Superstar @Ciara, here to promote vaccines for kids 5-11, delivers an impromptu press conference in the White House briefing room with cameos from her sons Future (7) and Win (1) pic.twitter.com/8AypmQF888
— Nancy Cordes (@nancycordes) November 17, 2021
Getting your child vaccinated is the best way to protect them from COVID, including the Delta variant. The vaccine is safe, effective, and if your child gets their first shot this week, they can be fully vaccinated by the holidays.
Find an appointment at https://t.co/S2DQV6MlBv. pic.twitter.com/5qs6oywB5N
— The White House (@WhiteHouse) November 17, 2021
It's a reason for everyone to get vaccinated. We have no idea how long this will last, but it looks like it may be a public health problem (not to mention what it will do to the individuals affected) for some time. https://t.co/qhMPF6ecYj
— Cheryl Rofer (@CherylRofer) November 18, 2021
This isn't good, folks, and tells where we're headed
—USA new cases today 115,000, 7-day average up to ~88,000, a 14% increase in a week
—Hospitalizations are on the rise again, 850 more today, to ~48,000
—Over 1,700 deathshttps://t.co/xStmHRzwg2— Eric Topol (@EricTopol) November 18, 2021
=====
From a long thread:
The recent update to quarantine rules for overseas travelers coming into Shenyang takes the cake. 28 days in a hotel, 28 days at home. Let’s have a look at what that means for foreign and Chinese companies alike. THREAD 1/
— Jacob Gunter (@Jacob_T_Gunter) November 16, 2021
This affects Chinese companies too. What if such a failure at a foreign OEM occurs and you’re a local supplier who loses demand?
More significantly, a lot of the Chinese companies that use high end equipment from the EU, Japan, US, etc. face the same issue if they want… 12/
— Jacob Gunter (@Jacob_T_Gunter) November 16, 2021
I imagine there are a lot of business leaders nervously praying to the gods of industry that their machinery holds up.
Unfortunately for them, China has already demonstrated a willingness to accept high econ costs to prevent even the most negligible risks re COVID. 14/
— Jacob Gunter (@Jacob_T_Gunter) November 16, 2021
But I can’t even fathom the scientific basis for eight weeks of quarantine.
What we can be sure of is that the economic costs will become steeper as machinery is strained and upgrades are delayed because of the unreal length of quarantines that only seem to get longer. End/
— Jacob Gunter (@Jacob_T_Gunter) November 16, 2021
The rumour that SARS was a CIA bio-weapon was rife in 2003, but I don’t recall it ever receiving the kind of official boosting that this has. On the other hand I’m not sure the Chinese government ever fully acknowledged that SARS emerged first in China either.
— Gilman Grundy (@FOARP) November 18, 2021
South Korea reported its biggest daily jump in coronavirus infections since the start of the pandemic as hundreds of thousands of masked students took the highly competitive college entrance exam. https://t.co/l6Hha5NJU2
— The Associated Press (@AP) November 18, 2021
S.Korea reports record new COVID-19 cases as serious infections cause worry https://t.co/rbvzyuMyPS pic.twitter.com/DkzrXaMa2p
— Reuters (@Reuters) November 18, 2021
Melbourne's pubs and cafes can have unlimited patrons from Thursday night, while stadiums can return to full capacity as authorities lifted nearly all remaining COVID-19 restrictions for the vaccinated residents in Australia's second-largest city https://t.co/qbJktWewNK
— Reuters (@Reuters) November 18, 2021
⚡ Russia has confirmed 37,374 Covid-19 infections and a new record of 1,251 deaths in the past 24 hours https://t.co/DZPeGdBXjp
— The Moscow Times (@MoscowTimes) November 18, 2021
A year and a half since the coronavirus pandemic closed borders worldwide and halted nearly all international travel, Russia is slowly reopening to other countries https://t.co/k6GV8niSZ1 pic.twitter.com/Clf5nw3iah
