Category: Coronapanic

COVID-19 testing is required in Maskachusetts, but unavailable

by philg

We have been barraged by emails from our kids’ schools during the Christmas vacation week. If we traveled, the public school administrators want to know where and when and they want to see medical records of a PCR test (required under the governors’ travel orders, though at this point most other U.S. states have a lower rate of COVID-19 cases within 7 days compared to MA). Example:

We will be strictly enforcing the Governor’s Travel Orders and sending students home when we learn about travel and have not received notification and verification of required test results.

The school actually requires additional testing and quarantine days (14) beyond the referenced travel order, which requires 10-day quarantines and testing for those 10 and older:

Children who are 10 years or younger are not required to have a test. However, without a test, they must quarantine before returning to school. So, families will need to choose to either have their children tested and provide the result of the test to the school nurse so that they can return to school immediately if the results are negative or they will need to keep their child home in quarantine for 14 days if a negative test is not provided.

(i.e., if children can keep quiet about that trip to Disney World, they can continue to receive an education!)

The kicker to all of this is that COVID-19 tests aren’t available, except to the mostly-imprisoned college students who don’t need them (they get tested twice/week). Here’s one self-pay $80/test service (recommended by a private school administrator) that you might think would have slots because they don’t take insurance and don’t provide the taxpayer-funded testing that was supposed to be Americans’ right:

As of Sunday morning, it would be possible to get a test on Friday evening in the Cambridge location:

So the result would come back on Monday? That’s 8 days later and the governor’s travel order requires a 10-day quarantine. So the effort and $$ for the test shortens the quarantine period by only 1-2 days.

Separately, one thing that is great about Americans is that we won’t give up our passion for bureaucracy and paperwork even after we declare an “emergency”. For example, although a non-physician (the governor) orders subjects to get tested after travel, a subject can’t actually be tested without paying a physician in addition to paying the lab. From the CIC Health site, regarding pricing for organizations:

To cover the physician who provides the legally-required referral, the clinician to oversee the test, the software for ordering and reviewing results, and logistics support. This fee ranges considerably based on the components required, and range from $5-$35.

As there is no medical treatment for COVID-19 (remdesivir is approved by the FDA, but considered useless by the WHO) and the vast majority of folks who test positive for COVID-19 have no symptoms and the person getting the test probably isn’t sick to begin with, what is the point of paying a physician?

Finally, let me note that rich white people seem to be ignoring the travel order. Friends with vacation houses in other states go to and from freely. A friend recently met up with us for a dog walk in the woods. He talked about having just returned from a ski trip to another state. I asked “Unless you were skiing in Hawaii, didn’t you have to get a Covid test to comply with the governor’s travel orders?” He responded that he hadn’t bothered and wasn’t going to bother. What’s his day job? Physician.

Related:

  • Turboprop coast to coast to coast with youngsters (we managed to get a test, but in Kentucky where they’re apparently better organized)
  • beacontesting.com, a massive project; on January 3, the site showed “no upcoming times are currently available” at any of the Boston-area locations, but a 2.5-hour round-trip drive to New Bedford, MA would have enabled a test on January 4

Update: Patrick, below, asked whether the situation was better in Western, Maskachusetts, e.g., Pittsfield. The answer seems to be “no”. As of January 3 at 2 pm:

Update from a friend who is considering a brief trip from his all-white COVID-free exurb of COVID-plagued Boston (he’s locked down in a 12,000 square foot house on 10 acres) to rural Maine:

I see. So if I leave MA, go to Maine, and come back – I must quarantine for 10 days. But if I go to Boston and back, I don’t need to. Got it.

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People who don’t believe in evolution are idiots, but the coronavirus cannot evolve

by philg

One evergreen fun activity for American Democrats is saying that Republicans are idiots because they purportedly don’t believe in the theory of evolution. (As Democrats generally live in cities that are devoid of Republicans, it is unclear how Democrats would know what Republicans actually do and don’t believe.)

The same folks are also saying that forcing every American to be injected with a COVID-19 vaccine will end the frightening coronaplague that has lead to coronapanic and shutdown.

Are these points of view consistent?

Why can’t the coronavirus evolve its way around the vaccine, in the same way that influenza evolves to defy our vaccination attempts? And why can’t it evolve to spread even among a mostly masked-and-cowering-Clorox-armed population?

