The moment’s here. My people are all the people. It is time to let my people go. While case counts in many places remain high, we are on the way back down the mountain. The hospitals will hold. People can choose, based on their preferences and situation and the local conditions, whether they want to go now or wait a few more weeks before going. That is their call. It needs to be
1) Your Local Epedimiologist this week stated "There is zero evidence that masks harm, physically or psychologically, kids."
2) There is no evidence that I am subscribed to YLE any longer.
3) Annecdotally, I've seen that masks-blocking-non-verbal-communicatoin is a pretty huge burden on people with Autism, and for boys more than girls. Most that I'm interacting with are middle-school aged and their parents. No one has ever studied this, so of course there is No Evidence on this either.
Isn't DeSantis' point that while Omicron might be the dominant strain, Delta didn't just vanish like throwing a light switch? (The latest numbers I've seen say about 1.6% of Covid cases are still Delta in the US.) So why deny people unlucky enough to catch Delta instead of Omicron a treatment that works? Especially since Omicron's lesser severity means Delta will be over-represented in hospitalized cases relative to general prevalence.
To clarify, suppose that either Delta or Omicron were not a coronavirus. Would this policy make sense? Would you take away the rabies vaccine because we were in an influenza epidemic?
Probably not. So why take away a treatment some of the Covid victims could profit from, just because most wouldn't?
On being post covid: I'm planning on waiting another week and a half and then restarting NYC rationalist weekly meetups - I want it to be very unambiguously over, and there are people who are more covid hawkish than me. Hopefully by then it'll be clear enough that we can agree to start being officially post-covid.
On predictions: mostly agree with your updates, but I'd buy airline mask requirements to 40% on the basis of "airlines love keeping dumb regulations" and keep the probability of omicron optimized boosters at 10% (I was at 8% before, so updating upwards but by less than you, and mostly as a response to your update rather than a direct response to the 5 month thing).
I'm confused about your discussion of schools and kids/students. I know that _some_ parents of school-age kids _are_ concerned about the kids themselves being infected and falling ill (or otherwise being harmed) – I regularly interact with one in particular.
But the, IMO, charitable interpretation around the general concerns of schools and students isn't that the kids themselves are at any significant risk but that everyone else they interact with outside of school is. The particular parent I mentioned has told me that their child has been sick several times already this winter (not from COVID, or at least negative on all tests), and all the anecdotal evidence I've ever observed has been that kids, and 'schools' (i.e. anywhere large numbers of kids interact with each other for extended periods), are probably the most common means of transmission for all kinds of contagious diseases.
I commented on an earlier post that the same parent's kid participated in a school music performance. That the school did this didn't and doesn't make any sense to me – in combination with all of the other precautions, e.g. mandatory masking at all times, even outside, and all classroom windows being open in the winter. I have greater appreciation of the thinking of the 'bubble person' you mentioned – they at least seem to have a 'physical model' and to be seriously cautious about being infected, whereas (most) everyone else, including the particular parent I mentioned, seems to be deluding themselves that whatever official precautions are mandated _must_ be (almost) perfectly reasonable.
I think it's useful to focus on how the phrase "herd immunity" is used. I remember from times before Covid that we talked about herd immunity in the context of the protection afforded to the vulnerable people (immunocompromised individuals, the frail and the infirm) by presence of levels of natural or artificially-acquired (i.e. vaccinated) immunity among the population as a whole, sufficient to prevent uncontrolled, outbreak-type spread. Herd immunity doesn't mean a complete immunity of all people in the community, only enough immunity to prevent epidemic, uncontrollable spread. For pathogens such as whooping cough, where vaccine immunity is long-lasting, the preferred means of achieving herd immunity is vaccinating enough children to prevent outbreaks. For pathogens such as coronaviruses, which are commonly endemic and tend to produce frequent but mild reinfections (as it may be eventually the case with Covid-19) it means doing nothing in particular about infections among the healthy and young but it may mean special precautions around the Covid-vulnerable persons, which is exactly what the Declaration advocates. In other words, the Declaration is actually conventional epidemiological wisdom, applied to a new pathogen that seems to follow a trajectory similar to multiple previous pathogens of this kind (e.g. the Russian Flu of 1889). Almost everybody eventually gets infected and re-infected, multiple times, by most major strains of common viruses (rhinovirus, RSV, coronaviruses) and trying to prevent that just is not reasonable. But it is reasonable to protect the sick elderly and to develop better vaccines.