— The Moscow Times (@MoscowTimes) November 17, 2021
A Far East Russian region has become the first in the country to introduce vaccine passports for internal flights as federal lawmakers race to mandate health passes for public transport and other areas https://t.co/0c1tAOJ8Yk
— The Moscow Times (@MoscowTimes) November 18, 2021
The World Health Organization says coronavirus deaths in Europe rose by 5% in the last week, making it the only region in the world where COVID-19 mortality increased. It was the seventh straight week that COVID-19 cases continued to mount across Europe. https://t.co/pvKWk5ISVC
— The Associated Press (@AP) November 17, 2021
Sounds familiar:
Vaccinated vs. unvaccinated: Europe’s Covid culture war. In pockets of Europe, vaccine resistance has become part of the populist nationalist movement https://t.co/SvJklpUZ2p
— delthia ricks ? (@DelthiaRicks) November 17, 2021
The Czech Republic and Slovakia hit new records for daily COVID-19 infections, prompting both to plan new restrictions against unvaccinated people. Thousands protested in Prague and Bratislava against the new rules. https://t.co/PkDKVsR2UZ
— AP Europe (@AP_Europe) November 17, 2021
The head of Germany’s disease control agency has warned that the country faces a “really terrible Christmas” unless steps are taken to counter the sharp rise in coronavirus infections. https://t.co/9jE7C7sdMa
— The Associated Press (@AP) November 18, 2021
A subvariant of Delta that is growing in Britain is less likely to lead to symptomatic COVID-19 infection, a coronavirus prevalence survey found, adding that overall cases had dropped from a peak in October https://t.co/ATWGnrgzza
— Reuters (@Reuters) November 18, 2021
=====
In the lab: A low-cost SARSCoV2 vax designed for older adults w/ waning immunity is showing promise in lab research. Formulation created by vaccinologists at Boston Children's Precision Vaccines Program uses part of SARS2's spike protein & immune boosters https://t.co/6SY124Vbbg
— delthia ricks ? (@DelthiaRicks) November 17, 2021
Over a year and a half into a pandemic that has laid bare racial inequities, and only 8 states are reporting vaccinations by race and ethnicity for kids.@SArtiga2 https://t.co/tYoQqVkznI
— Larry Levitt (@larry_levitt) November 17, 2021
Analysis of VA system cases of breakthrough #COVID19 in vaccinated adults finds they, "exhibit lower risks of death and post-acute sequelae than people with COVID-19 who were not previously vaccinated for it."https://t.co/NwxJomP3KC
— Laurie Garrett (@Laurie_Garrett) November 17, 2021
Deltaplus, Lambda & Mu are all variants of #SARSCoV2. What do scientists know about them as we enter another winter & infections have again begun surging in many parts of the world? https://t.co/LDcj81yn0X
— delthia ricks ? (@DelthiaRicks) November 18, 2021
=====
100,000 Americans died of drug overdoses in 12 months during the pandemic – "It is the first time that drug-related deaths have reached six figures in any 12-month period." https://t.co/27YDcSuBvD
— Katie Rogers (@katierogers) November 17, 2021
The NFL is requiring players and staff to wear masks inside team facilities regardless of vaccination status for a week starting on Thanksgiving, and they must be tested twice for COVID-19 after the holiday.
— AP NFL (@AP_NFL) November 17, 2021
Looking like Texas will soon eclipse California as the worst affected state in the nation in terms of total COVID-19 deaths. We'll get there from the 20,000 unvaccinated Texans over the summer/fall who died because they refused vaccinations.
Death by antiscience aggression— Prof Peter Hotez MD PhD (@PeterHotez) November 17, 2021
GOP Rep. Glenn Grothman on vaccine mandates: “It is such a gross grab of power to think you can tell other people what you have to do with your body.”