In the early months of coronascience, we were told that the virus was mutating more gradually than influenza. And presumably the most successful mutations will be less deadly (killing one’s host is a suboptimal strategy for a virus).

(Why does this matter? Shutdowns, mask wars, school closures, etc. make sense only if you think coronavirus is a temporary one-and-done phenomenon. If coronavirus will be an influenza-style permanent companion to the 8 billion humans on Planet Earth then it doesn’t make sense to do anything now that we aren’t willing and able to do for the next 50 years.)

Should we schedule a reminder to look at this in February 2022? What’s a threshold of cases and/or COVID-19-tagged deaths that we should use from, say, September 2022-February 2022 in the U.S. to declare vaccine victory or vaccine disappointment?

Update: A Facebook friend updated his profile picture to say “When It’s My Turn, I’m Getting Vaccinated! Goodbye COVID”:

In other words, he’s denying the possibility of the virus evolving its way around the vaccine, as well as assuming that the vaccine prevents transmission (as yet unknown) and that the vaccine will prevent deaths among the old/sick (also as yet unknown because never tested). His tagline is “Yes: Facts,Equality,Justice,Freedom, Intelligence,Confidence. No: Ignorance,Intolerance,Corruption.” so presumably this is an “intelligent” perspective. (My Facebook tagline: “I like to do everything in the dumbest way imaginable.”)

Related:

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The social justice of coronashutdowns

by philg

An email exchange with a friend who was trying to persuade me to see reason (i.e., accept that the obviously correct reaction to COVID-19 is shutdown). If you’re short of time, just check out the two sections highlighted in bold face.

Me:

Opponents of shutdowns, including me, primarily argue that the shutdowns do not save either lives or life-years. While a shutdown in a non-police state may delay some deaths tagged to COVID-19, the shutdown itself, in our view, will kill far more people via deferred health care (e.g., cardiology), increased obesity, reduced fitness, increased alcoholism and drug use, despair due to loneliness, poverty due to unemployment, intensified poverty in poor countries with which we have reduced our trade and tourism. (a partial calculation).

It is not that we deny the value of “lives saved”. We deny the assertion that the government is actually saving lives. It will be 5-10 years before we can see for sure who was right. And maybe we won’t ever get an accurate total because a lot of the deaths due to shutdown will be in countries that may not be great at keeping statistics (see https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/22/world/africa/coronavirus-hunger-crisis.html for example). And some of the deaths won’t happen for another 60 years or so. Children who have lost a year of education will have shorter lives, if previous statistics of life expectancy versus education can be used as a forecast. We don’t have an infinite fountain of money and resources, so the $trillions being spent right now on coronapanic won’t be available to spend on health care and medical research in the decades to come.

Proponents of shutdown wrap themselves in virtue by claiming that they are the only people who care about human life. But I see these proponents as mostly indifferent to human life. They don’t care about any deaths that aren’t tagged to COVID-19.

Him:

Mostly people are scared and confused and it is hard to make an accurate model on which to base decisions, because we only have “in circuit” testing of the various components that makes the anticipated effect of changing things hard to gauge.

Complicating things further has been a president with a personality disorder and the unfortunate human susceptibility of many people to become enthralled to those with that disorder, so that the matter of shutdowns is conflated with that man and his followers.

In any case, I get what you are saying. If that was all you were saying I would not object. But mixed in is a streak of righteousness that I think is uncalled for. Your adversaries are mostly not stupid or badly motivated. They mostly just disagree with you.

Let’s take obesity. I think it is highly unlikely the pandemic will directly affect obesity long term. … If you had appropriate clothing and water, you could walk to California without eating, because walking is extraordinarily efficient and fat is extraordinarily energy dense. Exercise and dieting rarely make a significant direct difference in obesity and often have a paradoxical effect, especially dieting. Babies born to women during famine develop obesity as a compensatory response. Obesity is a result of cheap high energy food intersecting with a natural response in some people’s genes to hoard energy when available.

Me:

Folks who are advocating for shutdowns are presumably the most scared, though. So they are therefore the least likely to be thinking and acting rationally. If shutdown advocates actually had facts/science on their side, they wouldn’t have to censor Facebook and Twitter, fire anyone who dissented (e.g., this trauma specialist), etc. Astronomers don’t have to work on hunting down astrologers to get them fired for their heresy. The results of astronomy speak for themselves. To my knowledge, Anders Tegnell wasn’t paying attention to Donald Trump. Nor were the scientists at the W.H.O. when they said (through June) that masks for the general population wouldn’t stop the plague from spreading.