This is just old-fashioned, epidemiological common sense. That it is seen as a dangerous and abominable heterodoxy is a testament to how far off the beaten path we are now.
Part of the reason for the weird stabilisation of case numbers is that cases in children are rising rapidly while falling rapidly in older adults. This is somewhat predictable from the timings of school holidays which have delayed the peak in children. The stabilisation in middle aged adults could be increased cases in parents, but could be something else too.
It is hard to make sense of the comment by Sunetra Gupta. It does remind me of https://www.nitag-resource.org/sites/default/files/e361266bc0e478ac95c2bcf4bc698b40186f2206_2.pdf which is an official statement by the UK's JCVI (who effectively set vaccine policy) explaining that chickenpox vaccine will not be provided to children as infections in children are needed to boost the immunity of adults (paragraph 10). Similar logic could be applied to conclude that having a continual high number of SARS-Cov-2 infections will reduce levels of severe Covid. Maybe Gupta meant "the low risk of severe disease among the vulnerable arises from the maintenance of immunity through constant reinfection", which might be true.
Was hoping to get your take on BA.2 omicron variant. I'm picking up bits and pieces of info finding it hard to synthesize into a story. The usual "no evidence of any increased virulence" vs "the sky is falling again". This is the kind of thing I look towards you to research for me.
Mike Makowsky should be a lot more charitable towards Peterson regarding the value of models. Mathematical economics models have done very poorly over the past century, bordering on possibly being a huge dead end. The replication crisis is maybe not so bad as in psych or sociology, but it is not going well. It has been a few years since I talked with Mike, but I am pretty sure he knows this. It is true that it is not impossible to find true things, but that is a LONG way from saying that economic modeling has produced much replicable truth. I know a lot has happened since 2008, or 2001, or the last time someone said "we have tamed the business cycle" with a straight face, but advanced modeling techniques haven't produced much truth.
Anecdotes are not data, but: what I'm hearing from colleagues in India is that official numbers are under-reporting the physical reality.
One observation was that when your whole family comes down with Covid during the Omicron surge, it's obvious that's what's happened. Perhaps you confirm with an at-home test, or perhaps you don't have access to one; either way, you don't get officially tested, and so your infections aren't counted as cases.
I don't know if this helps you understand the Indian conundrum, but IMO, as someone who lives here, the data is extremely untrustworthy. In many places governments are dictating what the data should say for whatever ridiculous policy they want to justify. Tests are often/typically conducted by people who come home to collect samples, and they will agree to give you the test result you want for travel etc. The whole thing is a shit show.
Just out of curiosity… I really find your writing helpful to understand the immediate considerations of acute illness of Covid-19 but to provide a really accurate analysis and assessment of risks and what constitutes, for example, a safe time to call it over, shouldn’t you include observations on Long Covid?
Precautions and measures to curb the spread are not simply to reduce deaths and hospitalisations but to reduce the number of healthy people whose lives will be completely turned on their head as they are debilitated by the long term illness.
I do not feel you have ever really factored this in even though it a very real and important factor in any pandemic narrative.
Governments continue to ignore the size of the problem- focussing short term and not long term economic impact it will have with millions debilitated and unable to work.
There are now over 30 studies and trials into treatments for Long Covid so the Pharma world understands the size of the problem- it will be years before many people see the treatments available to them and there’s no certainty of a cure.
The criticisms of Peterson’s statement are valid, but there is a sliver of a valuable point there too. When activists and scientists discuss climate models as an ironclad consensus from on high, they overstate their case. The problem does suffer from the high dimensionality Peterson alludes to and the typical person on the left would benefit from considering the necessary subjectivity that this introduces into the science.
Admittedly the typical person on the right is more likely to encounter this conversation and requires a different kind of counterbalance, but at least as the conversation goes on Peterson appeals to the various degradations caused by water pollution and the potential to address them feasibly.
1) Your Local Epedimiologist this week stated "There is zero evidence that masks harm, physically or psychologically, kids."