Yes, he wants to outlaw abortion. pic.twitter.com/CjeNKycZst
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) November 18, 2021
Evidence ivermectin doesn't work: Pierre Kory the doctor who says ivermectin is a wonder drug was diagnosed w/ Covid. He's a developer of the ivermectin protocol purported to prevent Covid. Diagnosis was in August & disclosed this wk by a newspaper. Quack. https://t.co/BvzJ4q3TGR pic.twitter.com/pzmKq1N8RN
— delthia ricks ? (@DelthiaRicks) November 18, 2021
On The Road – cope – Chasing Pancho Villa, Part 2
NeenerNeener
Monroe County, NY:
The Monroe County website says 416 new cases yesterday; NYSDOH says 382 new cases.
NotMax
As if the whole security theater experience wasn’t already stressful enough,
Winston
well you still can’t tell didlyshit what is going on if Florida. So still isolating after 600 days. It sucks.
New Deal democrat
Nationwide cases up 16,000, or over 20%, from their bottom 3.5 weeks ago. West region flat, South up slightly, the Northeast and Midwest up 40%. Deaths still flat at under 1200 for the moment.
As of yesterday 23 States were rising, and only 7 falling. CA is still in decline, which is the best news. Northern New England, most of the upper Midwest, and the southern Rockies have the biggest increases.
One big exception: the 3 States at the heart of last autumn’s outbreak – ND, SD, and NE – have not been increasing at all, while the States all around them have some of the worst increases. Maybe something similar is occurring in the NYC area. On the other hand, Michigan, which had a severe outbreak this spring, is now the very worst State.
CDC shows 1.8m more children under 12 vaccinated than several weeks ago. This is still less than 10% of those newly eligible.
I’m still not ready to be as pessimistic as Eric Topol. One year ago, there were 160,000 cases/day, and were doubling every 2 weeks. With similar weather now, cases are much lower and are rising more slowly. I still tend to think that after this winter, vaccinations + prior infection will be high enough that COVID will recede more permanently (not go away, just be more like seasonal flu levels).
debbie
Where I work was very generous in granting “accommodations” to employees to continue working from home rather than returning to the office. They were equally generous when granting extensions. They’ve now begun retracting the extensions and have asked for more detailed paperwork before they think about changing their decision. This has happened to a couple of co-workers this week, who are now very unhappy. I need to figure out what I would do if I lost mine, which could very well happen.
Matt McIrvin
Every single instance of breakthrough COVID, or COVID in a highly vaccinated place, gets pushed so hard by antivaxxers as evidence the vaccine is a lie and doesn’t work, and if people won’t believe statistics and think entirely in innumerate, all-or-nothing ways, I don’t know how anyone fights this.
Amir Khalid
Malaysia’s Ministry of Health reports 6,380 new Covid-19 cases today in its media statement, for a cumulative reported total of 2,569,533 cases. It also reports 68 deaths as of midnight, for an adjusted cumulative total of 29,837 deaths – 1.16% of the cumulative reported total, 1.19% of resolved cases.
Based on cases reported yesterday, Malaysia’s nationwide Rt is at 1.03.
452 confirmed cases are in ICU, 169 of them on ventilators. Meanwhile, 5,760 more patients have recovered, for a cumulative total of 2,472,283 patients recovered – 96.2% of the cumulative reported total.
Nine new clusters were reported today, for a cumulative total of 5,867 clusters. 246 clusters are currently active; 5,621 clusters are now inactive.
6,352 new cases today are local infections. 28 new cases today are imported.
The National Covid-19 Immunisation Programme (PICK) administered 117,736 doses of vaccine on 17th November: 6,243 first doses, 20,013 second doses, and 91,480 booster doses. As of midnight, the cumulative total is 51,591,383 doses administered: 25,636,716 first doses, 24,914,099 second doses, and 1,226,523 booster doses. 78.5% of the population have received their first dose, while 76.3% are now fully vaccinated.
Matt McIrvin
@New Deal democrat:
The long-term question is the balance between the rate at which immune protection declines, and the rate at which people are willing and able to get repeated booster shots. And we don’t really know either thing.