It wouldn’t bother me if they disagreed, so long as they didn’t also claim that they had a monopoly on scientific truth and that people who don’t accept these truths are idiots. The raging plagues in fully masked Spain and California are good examples. People who say that science proves that masks for the general population will substantially slow down or stop a plague won’t accept any evidence, including the Spanish/Californian plagues, as sufficient to falsify their hypothesis. This is a fundamental aspect of religion. An earthquake that destroys your church and kills innocent children won’t shake (literally) your belief in a benevolent omnipotent God. …

Finally, there is an equity issue that would prevent me from supporting a shutdown. The shutdowns are ordered by people who live in mansions (governors) and supported by rich white people who live in 4,000+ square foot suburban houses (and who may have vacation houses in addition). I’ve heard a few of your [rich Boston suburbs] neighbors talk about how the school shutdown wasn’t a serious inconvenience and they thought it should continue indefinitely nationwide. These are from people who live in 6,000 square feet, who have two college-educated parents at home, who have multiple private automobiles, etc. They never mention what they imagine school shutdown means to a single parent in a 2BR public housing apartment with three kids. Nor do these folks, generally in their 50s, ever say what benefit the shutdown is delivering to a 30-year-old single mom and her 10-year-old kids.

As a rich white 57-year-old, of course I would like to be protected from coronavirus. But even if I thought that wrecking the lives of a 30-year-old public housing mom and her not-at-risk children (via lockdown) would help me, I would be unwilling to use political and police power to extract this benefit for myself. In my view, the young mom and her kids should be free to continue with their lives and education. They’re not stopping me from hiding in my suburban bunker. Why do I need to force them to give up their First Amendment right to assemble and their right to an education under https://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/ ?

[your lockdown arguments sound] reasonable, but, again, it is one in which old rich people (watching cash stack up even faster while quarantined in their massive beachfront mansions) say that they want to help Group A (the elderly) and they will make Group B (the essential workers) pay for this by taking away schools for Group B’s kids, freedom for Group B to exercise and socialize, etc.

Him:

… it looks like Sweden has now admitted it botched things. and the numbers are rising quickly there now. No ?

Me:

The King of Sweden, a guy with 11 palaces and 3 taxpayer-funded Gulfstreams to move among them, has come out as an advocate of shutdown for the working class. So that’s a kind of admission. And the Prime Minister has decided that he will keep his job by appearing to do some stuff (masks on the crowded metro system where people don’t have the flexibility to social distance; reduce the max gathering size for public events (you can still legally have a party at your house for 100 people if you really want to)).

But I think it is more a shift in how people perceive the situation, not a dramatic change in numbers. Below is a chart of Swedish ICU occupancy by COVID-19 patients. Out of a population of 10.4 million they have 300 people nationwide in their ICUs with a COVID-19 tag. (Keep in mind that Sweden has only about 30% of U.S. ICU beds per capita.) They had closer to 550 during the April peak (and Swedish academic modelers predicted that 20,000 Swedes would be in the ICU during the spring 2020 peak).

Is it a “mistake” to have 1 million children in school (without masks) and 300 old/sick people in the ICU with a positive COVID-19 test result? If you believe that humans are in charge of the virus AND that the interests of the old/sick people outweigh the UN-listed universal right of the children to have an education, maybe this is a “mistake”. But the numbers from all around the world suggest that humans are not in charge of the virus, e.g., with raging plagues in masked-and-shut countries or states. In that case, it could look like a “mistake” to deny 1 million children a year of education in hopes of saving a few life-years.

The complete 2020 data won’t be available until mid-January, but right now it seems almost certain that Sweden will have a lower overall death rate than it had in 2010 (the population has grown about 10% during that interval).

Sweden has a COVID-19 death rate that is less than half of the Massachusetts rate. Given recent trends, it seems likely that Sweden will have a cumulative COVID-19 death rate lower than California’s. With lower income children here in Massachusetts and California now having missed nearly a year of education, I personally wouldn’t say that it is the Swedes who are the failures.

