This is the non-China section of this week’s update. Despite there being essentially zero good statistical data about the real situation in China, things are clearly moving fast, and I have assembled what useful information I have been able to find. If cases are rising as quickly as some reports suggest, their wave could crest within a matter of weeks and life be back to normal within a few months.
Latest UK data out just now shows covid cases and hospitalisations up by 29pc and 36pc respectively in the past week, in the run up to Christmas/New Year. Should be an interesting two weeks before the next figures are released but anecdotally it is starting t.o get a bit rampant, given this is the first holiday season in three years with no restrictions. https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/
Obviously, withholding a degree from someone who will not come into physical contact with Stanford again for not meeting a physical-contact requirement is somewhat silly.
But (and I say this recognizing this may be misread by many)...said individual admits they're part of the Stanford Review and seems to signal they have a visible identity as a bit of a conservative iconoclast on campus. My sense, from having been adjacent to similar circles at Yale, is that said groups often get a bit of a reputation for gotcha journalism and similar hijinks _that is legible to campus administrators of exactly the sort processing such a request_.
Such is the nature of being young and contrary, and I wouldn't get us away from it! But it's also not surprising (even if not desired) that such an individual _might_ experience administrators being very, very careful about not waiving the rules. (For example, if they had granted the waiver, they might fear then being the subject of a "Stanford is hypocritical on vaccinations" opinion piece instead...)
As a supporter of the focused protection strategy, I'm glad to see it's being considered, even if only in retrospect. I haven't read the MR piece yet (I intend to right after this), but I will offer modest pushback on your description of focused protection Zvi. Specifically the thought "I do think the core assertion here, that focused protection of those in nursing homes was not in practice a realistic option, is still mostly correct. We were not sufficiently capable of understanding what such protection would look like physically, or of implementing what we did know in the face of social and commercial pressures. There was no way to get everything we would have wanted."
My interpretation of focused protection is along the lines of applying the protective strategies that were applied to the entire population only to the most vulnerable populations, e.g. nursing homes. Consider the pure covid theater that was inflicted on school kids for ~2 years (and is about to start being inflicted again, as per your link to the Philadelphia school). How much value did that theater contribute, versus how much suffering did it cause? The idea behind focused protection is that the risk profile of covid varies drastically with the demographic, therefore a one-size-fits-all solution is doomed from the start. If your one-size-fits-all solution is designed around the least vulnerable, more people than necessary get sick. If your one-size-fits-all solution is designed around the most vulnerable (I claim we were here), then your policy choice inflicts unnecessary misery. Thus, focused protection doesn't need to be about Doing More to protect the vulnerable, it could have been implemented by Doing The Same as we actually did for the vulnerable and loosening up elsewhere. The idea is to avoid one-size-fits-all solutions entirely.
One of your last paragraphs on the matter, "we could have largely implemented by giving people more individual choices sooner, and letting them decide how to adjust. Such outcomes, however, fall more into the ‘we do less damage to our lives without also becoming net sicker, or at least not substantially sicker’ rather than ‘the elderly actively do better.’" hits the mark exactly.
Applying a standard SEIR model, the focused protection strategy only makes sense if you are working towards getting the younger population infected and reaching herd immunity. Proponents of the strategy downplayed this aspect because it is incredibly unpopular, but it doesn't really make sense to evaluate the success in the context of the actual response which tried to keep everyone from getting sick.
In retrospect focused protection wouldn't have worked even if feasible, because we don't know of a good way to reach the herd immunity and rapid elimination that the strategy requires, but on the other hand nothing else really worked either.
I remain confused as to why it makes sense to rely on the official case counts rather than using wastewater data alone. Unless we know of sampling/accuracy problems with that data, it seems to be far superior.
The kind of person who would choose to go get an official PCR test at this point is no longer representative of the general population.
Latest UK data out just now shows covid cases and hospitalisations up by 29pc and 36pc respectively in the past week, in the run up to Christmas/New Year. Should be an interesting two weeks before the next figures are released but anecdotally it is starting t.o get a bit rampant, given this is the first holiday season in three years with no restrictions. https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/
Obviously, withholding a degree from someone who will not come into physical contact with Stanford again for not meeting a physical-contact requirement is somewhat silly.
But (and I say this recognizing this may be misread by many)...said individual admits they're part of the Stanford Review and seems to signal they have a visible identity as a bit of a conservative iconoclast on campus. My sense, from having been adjacent to similar circles at Yale, is that said groups often get a bit of a reputation for gotcha journalism and similar hijinks _that is legible to campus administrators of exactly the sort processing such a request_.
Such is the nature of being young and contrary, and I wouldn't get us away from it! But it's also not surprising (even if not desired) that such an individual _might_ experience administrators being very, very careful about not waiving the rules. (For example, if they had granted the waiver, they might fear then being the subject of a "Stanford is hypocritical on vaccinations" opinion piece instead...)
As a supporter of the focused protection strategy, I'm glad to see it's being considered, even if only in retrospect. I haven't read the MR piece yet (I intend to right after this), but I will offer modest pushback on your description of focused protection Zvi. Specifically the thought "I do think the core assertion here, that focused protection of those in nursing homes was not in practice a realistic option, is still mostly correct. We were not sufficiently capable of understanding what such protection would look like physically, or of implementing what we did know in the face of social and commercial pressures. There was no way to get everything we would have wanted."
My interpretation of focused protection is along the lines of applying the protective strategies that were applied to the entire population only to the most vulnerable populations, e.g. nursing homes. Consider the pure covid theater that was inflicted on school kids for ~2 years (and is about to start being inflicted again, as per your link to the Philadelphia school). How much value did that theater contribute, versus how much suffering did it cause? The idea behind focused protection is that the risk profile of covid varies drastically with the demographic, therefore a one-size-fits-all solution is doomed from the start. If your one-size-fits-all solution is designed around the least vulnerable, more people than necessary get sick. If your one-size-fits-all solution is designed around the most vulnerable (I claim we were here), then your policy choice inflicts unnecessary misery. Thus, focused protection doesn't need to be about Doing More to protect the vulnerable, it could have been implemented by Doing The Same as we actually did for the vulnerable and loosening up elsewhere. The idea is to avoid one-size-fits-all solutions entirely.
One of your last paragraphs on the matter, "we could have largely implemented by giving people more individual choices sooner, and letting them decide how to adjust. Such outcomes, however, fall more into the ‘we do less damage to our lives without also becoming net sicker, or at least not substantially sicker’ rather than ‘the elderly actively do better.’" hits the mark exactly.
Applying a standard SEIR model, the focused protection strategy only makes sense if you are working towards getting the younger population infected and reaching herd immunity. Proponents of the strategy downplayed this aspect because it is incredibly unpopular, but it doesn't really make sense to evaluate the success in the context of the actual response which tried to keep everyone from getting sick.
In retrospect focused protection wouldn't have worked even if feasible, because we don't know of a good way to reach the herd immunity and rapid elimination that the strategy requires, but on the other hand nothing else really worked either.
I remain confused as to why it makes sense to rely on the official case counts rather than using wastewater data alone. Unless we know of sampling/accuracy problems with that data, it seems to be far superior.
The kind of person who would choose to go get an official PCR test at this point is no longer representative of the general population.