Most people don’t get flu shots every year either. Granted flu shots are actually much less effective than COVID shots, and a lot of things get misidentified as “flu” that aren’t, so the personal cognitive effect of “I got the shot and I still got the flu” or even “I got the shot and it GAVE me the flu” is probably much stronger. On the other hand, with COVID there’s an active politicized conspiracy movement pushing this line.
It may be that a plurality of the population simply come to accept COVID as a major killer, or even welcome it as some weird political badge of honor, and we get huge waves every year.
rikyrah
I think that they need to break down the cases between vaccinated and unvaccinated. Always in this post-vaccine is available world.
rikyrah
@debbie:
Do they have a vaccine mandate for employees?
Matt McIrvin
@rikyrah: Yes, though comparing the raw numbers is always going to invite the base-rate illusion if most people are vaccinated.
debbie
@rikyrah:
Everything but. Ohio won’t allow that. In fact, some RWNJs tried to add a provision banning ALL vaccines into the redistricting legislation.
Work is requiring all kinds of testing, verification, etc., and they’ve added a surcharge to health insurance for those employees who are unvaccinated/unwilling to disclose.
Robert Sneddon
@Matt McIrvin: It’s tempting to try and model the seasonal surges of influenza cases and attribute the same mechanisms to COVID-19. This is not a good idea. They are both respiratory diseases with the major transmission route via inhalation of virus particles but they are not the same and do not affect the human body in the same ways.
The bad news is that the COVID-19 coronavirus is very good at spreading between human beings with the Delta variant having an evolutionary advantage in that respect. Any “herd immunity via vaccination” will require a lot more than 90% uptake of the vaccine in adults and older children and, sadly, that’s just not going to happen because people are people. The modellers trying to predict what might happen in the future take this into account when they publish their estimates of how this disease will spread hence their pessimistic predictions of large increases in case numbers over the coming winter period in the northern hemisphere.
New Deal democrat
@Robert Sneddon: The counterexample is Israel. Less than 65% fully vaccinated, but after booster shots, cases back down to almost zero.
lowtechcyclist
And that’s the way a lot of people prefer it, unfortunately.
If the inequities were reported, they’d be screaming, “CRT! CRT!!”
@Winston:
And that’s damned sure the way DeathSantis prefers it.
That’s where the in-laws are, so we’ll be there for Christmas. But it feels like we’re flying blind here.
Well, I got my booster ten days ago, my wife should get hers soon, and my son should be eligible in early December. We’ll have our N95 masks with us. We’ll be about as protected as we can be.
Fucking Covid traitors. Every day’s a jonestown, and they don’t GAF.
lowtechcyclist
@Matt McIrvin:
And a third thing we don’t know is, whether (more likely when) some new and more problematic Covid variant evolves and spreads.
Wag
@Robert Sneddon: I agree 10%. Given the R naught value for Delta in a land with active resistance to any attempt at mitigation, we are going to need an unachievable level of vaccination in order to control COVID. As a physician, I despair. Our only hope may be the excess mortality of GQP voters.
@New Deal democrat: I don’t know how much active resistance to mitigation mandates there is in Israel compared to the US.
rikyrah
@debbie:
Make the surcharge expensive for the lying unvaccinated.
rikyrah
@lowtechcyclist:
Why aren’t the in-laws coming to you, instead of you risking yourselves in the cesspool of COVID that is Florida?
Ken
I was going to be sarcastic and thank Captain Obvious here, but I suppose we really do live in a world where you have to repeat, often, that vaccines work.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
Greece: the daily numbers released Wednesday evening are still bad. 6,682 new cases, 561 intubated in ICUs, and the number that snuck up on me when I wasn’t looking: 87 dead. Kathimerini noted that Greece has passed 17,000 total dead from COVID-19, two weeks after the 16,000 level on November 2. The Worldometer chart shows that the daily death toll is approaching the levels of the spring 2021 wave, and if it keeps up like it’s been going, it’ll be as bad as the worst death tolls in last winter’s wave.