So… anyway, I think we can explain different attitudes by different value systems and different personal situations. The Californians whom I know who are pro-shutdown and pro-mask orders do not have children in public school, do not have to leave the house in order to earn money, and simply deny that there is any cost to the loss of freedom of assembly, the loss of gyms, the shutdown of social life (“I can walk outside by myself any time I want”), etc. If we took them seriously, it wouldn’t be cruel or unusual to put convicted criminals into solitary confinement because as long as they have Zoom they wouldn’t have suffered any loss at all by being confined. Shutdown has almost no cost for them so they don’t need a comprehensive scientific theory regarding the benefits of shutdown in order to advocate for it.

The working class people whom I know in Massachusetts (don’t know any in California) feel that their lives have been mostly destroyed. So they demand a logical explanation for how the governor’s 59 orders (so far) will accomplish something more than delaying a few cases by a few weeks. And, of course, the state of the “science” is nowhere near sufficient to provide them with a coherent-sounding explanation. The virus is an aerosol… but a bandana will provide a lot of protection and children who are together in a (white suburban) classroom for 5 hours/day won’t spread the virus to each other so long as they’re all wearing bandanas. Flying and driving lessons are banned after 9:30 pm for COVID-19 safety, but it won’t be unsafe to be in an enclosed car or aircraft prior to 9:30 pm. If this is our best science, it is not good enough to justify the costs of what is being done in the name of science in the eyes of the working class.

We had to agree to disagree, of course, on what is a religious issue. We’re both MITers so, unlike the Facebook righteous, we are able to disagree on a technical issue without destroying our friendship. I asked him to confirm his mailing address for a New Year’s card. He sent me a new address, which I looked up in Zillow. He is living in more than 8,000 square feet in a house with an estimated value of $9.6 million.

Related, an #InThisTogether aerial photo of a house in Lincoln, Maskachusetts:

(by Tony Cammarata with me flying the helicopter)

Related:

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American central planners tackle vaccine scarcity

by philg

The problem with socialism is that it was never given a fair chance or a proper technocratic implementation, e.g., in the Soviet Union. Once President Harris or President AOC appoints properly credentialed agency heads, American Democratic Socialism will serve as a City on a Hill-style demonstration to countries around the world.

My Facebook feed is alive today with Bigger Government enthusiasts decrying the fact that state health departments (New York’s has more funding than the entire Russian military, but our media characterizes these departments as “chronically underfunded”) are not managing to distribute the vaccines that the Feds shipped to them. Presidents Biden and Harris will fix the problem starting on January 20, according to my friends, but we are still left with three weeks of what is, in their view, incompetent and slow distribution (at current injection rates, the U.S. is on track to lose 40% of the paid-for vaccines to expiration).

Stats from the NYT:

(Note that New York and New Jersey collect more in state/local taxes, as a percentage of residents’ income, than 47 other states, but they’re still on track to have expired vaccine doses.)

An interesting aspect of this is that the failure of central planning for vaccine distribution has not dimmed anyone’s enthusiasm for more central planning in other parts of the economy. The solution for dealing with scarcity is not a market and prices, but rather more and better technocrats.

Separately, I’m wondering how anyone who has recently gotten a flu shot in the U.S. thought that this would go quickly. From Do they still line up kids at school and give them shots? (2018):

The other day I was waiting for a friend at CVS so decided to use the time to get my “free” (i.e., included in my $10,000/year Obamacare policy) flu shot. Ten minutes later my friend showed up. It took roughly another ten minutes before the shot was “ready.” It turned out that three health care professionals had to process various forms on a computer screen, get a one-page questionnaire from me, and finally deliver the shot with a simple needle (less than one minute). A licensed pharmacist was required as part of the paperwork pipeline.

I wonder if something more like a market economy could have done this better. The bureaucrats can send free vaccine doses to hospitals, medical and dental offices, and nursing homes. Whatever is left over goes to whatever clinic or facility bids the highest. The bidding process is necessary to ensure that clinics that have the most streamlined and efficient procedures are the ones who will get the vaccine and also to ensure that clinics won’t let doses get spoiled or expire.

The auction-winning clinics and facilities can then use conventional web-based services to let people book slots and pay for vaccines at whatever prices they want to charge. Presumably the people who are at highest risk will recognize their risk and be willing to pay the most.

