(2023-01-19) Zvi M Covid011923 Flipped Numbers

Zvi Mowshowitz: Covid-19 1/19/23: Flipped Numbers. It was a quiet week. All the longer term news was as one would expect. That is good news.

Executive Summary
Deaths unexpectedly up for a second week, should be peaking here.
Cases unexpectedly down a lot in Northeast, other regions likely will follow soon.
Estimate says China’s wave peaked at ~3x the size of last year’s Western wave.

The Numbers

Physical World Modeling

Celine Gounder notes that we did not have a winter surge in hospitalizations or deaths, attributes this to immunity built up over time. That is in spite of XBB.1.5.

Zeynep Tufecki notes that in a meta-anlysis of Covid cardiac symptoms, out of 106 studies, only 6 had representative samples. The others were essentially worthless.

In Other Covid News

China

Scott Sumner reminds us of the obvious fact that China did not previously have a major Covid outbreak and cover it up, as there would have been no way to cover it up. Also the obvious fact that Covid Zero was a clear and highly expensive politically-motivated error

Remember

If you institute requirements, enforce them. If you don’t want to enforce them and they’re more like ‘suggestions’ then I suggest that, instead, you suggest them. Otherwise, you are punishing those who think your words have meaning and that your rules need to be followed, and you are sending the strong message not to follow your rules.

Other Medical and Research News

Tl;dr: If you are vegan or menstruate regularly, there’s a 10-50% chance you are iron deficient. Excess iron is dangerous so you shouldn’t supplement blindly, but deficiency is easy and cheap to diagnose with a common blood test. If you are deficient, iron supplementation is also easy and cheap and could give you a half standard deviation boost on multiple cognitive metrics (plus any exercise will be more effective)

This is quite a lot of prescriptions (source) for something that is almost, but not quite entirely not unlike meth (Adderall).... if we are giving out over forty million prescriptions for this, multiple things are deeply wrong. (ADD)