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Removed (Banned)Jan 6, 2022
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Could the still-receding delta wave be what's confounding the death rate?

Also, while the Boston wastewater numbers are pretty good as a within-wave comparison I wouldn't take them too seriously for between-wave comparisons. Omicron seems to be better at entering cells without TMPRSS2 and so is found in different places in the body, probably leading to different amount in a person's feces for the same respiratory viral load.

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I find myself not super surprised that deaths have stopped tracking past trends for two reasons (whether they are actually valid is an empirical question). More young people are getting COVID than earlier in the pandemic and more people are getting infected for the second time. One or both of these outcomes would lead to fewer deaths.

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I applaud your go forward comments policy. Anything one can do to make life more polite is worthwhile.

At a middle school in Washington Heights (Manhattan), attendance today was about 60%. This is a school that in normal times has 95%+ attendance.

I want to self-report a psychological phenomenon, which i call the Covid reverse slot machine syndrome. The longer I go without an infection, the more value I place on not getting infected. Given that I'm vaccinated and boosted and the evidence about Omicron, I know I rationally should be less worried, but my lizard brain tells me "you've invested so much care up until now..."

A behavioral expert would cite, perhaps, some strange "variant" of the :Endowment Effect.

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Was comment editing only added to ACX by Substack? Let me test!

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Regarding health care staffing, it is probably worth remembering that many place (e.g. Philadelphia and environs) required employees to get vaccinated or be fired, regardless of whether they had gotten COVID or not, with the deadline around late summer. Around here that was an estimated 10-15% of the workforce, although I never saw a final count. We should remember this because present lack of staff is partially because policy makers in government and the healthcare industry decided they wanted to have fewer staff around. I would say they are now trying to cover up their mistake by talking about quit rates, but who knows if they even believe it was a mistake.

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"There is a story to be written about academics who where too willing to amplify a message..."

Of course, as in all important moral questions, CS Lewis did it nearly a century ago. And because he's one of the greats of all time, he included some bears in the story.

"One of the biggest problems with the Trusted Authorities is that if it’s very important that they never be seen as importantly wrong, it’s extremely difficult to ever be importantly right."

In war, the old peacetime generals get shitcanned because the state can't hide the dead bodies and moving line. Then new wartime generals get promoted who are usually better at fighting a war but bad at checking boxes. We still have no mechanism for shitcanning our peacetime FDA/CDC/etc.

"Radicalization"

Yeah. I've shown more normies how to pack a bug out bag, how to defund the police, how to stock up food and supplies for an emergency, how to order veterinary antibiotics from the internet, and how to use a firearm this last year than I care to think about. It's really screwed with my self-image as a crazy person.

My pediatrician told my vaccinated son to "be smart, wear a mask when they tell you you have to, but don't drink the Kool-Aid." Also told him he needs to read 1984 and Fahrenheit 451 this year. Guess what they look like. Did you imagine a neck-bearded 40 year old dude with "Taxes are Theft" bumper stickers? Nope, 65 year old church lady with diabetic socks.

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Jan 6, 2022·edited Jan 6, 2022

Very recently, it became possible to edit comments on ACT. This is a test to see if that works here.

EDIT: Yes , it does. Clicking on the … to the right of the Reply EDIT #2 and Delete buttons (which you will only see on _your_ comments) gives you the edit option.

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Could you link the German study on long covid that you said there is a replication of? AFAICT there's only one study, out of France, from months ago, but that wouldn't be anything to update on now.

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Lower death rate than expected is because early cases skew towards younger, more pro-social people (i.e. those who natural will have milder outcomes, and those have already been exposed to SARS-CoV-2).

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Hi, just a quick comment on novavax - the Politico article is using speculation based on unknown sources. The company has reiterated that it will produce at least 2 billion vaccines in 2022. It has already started supplying some countries (Indonesia) or produced vaccines awaiting the final approval (South Korea).

EU should get its first package of Novavax vaccines by January, so they are on track with their 100 mil in 2022 order.

FDA and US is another beast. There were speculations, but it is unclear. They had submitted the full CMC package now so the EUA should be granted (since it was granted everywhere else incl. WHO, India, EU) and Novavax can broaden the American arsenal of vaccines.

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“Today, six health experts on President Biden’s transition team called for Biden to adopt an entirely new pandemic strategy — one that does not have a “single-minded focus on vaccines” and that is geared to the “new normal” of living with the virus indefinitely, not to wiping it out.“ some of their points look very interesting. What do you think?

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A look into the 40% rise in death rate for working age people, by an actuary in the life insurance field.

https://marypatcampbell.substack.com/p/excess-mortality-for-working-age?justPublished=true

(TL;DR - COVID, drug overdoses)

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Post-exposure vaccination is a thing in a number of diseases with longer incubation - smallpox, rabies, ...

There are potential reasons to believe that it might help for covid too, you might gain your antibodies a day or too sooner. Research is needed, but it can't be excluded.

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Jan 7, 2022·edited Jan 7, 2022

Great blog, Zvi, as always. Could you elaborate on your optimism - "our lives beckon"? This seems to be predicated on reasonable behaviour by policymakers. It is very possible that another immune-evading variant will appear in the coming months, or perhaps we'll get a second omicron wave in the spring once antibodies have dwindled. If we didn't collectively move on last summer, once most vulnerable people were double vaccinated, why would we move on now? Mutations of this virus will likely continue to put significant pressure on hospitals for many years, especially during winter. Why would this by now deeply-ingrained fear of overflowing hospitals suddenly disappear after the current wave - perhaps I am missing something?

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> one man is still trying to find the answers to life’s persistent questions.

Garrison Keillor has a substack! https://garrisonkeillor.substack.com/

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