(2022-11-03) ZviM Covid 11/03/22 Asking Forgiveness

Zvi Mowshowitz: COVID-19 11/03/22: Asking Forgiveness. It was a quiet week on the Covid front. That is a very good thing.

Executive Summary
Cases and deaths rise modestly, raising chance of winter wave.
Forgiveness is often offered where it needs to also be requested.
Things are the largely the good kind of quiet.

The Numbers

Physical World Modeling

This is not ‘millions of workers now disabled.’ It is instead ‘millions of disabled now workers.’

A good point that I’d forgotten, the most dangerous part of flying, in terms of infection, is when you are still on the ground because the filtration systems aren’t in full effect. So you might want to mask until you take off

US Senate minority report says Covid likely originated from a research incident (aka a lab leak)... it represents clearly motivated reasoning, and it seems some important details are importantly wrong

Incidentally, how about this other lab leak of the 1918 flu virus? Perhaps our safety protocols are not so great?

If you definitely want a booster and have to choose which booster to get, you 100% would prefer the updated ones

In Other Covid News

What would have happened if we had tried a Libertarian approach to Covid vaccines? Tyler Cowen seems to affirm in his response as Scott Sumner notes that a true libertarian solution would have been great....I see this as a strange choice of counterfactual.

Forgiveness

Emily Oster proposed what she calls an ‘amnesty’ and says she ‘forgives’ everyone for what they did during Covid ‘while they were in the dark.’

In some situations, it is generous to offer people forgiveness. In others, it is a claim that you are the one who gets to do the forgiving.

There is typically little appetite for ‘forgiveness’ when everyone still thinks they were right. There is nothing stopping Emily Oster or others from unilaterally ‘forgiving’ whatever they would like. It seems good, even, if done genuinely. If done as a way of saying ‘I was right,’ even if she was indeed right, then not so much.

The best way to earn forgiveness is always, of course, to not only admit error but also then to Fix It. CDC director Walensky is attempting to do so, with explicit goals including ‘tell the public what we don’t know’

all of this is about information being given relatively quickly. None of this is about recommendations or permissions or actions happening quickly. At some point, things stop being prospects for reform and the better option becomes replacement. This was a communications issue but was not only a communications issue. If the CDC thinks it doesn’t have other huge problems to fix, well, CDC Delenda Est.

China

China doubles down on its lockdowns in the wake of the party congress, impacting hundreds of millions at a time

Other Medical and Research News

Pfizer reports Phase III success in its maternal RSV vaccine trial, reducing severe illness in newborns by 81.8%. People are saying this might be our last really bad RSV season

From Saloni Dattani, I missed it last week, a Wired piece on how to speed up science based on lessons from the pandemic. Everything here seems great. We should do all of it. The problem is that there are other things, that matter more, that Saloni is not even willing to write in Wired. Until we acknowledge the regulatory obstacles in our way, we will continue to move slowly