The obvious objection to the above is fairness. Rich people who aren’t scared of the barely tested vaccines will happily offer their Platinum cards. But maybe this is actually good from an epidemiological and economic point of view. Rich people tend to travel a lot (via private jet, of course, and including internationally throughout all of 2020) and, if the vaccines do stop transmission, vaccinating them will slow down the pandemic. Those rich people who are vulnerable and/or especially fearful and who have therefore been hiding in oceanfront bunkers will go out and spend a lot more money once vaccinated.

We could deal with the unfairness by simply sending out money to the people whom we want to get vaccinated. Use payroll data to send out checks to essential workers. Use Social Security data to send our checks to old people. Use insurance claim (including Medicaid and Medicare) databases to send out checks to those with BMIs over 30 (goal!) or other health conditions. The check recipients could decide whether to stay bunkered, N95-masked, bathed in hand sanitizer or to use the check to pay the going rate for the vaccine.

At least to judge by my Facebook feed, there are a lot of suburban white and Asian Americans who feel that the cost of lockdown is negligible. They’re happy to work from home (4,000 to 6,000 square feet), order deliveries, refrain from socializing in person. These folks don’t need a vaccine because if the government recommends that they stay home for the next 5 years they will cheerfully comply. But, on the other hand, there is no central database of the Happily Shutdown. Thus, the market would be the best way to keep these folks from clogging up the vaccine line. They know that they’ll be home for another year or two, so why should they pay $500 for a shot? They’ll wait for the price to come down to $100.

Update… We can watch the needle sticks unfold in real time:

Universal health care is plainly way better than whatever we want to call our system, since Israel, Bahrain, and the UK are well ahead of us. Also, universal health care is plainly way worse than the U.S. system: Denmark, Canada, Germany, Italy, and France are way behind us.

Second Update: We could also run this as a bounty-based system. The government gives away the vaccines to existing state-licensed clinics, such as CVS MinuteClinic, etc. Then the government says “You get $500 for every person over 80 whom you inject, $250 for every person over 70, and $100 for anyone else. There is a bonus of $200 for every shot in a person with a BMI over 40 and $100 for everyone with a BMI over 30.” Would we have vaccines expiring in freezers? The FAA did this with pilot briefings back in the 1980s. They let two contractors compete to offer computer-based weather information to pilots so as to discourage pilots from calling human briefers. The two contractors ran advertisements, enhanced systems, built web versions at around the same time as Amazon launched, etc. Other than writing checks, the FAA never had to do anything to get people to switch to briefing via computer system other than open up an API on their mainframes.

Related:

  • “Here’s Why Distribution of the Vaccine Is Taking Longer Than Expected” (NYT): Health officials and hospitals are struggling with a lack of resources. [18% of GDP is not sufficient to run a health care system] In Puerto Rico, last week’s vaccine shipments did not arrive until the workers who would have administered them had left for the Christmas holiday. [Coronaplague is an emergency, but not such a serious one that people should work through traditional vacation periods] In one notable blunder, forty-two people in Boone County, W.Va., who were scheduled to receive the coronavirus vaccine on Wednesday instead were mistakenly injected with an experimental monoclonal antibody treatment. [18% of GDP is not sufficient to run a system in which people get the intended shots]
  • Roughly half of the front-line health care workers whom the central planners targeted for #1 priority don’t want to be early adopters of these vaccines and are refusing to be injected: NBC
  • Update: a reader pointed me to “Free Market Vaccines”, a December 7, 2020 post by the always interesting John Cochrane: economics should start with “to the highest bidder,” and come up with some well documented market failure, and a public allocation system that mimics the highest bidder allocation. … In India, meanwhile, that bastion of… informal.. if not free markets, it appears you can sign up to buy the vaccine, for about $8.”
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Get plastic surgery before lockdowns are lifted?

by philg

One problem with plastic surgery is how to get it done without friends and coworkers noticing. If you show up to work with bandages on your face or new breasts, people can compare to what they remember from the day before.

Should a New Year’s resolution be to get plastic surgery before the lockdowns are lifted? Tell folks that one’s webcam is busted and that’s why you’re participating in Zoom with audio only. After the bandages come off, the webcam can be “fixed”.

Separately, whether or not you’re going to get plastic surgery… Happy New Year!