Bright side: got my booster Wednesday at noon. Woke up today (Thursday) at stupid o’clock with a hundred-degree fever. Since my PCR test on Tuesday was negative, I guess that means the booster’s working.
YY_Sima Qian
On 11/17 China reported 6 new domestic confirmed (1 previously asymptomatic) & 0 new domestic asymptomatic cases.
Dalian in Liaoning Province reported 5 new domestic confirmed cases (1 previously asymptomatic, 2 mild & 3 moderate), all 4 new domestic positive cases are traced close contacts already under centralized quarantine. There currently are 280 active domestic confirmed & 38 active domestic asymptomatic cases in the city. 2 communities are currently at High Risk. 12 residential compounds, 17 residential buildings & 16 villages are currently at Medium Risk.
At Ejina Banner in Alxa League, Inner Mongolia “Autonomous” Region 5 domestic confirmed cases recovered. There currently are 5 active domestic confirmed cases remaining.
At Xi’an in Shaanxi Province 1 domestic confirmed case recovered. There currently are 6 active domestic confirmed cases remaining.
At Yinchuan in Ningxia “Autonomous” Region 1 domestic confirmed case recovered. There currently are 17 active domestic confirmed cases remaining. The 2 Medium Risk residential compounds were re-designated to Low Risk.
At Gansu Province 13 domestic confirmed cases recovered. There currently are 58 active domestic confirmed & 1 active domestic asymptomatic cases remaining in the province.
Hebei Province did not report any new domestic positive cases. 4 domestic confirmed cases recovered.There currently are 94 active confirmed & 3 active domestic asymptomatic cases in the province.
At Changsha in Hunan Province there currently is 1 active domestic confirmed case remaining.
At Zunyi in Guizhou Province there currently are 2 active domestic confirmed cases (both moderate) remaining in the city. The 2 Medium Risk residential compounds have been re-designated to Low Risk.
Beijing Municipality did not report any new domestic positive cases. 1 has been re-designated to Low Risk. 1 residential compound remains at Medium Risk.
At Rizhao in Shandong Province there currently are 11 active domestic confirmed & 6 active domestic asymptomatic cases in the city. The Medium Risk residential compound has been re-designated to Low Risk.
Sichuan Province did not report any new domestic positive cases. There currently are 27 active domestic confirmed cases in the province.
Chongqing Municipality did not report any new domestic positive cases. There currently are 6 active domestic confirmed & 5 active domestic asymptomatic cases remaining. 2 residential compounds & 1 office building are currently at Medium Risk.
At Changzhou in Jiangsu Province 1 domestic confirmed case recovered. There currently are 2 active domestic confirmed cases remaining. The 3 Medium Risk residential compounds have been re-designated to Low Risk.
At Xining in Qinghai Province 1 domestic confirmed case recovered. There currently are 10 active domestic confirmed case remaining.
Heilongjiang Province did not report any new domestic positive cases. 14 domestic confirmed cases recovered. There currently are 191 active domestic confirmed cases in the province.
Shangrao in Jiangxi Province did not report any new domestic positive cases. 1 domestic confirmed case recovered & 5 asymptomatic cases were released from isolation. There currently are 9 active domestic confirmed & 28 active domestic asymptomatic cases in the city. 1 township & 2 residential compounds are currently Medium Risk.
At Zhejiang Province there currently are 1 active domestic confirmed (at Jiaxing) & 1 active domestic asymptomatic (at Hangzhou) cases remaining.
Henan Province did not report any new domestic positive cases. There currently are 71 active domestic confirmed & 1 active domestic asymptomatic cases in the province.
