliate and jump on that bandwagon without anyone necessarily telling them they should do so, i.e., a “Social Failure Mode”.
Despite decades of being a top recommendation in every government pandemic plan, no mask stockpile or spare domestic production capacity had ever been established. The US couldn’t produce enough masks for its own population, and couldn’t ramp up domestic production fast either. This is what once might have been termed a “wake-up call”, but we don’t wake up anymore, as a year later not much has been done about the root causes.
Indeed, HHS is planning to spend over a billion dollars sending everybody masks in the mail. Yes, they know everyone already has plenty of masks, but in addition to voters loving more free stuff, it turns out to mainly be a sly way to bail out the post office without having to vote to raise rates, as most of the money spent will go towards postage.
Still, even a year later, even this plan is taking months, because the US still lacks sufficient domestic production capacity to make enough more masks quickly enough to avoid disrupting supplies to mainly health-care buyers who are legally obligated to purchase from domestic producers.
There is perhaps no getting around the need for noble lies. But if one is going to go down that path, it had better be about a lie that one expects to be perpetuated indefinitely, or else, when revealed in short order to have been a temporary necessity, the only way to maintain one’s honor is to permanently retire from public life, to include resigning from any positions which involve influential communication to the general public.
Covid deaths in Israel HAVE plummeted. 7 day weekly average on Jan. 25 was 65, as of yesterday it was 20. Numbers for US are 3265 and 1806. Decline in Israel 69%, in the US 42%. And that is from a much lower level in the first place. Deaths per million Israel: 7.2 to 2.2. US: 10.0 to 5.8. Israel eschewed a “first doses first” approach which would have prioritized preventing a flu-like illness among healthy people and instead prioritized preventing deaths among those at risk. Over 90% of the at-risk population in Israel have two shots, many have had COVID so the number who have a high level of immunity is quite high. Inoculation by age group here: https://datadashboard.health.gov.il/COVID-19/general
Deaths occur after exposure with a long and variable lag, I think that Israel is mainly now seeing the tail of that lag, people who got the disease before the vulnerable population was so well protected.
Right. There is a built-up stock of very seriously ill patients who are highly likely to eventually succumb to the disease. It is easy to measure the major flow out, in terms of deaths per day (the other flow out is that some with recover).
But what we really want to measure in terms of a leading indicator of mass vaccination effectiveness is the flow into a deathly-ill condition.
This is like a restaurant. Some people pop in for a quick bite, then leave. Others want to hang out and chat for hours. If you stop letting people in the entrance, the customers will still only gradually trickle out the exit. We are watching the exit, but one wants to be at the entrance, counting people coming in.
According to Hagai Rossman et al, new hospitalizations for severe covid for those over 60 collapsed by about 2/3rds in a month, from about 750 January 20th, to about 250 on February 20th. I think this is their data source if you want updates for the last two weeks too, but I had to play with my script blocker to get access.
So why do so many people – including ASK – focus on the death rate, more than anything else?
Because the 65+ voting age population combined with the work-from-home class far outnumber and have far more influence than the rest of the population. The latter group has actually borne the most significant costs of lockdowns, so we throw some stimulus dollars at them every 6 months or so.
We don’t need nor do we want value judgements or alternative measures in such scenarios except when a red state decides to try something different. Only then can we express our collective moral outrage at the neanderthals. Case closed.
1. In the UK the Office of National Statistics has been doing random sampling to estimate Covid prevalence since May 2020.
It appears to be useful information but the UK death rate is terrible, even excluding the first wave in April 2020.
Being at the halfway mark between areas that are like 80/20Trump versus 20/80 Biden, I’ve been able to physically see the difference in attitude as you travel in a relatively short car ride.
This weekend we hit a few weeks after getting our vaccines, enough for immunity to kick in, so we decided to go to an indoor water park out in the mountains of Trump country. Every single thing in the water park is open (except the hot tub). People are on top of each other running around, breathing heavily, waiting on lines for water slides. Hilariously, there are signs posted informing everyone to remain at least 10 feet apart (not even six) and not to touch the same surfaces…and wet kids try to slide past each other to climb on the same things and go down the same slides. A farce and everyone knows it.
By contrast, as I drive closer to DC people mask even their small children outdoors. We tried to visit a museum, but the kids couldn’t touch or interact with anything despite being the only people there…because of those surfaces don’t you know. Nearby was a small indoor water park run by the local government…it was closed completely.
Note that both of the counties where this dichotomy could be observed basically the same death rate throughout the pandemic.
I think that in order to run the experiment correctly you’d have to go to the water park in the red city/county as compared to the similar water park in the blue one. Is the water park even open in the blue one and what are the safety protocols? Museum vs. water park just doesn’t work very well. The target audience and the enforcement staff are not nearly the same.
Just saw “Raya and the Last Dragon” with the family in a movie theater in red Texas over the weekend. Face masks everywhere and distancing guidelines were definitely followed.
Fwiw – our daughter loved the movie and chicken finger and fries meal delivered to our seats. The movie was bunch of blah blah blah about trust and unity for a greater cause…what else could I possibly expect from Disney?
Both of these are in the same state with a Dem governor that is pro lockdown. They are just in very different parts of the state culturally.
And both are water parks. The Dem water park is closed completely, the red one is open. One responded to “the rules” by posting the signs and ignoring them. The other responded by completely shutting down even though they don’t technically have to.
One key difference though is that the Dem one is a government owned community center and the water park is private industry. Like the schools, there is a huge difference between (my revenue is guaranteed even if I shut down) versus (if I don’t open I will go out of business). Schools in even the very red counties are still closed out here, which shows how choosing a very red place to live doesn’t necessarily get you away from the trends decided upon by the commentariat.
“And both are water parks. The Dem water park is closed completely, the red one is open.”
Thanks for clarifying. That was kinda what I was expecting. The red places take a reasonable approach and the blue places are completely nuts, caught up in their morass of unions and overly cautious safety protocols. One year later, only two (more) weeks needed to slow the spread.
It’s good to keep track of the virus, and very good to track the LIES that scientists were telling before / are telling now.
a test cannot hurt you This seems true for individuals BUT, in a society, tests are not treatment nor a cure. Scarce resources, like especially trained doctors and Personal Protection Equipment, need to be used for safe testing. Those resources are not available for treatment nor care of the sick nor for running better experiments to find out what treatments work better.
Slovakia was fairly low death in the first wave, and is now quite high death / dangerous. Also doing huge amounts of testing, but sometimes short of care givers for the sick. My doctor wife, doing testing work, is furious at the waste of too much useless testing of healthy people, with questionable antigen tests (too many false positives at 99.4%; so out of 10,000 some 60 false positives) and little care other than quarantine for those positives with no symptoms.
There’s also more anti-Vax sentiment, partly fed by those who don’t trust the scientists who previously LIED.
At least we were allowed to make and use our own cloth masks, so that’s been common for most of this last lockdown year.