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Let’s check that September prediction about Sweden

by philg

From September 28, Doom by December for the wicked unmasked Swedes:

By the end of December, 200 Swedes will be dying every day from coronaplague, unless they see the light and convert to the Church of Shutdown and don the hijab.

Associated terrifying chart from the “scientists”:

How did #Science do? WHO says that Sweden has experienced 18 deaths in the last 7 days, an average rate of 2.5 deaths per day or 1.25% of the forecast. Admittedly, this is not a perfect experiment. For the first time since March, the Swedes tweaked their policies slightly in November, e.g., adopting masks on crowded public transport, reducing the number of people who can attend a commercial (“public”) gathering from 50 to 8 (still possible to host a big party at one’s house and unmasked Swedes still gather regularly for school and work). The elderly King of Sweden, a guy with 11 palaces and 3 taxpayer-funded Gulfstream jets to fly among them, suggested that shutdown would have been a better policy than “give the finger to the virus” (young healthy Swedes who live in small apartments might have a different perspective on the costs and benefits of home confinement).

So… given a three-month time horizon, the expert scientific prediction regarding what would happen in Sweden was off by a factor of 80X.

Related:

  • Sweden’s total deaths in 2020 compared to previous years (The Swedish MD/PhDs said that half of the people who died with a COVID-19 tag would have died at some point in 2020 (due to old age and/or poor health); if they’re right, the upper limit on excess deaths should be half the COVID-19 death statistic. Keep in mind that you need to adjust for a larger population in figuring the death rate and that the “as of December 11” on the chart should really be “as of December 4” because it takes a while for death statistics to propagate. Sweden was home to 9.3 million people in 2010 and today has 10.4 million potential human hosts for the coronavirus.)
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Assumption that masks are effective leads to conclusion that people of color are responsible for coronaplague

by philg

I was chatting with a California Mask and Shutdown Karen. Did the recent exponential plague in California, despite its mask rituals and nearly yearlong lockdown, change his views on the efficacy of masks and shutdown for containing COVID-19? From the NYT:

It turns out that the exponential plague just underlines the importance of masks. He blamed “Latinos” for causing the California plague. On the way to his house in the hills (he paid an extra $1+ million for a house 1/2 mile from the city limit so that his children wouldn’t have to go to school with the Black and brown Americans whose interests he says that he champions), he has seen “Latinos” barbecuing outdoors without masks on.

(Readers will not be surprised to learn that I educated him regarding the use of the term Latinx.)

So we’ve made a lot of progress in convincing rich white people that humans are in charge of coronavirus. Thus, when coronavirus “spikes” it must be due to something for which humans are to blame. But it seems that rich white people are not quick to blame rich white people. For rich white Californians, the Latinx are apparently the scapegoats (and also, via delivery services, the enablers of their ever-deeper bunkering).

(This is a little like Christianity versus Greek/Roman religion. If your Roman village is destroyed you can say “well, the gods are powerful sociopaths so we should sweep up and rebuild.” If your Christian village is destroyed, you must say “God is omnipotent, benevolent, and just and therefore we did something to bring this destruction down on ourselves.” The twist with the American coronaplague is that we aren’t a unified nation so it is always easy to find another group (Trump voters, Blacks, Latinx) to blame.)

Related:

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Are we going to waste three quarters of our vaccine supply?

by philg

“A Better Way to End the Pandemic Quickly” (MedPage Today):

The current plan is to give two doses, 21 days apart for the Pfizer product and 30 days apart for Moderna’s. Alternatively, all available doses could be given immediately, doubling the number of people who could be reached. Both Pfizer and Moderna report that the efficacy of a single dose is only about 50%. But a closer look at their incidence curves suggests that immunity appears to be maximized about 14 days after the first dose. In the Moderna trial, for example, most of the cases in the vaccine arm occurred during the first 2 weeks following the initial dose. We recognize that the vaccine was developed and tested on the assumption that two doses are necessary. Yet, the trial data suggest that a single dose provides substantial immunity. During this severe pandemic, it seems reasonable to use the available supply to reach as many people as possible in the short term. Delaying the second dose would maximize limited resources and could reduce serious illness and death. A recent projection suggests the U.S. will receive 40 million doses of the two mRNA vaccines by early 2021. A rough calculation suggests that vaccinating 40 million persons with these 40 million doses versus 20 million persons with two doses each could prevent over 100,000 severe cases and save over 10,000 lives.