2) There is no evidence that I am subscribed to YLE any longer.
3) Annecdotally, I've seen that masks-blocking-non-verbal-communicatoin is a pretty huge burden on people with Autism, and for boys more than girls. Most that I'm interacting with are middle-school aged and their parents. No one has ever studied this, so of course there is No Evidence on this either.
Isn't DeSantis' point that while Omicron might be the dominant strain, Delta didn't just vanish like throwing a light switch? (The latest numbers I've seen say about 1.6% of Covid cases are still Delta in the US.) So why deny people unlucky enough to catch Delta instead of Omicron a treatment that works? Especially since Omicron's lesser severity means Delta will be over-represented in hospitalized cases relative to general prevalence.
To clarify, suppose that either Delta or Omicron were not a coronavirus. Would this policy make sense? Would you take away the rabies vaccine because we were in an influenza epidemic?
Probably not. So why take away a treatment some of the Covid victims could profit from, just because most wouldn't?
On being post covid: I'm planning on waiting another week and a half and then restarting NYC rationalist weekly meetups - I want it to be very unambiguously over, and there are people who are more covid hawkish than me. Hopefully by then it'll be clear enough that we can agree to start being officially post-covid.
On predictions: mostly agree with your updates, but I'd buy airline mask requirements to 40% on the basis of "airlines love keeping dumb regulations" and keep the probability of omicron optimized boosters at 10% (I was at 8% before, so updating upwards but by less than you, and mostly as a response to your update rather than a direct response to the 5 month thing).
I'm confused about your discussion of schools and kids/students. I know that _some_ parents of school-age kids _are_ concerned about the kids themselves being infected and falling ill (or otherwise being harmed) – I regularly interact with one in particular.
But the, IMO, charitable interpretation around the general concerns of schools and students isn't that the kids themselves are at any significant risk but that everyone else they interact with outside of school is. The particular parent I mentioned has told me that their child has been sick several times already this winter (not from COVID, or at least negative on all tests), and all the anecdotal evidence I've ever observed has been that kids, and 'schools' (i.e. anywhere large numbers of kids interact with each other for extended periods), are probably the most common means of transmission for all kinds of contagious diseases.
I commented on an earlier post that the same parent's kid participated in a school music performance. That the school did this didn't and doesn't make any sense to me – in combination with all of the other precautions, e.g. mandatory masking at all times, even outside, and all classroom windows being open in the winter. I have greater appreciation of the thinking of the 'bubble person' you mentioned – they at least seem to have a 'physical model' and to be seriously cautious about being infected, whereas (most) everyone else, including the particular parent I mentioned, seems to be deluding themselves that whatever official precautions are mandated _must_ be (almost) perfectly reasonable.
I signed the Great Barrington Declaration today.
I think it's useful to focus on how the phrase "herd immunity" is used. I remember from times before Covid that we talked about herd immunity in the context of the protection afforded to the vulnerable people (immunocompromised individuals, the frail and the infirm) by presence of levels of natural or artificially-acquired (i.e. vaccinated) immunity among the population as a whole, sufficient to prevent uncontrolled, outbreak-type spread. Herd immunity doesn't mean a complete immunity of all people in the community, only enough immunity to prevent epidemic, uncontrollable spread. For pathogens such as whooping cough, where vaccine immunity is long-lasting, the preferred means of achieving herd immunity is vaccinating enough children to prevent outbreaks. For pathogens such as coronaviruses, which are commonly endemic and tend to produce frequent but mild reinfections (as it may be eventually the case with Covid-19) it means doing nothing in particular about infections among the healthy and young but it may mean special precautions around the Covid-vulnerable persons, which is exactly what the Declaration advocates. In other words, the Declaration is actually conventional epidemiological wisdom, applied to a new pathogen that seems to follow a trajectory similar to multiple previous pathogens of this kind (e.g. the Russian Flu of 1889). Almost everybody eventually gets infected and re-infected, multiple times, by most major strains of common viruses (rhinovirus, RSV, coronaviruses) and trying to prevent that just is not reasonable. But it is reasonable to protect the sick elderly and to develop better vaccines.
