Category: Coronaplague

In light of the two recent situations in which fully vaccinated friends have gotten COVID-19 (see Maybe it is time for that booster shot? and Why is it still almost impossible to schedule a COVID-19 test? (at least in Maskachusetts)), I think it is time to look at what #Science said six months ago. “One year or 5? Doctors and drug companies increasingly disagree about when we’ll need COVID-19 booster shots” (Business Insider, June 16, 2021):

Insider spoke with nine leading experts, who took their best guesses about how long vaccine protection may last. Those predictions were quite a bit longer than what pharmaceutical companies suggest: Some experts said boosters probably won’t be necessary for another one to five years, while others questioned whether the general public will ever need another round of shots.

Early studies also suggest that the mRNA shots from Pfizer and Moderna offer more robust protection than natural immunity from an infection.

“Vaccines, actually, at least with regard to SARS-CoV-2, can do better than nature,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the US’s leading infectious-disease expert, said in May.

“If I had to look at my crystal ball, it’s probably not sooner, hopefully, than a year after being vaccinated, for the average adult,” Dr. Peter Marks, director of the Food and Drug Administration’s biologics center, said during a recent webinar.

Other experts think protection may last far longer. Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, estimates it could be three to five years. “I would predict that protection will last for a few years — protection as I define it, which is protection against severe to critical disease,” Offit told Insider last month.

Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla estimated in April that people would likely need booster shots within 12 months of getting fully vaccinated. That’d be as early as December for some in the US.

From University of Colorado, February 24, 2021, quoting the director of epidemiology for the Pandemic Response Office at CU Boulder:

… we know that the vaccine efficacy lasts at least eight to 10 months. But immune cell—called T-lymphocytes as well as B-lymphocytes—can stick around in the body for years, breaking into action quickly if the body ever encounters the same virus again. So, it’s likely that protection from severe disease and hospitalization could last for many years.

Two months after the vaccines were authorized for emergency use, in other words, scientists actually knew for certain that protection would last for 8-10 months.

“Underselling the Vaccine” (NYT, January 18, 2021):

Although no rigorous study has yet analyzed whether vaccinated people can spread the virus, it would be surprising if they did. “If there is an example of a vaccine in widespread clinical use that has this selective effect — prevents disease but not infection — I can’t think of one!” Dr. Paul Sax of Harvard has written in The New England Journal of Medicine. (And, no, exclamation points are not common in medical journals.) On Twitter, Dr. Monica Gandhi of the University of California, San Francisco, argued: “Please be assured that YOU ARE SAFE after vaccine from what matters — disease and spreading.”

Readers: Any favorite predictions from earlier in 2021 that you can find? One of the most interesting things about coronaplague is that Americans consider a discipline that is unable to make accurate predictions to be a “science”.

Loyal readers will remember that, ever since January 2021, I’ve considered the Vietnam War to be the best analogy to American efforts in the fight against SARS-CoV-2 (see Lockdown is our Vietnam War so it will end gradually? and Vietnam War analogy for COVID-19 holding up?). As bad an idea as the Vietnam War might have been, from an economic point of view, this comparison is unfair to the folks who supported the Vietnam War for 15 years because coronapanic spending in the U.S. has been roughly 2X the cost of all U.S. wars combined and vastly more than what the U.S. spent on the Vietnam War (the spending on which was blamed for the massive inflation of the 1970s).

“COVID booster gap traps millions of Americans” (Axios) brings in something that I haven’t seen before: Cold War language. From Wikipedia:

In the United States, during the Cold War, the missile gap was the perceived superiority of the number and power of the USSR’s missiles in comparison with those of the U.S. (a lack of military parity). The gap in the ballistic missile arsenals did not exist except in exaggerated estimates, made by the Gaither Committee in 1957 and in United States Air Force (USAF) figures. Even the contradictory CIA figures for the USSR’s weaponry, which showed a clear advantage for the US, were far above the actual count. Like the bomber gap of only a few years earlier, it was soon demonstrated that the gap was entirely fictional.

John F. Kennedy is credited with inventing the term in 1958 as part of the ongoing election campaign in which a primary plank of his rhetoric was that the Eisenhower administration was weak on defense. It was later learned that Kennedy was apprised of the actual situation during the campaign, which has led scholars to question what Kennedy knew and when he knew it. There has been some speculation that he was aware of the illusory nature of the missile gap from the start and that he was using it solely as a political tool, an example of policy by press release.

Look at the suffering reflected in the chart below. Fully 58 million of our brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters have had two vaccine shots, but are not eligible for the emergency use authorized sacrament of boosting.

The Axios article quotes someone who seems unsuited to leadership in the American public health priesthood:

“The question is, what is the goal of this vaccine?” said Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.

Previous looks at estimating Covid death risk from insurance rates:

• COVID-19 is sure to kill you, but life insurance rates haven’t changed
• Thankful that life insurance rates are still down

From Canada:

Canadian life and health insurers paid $154 million last year in individual and group life insurance claims from deaths related to Covid-19, an industry group says.

The latest statistics published on Tuesday by the Canadian Life and Health Insurance Association (CLHIA) include details about benefit payouts related to the pandemic, as well as premium growth in life insurance and annuities.

An additional $150 million in disability claims was paid in 2020 above projections to support recovering workers.

Overall, the insurers paid $14.3 billion in life insurance benefits in 2020, $36.6 billion in health insurance benefits, and $46.2 billion in retirement benefits, the report said.