Despite that fact that the Moderna vaccine was developed nearly a year ago (see “We Had the Vaccine the Whole Time”), testing has been so slow that we can suspect, but don’t know for sure, that one dose is sufficient!

If the MedPage Today authors (Michael H. Criqui, MD, MPH, and Robert M. Kaplan, PhD; maybe they are colleagues of Dr. Jill Biden, MD?) are correct, we are going to be wasting half of our vaccine supply by giving two doses when one is sufficient.

How might we waste half of the remaining half? By giving the vaccine to people who are already immune as a result of previous infection (nearly one third of the U.S. population had been infected as of November (NPR/CDC), which means it will be closer to 165 million by the time the vaccine is available to the average person).

[In the Department of Prescience: “Up to 150 million Americans are expected to contract the coronavirus, congressional doctor says” (March 11, 2020).]

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The science of herd immunity evolves

by philg

From the World Health Organization, right now:

‘Herd immunity’, also known as ‘population immunity’, is a concept used for vaccination, in which a population can be protected from a certain virus if a threshold of vaccination is reached.

Herd immunity is achieved by protecting people from a virus, not by exposing them to it.

Same URL, but the archive.org version captured in November:

Herd immunity is the indirect protection from an infectious disease that happens when a population is immune either through vaccination or immunity developed through previous infection. This means that even people who haven’t been infected, or in whom an infection hasn’t triggered an immune response, they are protected because people around them who are immune can act as buffers between them and an infected person. The threshold for establishing herd immunity for COVID-19 is not yet clear.

It is tough to think of a time when science has progressed so quickly!

Also, in the Department of Evolution of Science, the W.H.O.’s January-June 2020 recommendation against masks for the general public:

Related:

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If COVID-19 vaccines weren’t tested on likely COVID-19 victims, how do we know that they will reduce COVID-19 deaths?

by philg

Sweden, in which coronaplague was allowed to rage while the population continued sending children to school, sending adults to work, restaurants, the gym, etc., will have about the same death rate in 2020 as compared to 2010 (stats; be sure to adjust for population growth of 9.5 percent from 9.34 million in 2010 to 10.23 million today). This suggests that most of the people whose deaths were tagged to COVID-19 were, as the Swedish MD/PhDs said, on track to die from some other cause at some point in 2020. In other words, COVID-19 kills humans who are already 98-99 percent dead (watch out, Joe Biden, even if you do have a Dr. in the house).

What we’ve heard so far from the vaccine trials are the following:

  • the vaccines don’t stop people from getting infected or spreading the infection to others
  • the vaccines cut down on symptoms and severity of an infection

So… the vaccines might actually make an epidemic worse, in terms of the percentage of the population infected, because people who are infected won’t feel sick and therefore won’t #StayHomeSaveLives.

Maybe this would be fine if we can be sure that vaccinated people won’t die with a COVID-19 toe tag. But do the clinical trials tell us that? Did they go to nursing homes and find the sickest oldest most machine-dependent humans? Given that nursing homes are completely locked down, even if they had found such trial subjects, what could be learned from folks who, by design, are shielded from all exposure?

Let’s have a look at the Moderna FDA paperwork. Only 3 people in the vaccine group, out of 15,208 total, died during the study (approximately 3 months; see pages 17 and 18), which tells you that Moderna picked a much healthier population with a much longer life expectancy than the kinds of people who have been tagged on death with COVID-19 positive test result. (If we assume that a typical COVID-19-tagged death is among those with a life expectancy of 4 years, we would have expected at least hundreds of deaths during a similar study of vaccination among people who really need the vaccination. Note that the Swedish data suggest that 4 years is an overestimate.)

Table 6 says that 4 percent of the study participants had “two or more high risk conditions” and that 25 percent were over 65 years of age, but here in Maskachusetts before the state pulled the age-related data, the median age of a “COVID-19 death” was 82 and more than 98 percent of those had an “underlying condition.”

It is nice that a healthy out-and-about 66-year-old develops a good immune response from these injections, but does that tell us that an extremely unhealthy 82-year-old with just a year or two of life expectancy will develop a similarly good immune response?

So… is it fair to say that we can hope, but not expect, these vaccines to stop the kinds of “COVID-19 deaths” that have been Americans’ consuming obsession?

(A med school professor friend: “Good question, probably not.”)

Loosely related…

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