This is just old-fashioned, epidemiological common sense. That it is seen as a dangerous and abominable heterodoxy is a testament to how far off the beaten path we are now.
A couple of thoughts from a UK perspective.
Part of the reason for the weird stabilisation of case numbers is that cases in children are rising rapidly while falling rapidly in older adults. This is somewhat predictable from the timings of school holidays which have delayed the peak in children. The stabilisation in middle aged adults could be increased cases in parents, but could be something else too.
It is hard to make sense of the comment by Sunetra Gupta. It does remind me of https://www.nitag-resource.org/sites/default/files/e361266bc0e478ac95c2bcf4bc698b40186f2206_2.pdf which is an official statement by the UK's JCVI (who effectively set vaccine policy) explaining that chickenpox vaccine will not be provided to children as infections in children are needed to boost the immunity of adults (paragraph 10). Similar logic could be applied to conclude that having a continual high number of SARS-Cov-2 infections will reduce levels of severe Covid. Maybe Gupta meant "the low risk of severe disease among the vulnerable arises from the maintenance of immunity through constant reinfection", which might be true.
Was hoping to get your take on BA.2 omicron variant. I'm picking up bits and pieces of info finding it hard to synthesize into a story. The usual "no evidence of any increased virulence" vs "the sky is falling again". This is the kind of thing I look towards you to research for me.
Mike Makowsky should be a lot more charitable towards Peterson regarding the value of models. Mathematical economics models have done very poorly over the past century, bordering on possibly being a huge dead end. The replication crisis is maybe not so bad as in psych or sociology, but it is not going well. It has been a few years since I talked with Mike, but I am pretty sure he knows this. It is true that it is not impossible to find true things, but that is a LONG way from saying that economic modeling has produced much replicable truth. I know a lot has happened since 2008, or 2001, or the last time someone said "we have tamed the business cycle" with a straight face, but advanced modeling techniques haven't produced much truth.
Anecdotes are not data, but: what I'm hearing from colleagues in India is that official numbers are under-reporting the physical reality.
One observation was that when your whole family comes down with Covid during the Omicron surge, it's obvious that's what's happened. Perhaps you confirm with an at-home test, or perhaps you don't have access to one; either way, you don't get officially tested, and so your infections aren't counted as cases.
I don't know if this helps you understand the Indian conundrum, but IMO, as someone who lives here, the data is extremely untrustworthy. In many places governments are dictating what the data should say for whatever ridiculous policy they want to justify. Tests are often/typically conducted by people who come home to collect samples, and they will agree to give you the test result you want for travel etc. The whole thing is a shit show.
Just out of curiosity… I really find your writing helpful to understand the immediate considerations of acute illness of Covid-19 but to provide a really accurate analysis and assessment of risks and what constitutes, for example, a safe time to call it over, shouldn’t you include observations on Long Covid?
Precautions and measures to curb the spread are not simply to reduce deaths and hospitalisations but to reduce the number of healthy people whose lives will be completely turned on their head as they are debilitated by the long term illness.
I do not feel you have ever really factored this in even though it a very real and important factor in any pandemic narrative.
Governments continue to ignore the size of the problem- focussing short term and not long term economic impact it will have with millions debilitated and unable to work.
There are now over 30 studies and trials into treatments for Long Covid so the Pharma world understands the size of the problem- it will be years before many people see the treatments available to them and there’s no certainty of a cure.
Click through rates are typically very low, so if I think the thread is necessary I try to paste in the required parts via snipping tool.
The criticisms of Peterson’s statement are valid, but there is a sliver of a valuable point there too. When activists and scientists discuss climate models as an ironclad consensus from on high, they overstate their case. The problem does suffer from the high dimensionality Peterson alludes to and the typical person on the left would benefit from considering the necessary subjectivity that this introduces into the science.
Admittedly the typical person on the right is more likely to encounter this conversation and requires a different kind of counterbalance, but at least as the conversation goes on Peterson appeals to the various degradations caused by water pollution and the potential to address them feasibly.
Couldn’t they be discussing something like subinfectious exposures (that’s supposed to prevent immunity from from fading). I know this is MDPI, but still: https://mdpi-res.com/d_attachment/viruses/viruses-13-00961/article_deploy/viruses-13-00961.pdf