So the Covid-related death claims were 1 percent of the total in a county that had, in 2020, about 40 percent of the Covid-tagged death rate compared to the U.S.:

What about the overall increase in payouts in Canada? The same publication says that 2019 payments were $12.1 billion. That’s an 18 percent increase and, therefore, payouts went up by 17 percent for non-Covid reasons in 2020. Perhaps simply due to a big sales push 40 or 50 years ago?

Today’s Wall Street Journal includes “Covid Spurs Biggest Rise in Life-Insurance Payouts in a Century”:

Death-benefit payments rose 15.4% in 2020 to $90.43 billion, mostly due to the pandemic, according to the American Council of Life Insurers. In 1918, payments surged 41%.

If we dig a little deeper, the article shows us year-to-year percentage changes. What happened in previous “surge years”? In 2015, payouts were up by 9.5%. In 1994, they were up by 13.1%. What was the great wave of death that swept the U.S. in 1994?

It looks as though 2019 was an unusually great year for life insurance companies (except those that sell a lot of annuities!). Payouts went down 1.7% despite population growth.

If we believe the Canadian data, adjusted for America’s higher Covid-tagged death rate, only about 2.5% percent of the 15.4% bump can be due to Covid. That would leave us with about 13% as the non-Covid increase, similar to the 1994 surge, and less than the 17% non-Covid increase that was experienced by Canadian life insurers.

Related:

• Wave of death among the elderly bankrupts Social Security

Following up on Omicron Question of the Day: What good is PCR testing that takes 2-3 days for a result? …

A repeat of an earlier question asked here: What is the point of our travel restrictions?

Knowing that current testing technology will flag perhaps at most half of those who are infected with SARS-CoV-2, we insist that people can’t come to the U.S. from abroad unless they’ve tested negative. This means that we’ve slightly cut the number of people who arrive into a country with 108,000+ “new cases” per day among those who are already here. NYT:

Our restrictions on documented travelers have proven useless in preventing a new variant from arriving in the U.S. and then spreading (see “Before Even Receiving a Name, Omicron Could Have Spread in New York and the Country” (NYT, 12/5)). The undocumented, of course, continue to cross the southern border without going through the testing and vaccine papers checks.

It would seem that we’ve had sufficient data to declare failure. If we want to keep people with COVID-19 out of the U.S. we have to close the borders to the documented and also somehow close the southern border to the undocumented. Or we could decide that, for whatever reason, we need open borders and we won’t bother hassling the documented travelers with demands for medical test results. But the current system seems irrational (especially closing the borders to people coming from certain African countries because we say that they’re likely to have a variant of COVID that is already in the U.S. and Europe and spreading in both places).

I know that we are #FollowingTheScience so obviously there is something I’m missing… but what is the explanation for keeping the current system after we have direct evidence of failure? The current system can’t be denting the number of infected people in the U.S. because there aren’t all that many documented travelers showing up compared to the 108,000+ daily positive tests here. The current system can’t be discouraging participation in the global COVID variant pool because the Omicron variant was first reported to WHO on November 24 with a first sample dated Nov. 9; it arrived in the U.S. no later than November 22 (CDC).

In case the testing hassles are discouraging you from going to Italy, a recent photo from Naples, Florida:

A friend just returned from Europe with the following report:

No Americans anywhere! … Rental cars in Italy were practically free as were hotels. Italians and Germans seem to have accepted their permanent masked fates with zero drama. They tend to wear inside and out, all ages. Everyone thinks Sweden is nuts and that the world has ended in America. Most I met with think the travel restrictions to the US are insane.

Rapid testing is everywhere, although on way home no one at any airport asked to see my test result, just vax status.

The systems in the EU all were digitally linked so a scan of their vax cards loads everything up everywhere. They thought my vax card was fake.

Related:

• Parking at Art Basel: the high school across the street (also some masketology) — in which the U.S. assembles an international crowd for an indoor event just as Omicron rages

One thing I love about SARS-CoV-2 is that the inevitable mutations enable me to ask the same questions over and over.

Suppose that Johnny starts feeling unwell after Art Basel. It takes him/her/zir/them a day or two to decide that it might be COVID and it is time to get tested. In a lot of states it might take at least one more day to arrange a test. After that, 2-3 days to get a result from the PCR toaster oven. Assuming a positive test, that puts Johnny 4-6 days after his/her/zir/their symptoms began when he/she/ze/they goes into isolation.

Let’s compare that to #Science. “COVID-19 Is Most Transmissible 2 Days Before, 3 DaysAfter Symptoms Appear” (Boston University/JAMA):

Each wave of the pandemic has underscored just how gravely contagious COVID-19 is, but there is less clarity among experts on exactly when—and to what extent—infected individuals are most likely to spread the virus.

Now, a new study co-led by a School of Public Health researcher has found that individuals infected with the virus are most contagious two days before, and three days after, they develop symptoms.

(They forgot to write “global pandemic”.)

In other words, by the time Johnny gets the PCR result, he/she/ze/they is mostly past the contagious phase. Wouldn’t the world have been far safer if we had a rule that anyone who is sick in any way has to be isolated (or, if unvaccinated, euthanized)?

I recently parked in a garage in Florida that has been converted into the world’s loneliest drive-through COVID-19 testing facility (there is hardly any COVID left in Florida).

After $10 trillion in COVID-related federal spending, how long to get a result in a state with hardly anyone infected? “Two to three days,” said the helpful lady who was checking the non-existent customers in. (I went back and forth to the car a few times and never saw anyone come in to be tested; about 6 people seemed to be working at this facility.)

Readers: Please explain to me under what circumstance this kind of PCR test has a practical value.