Dehong Prefecture in Yunnan Province reported 1 new domestic confirmed case (at Ruili, via screening of persons under centralized quarantine). There currently are 29 active domestic confirmed & 30 active domestic asymptomatic cases at the prefecture. 1 zone & 2 villages at Ruili, plus a village at Yingjiang County are currently at Medium Risk.
Imported Cases
On 11/17, China reported 29 new imported confirmed cases (6 previously asymptomatic), 27 imported asymptomatic cases:
Overall in China, 59 confirmed cases recovered (17 imported), 26 asymptomatic cases were released from isolation (all imported) & 7 were reclassified as confirmed cases (6 domestic), & 3,927 individuals were released from quarantine. Currently, there are 1,233 active confirmed cases in the country (390 imported), 16 in serious condition (2 imported), 494 active asymptomatic cases (347 imported), 3 suspect cases (all imported). 39,421 traced contacts are currently under centralized quarantine.
As of 11/17, 2,409.784M vaccine doses have been injected in Mainland China, an increase of 6.887M doses in the past 24 hrs.
On 11/18, Hong Kong reported 4 new positive cases, all imported.
Central Planning
I got an email from my school district yesterday warning everyone about delays and cancellations because of a lack of bus drivers. They go on to list 14 creative things they are trying. The one that is missing? Paying more. Cheap bastards.
Fair Economist
@New Deal democrat: Jordan and Palestine also have near zero cases with much lower vaccination. The Israeli results more likely reflect seasonal variability.
Fair Economist
@Ken: A priori, it’s plausible but not proven that vaccination provides additional protection from long COVID even if you are infected. This is good, honest science. Estimates of the risk ratios are good too.
Soprano2
@Matt McIrvin: Once everyone who wants to be protected can be protected from Covid, I’m going to quit worrying about the willfully unvaccinated. I suspect life will become harder and harder for them as their numbers dwindle and employers require vaccination that eventually they’ll be a relatively small number of people.
Soprano2
@rikyrah: Yes, I wish they would too, and make it absolutely clear so that everyone can see that the vast, vast majority of cases are among the unvaccinated, as are hospitalizations and deaths.
Soprano2
The dumbest thing about that is that by far they are the ones who are dying!
Robert Sneddon
@New Deal democrat: The counter-counter example is Scotland — over 90% of the 18+ adult population is fully vaccinated with about 25% of those having received booster shots yet the new case numbers are remaining high and steady (per capita, new cases reported are about double that of the USA).
People are not spherical cows of unit radius (old physicist joke there), they are lumpy and awkward to handle statistically. Israel went through a third wave of infection a couple of months ago with lots of new cases and deaths. They have a non-homogenous population with some ultra-religious groups who are anti-vaccination. In Scotland the headline vaccination/booster rate is mostly due to a very high uptake in the 50-plus population with the Young Immortals aged 18-40 lagging well behind. It’s this group that is providing a reservoir of infected and more infectious individuals, an age group that socialises in pubs and clubs, gathers in parties and goes to sporting events to share the virus around.
You can find low case numbers and high case numbers anywhere if you torture the data sufficiently, the bad news is that the data from everywhere shows peaks and troughs over time — in midsummer this year the Scottish new case rate bottomed out before the predicted third wave hit around early August. Cherry-picking Israel or Vietnam (an early “COVID-19 success story”) or New York/New Jersey in the spring of 2020 is not the way to predict what will happen in the future.
My own less-than-informed guess is that a couple of years from now, looking back on the progress of COVID-19 in all communities and all populations around the world we’ll see about the same total number of cases, hospitalisations and deaths (with large error bars). Some groups and places will do better than others, some worse but there will be no total disasters and no perfect exemplars (China is trying hard but it still may not succeed).
Soprano2
@Central Planning: Well, they may not have the money. School budgets are not like a business; you can’t always shift money from one pool to another pool. When you’re talking about any part of government and budgeting it’s complicated. I actually saw a letter to the editor in our paper asking why our local public utility couldn’t just give their surplus to the public schools! Too many people think all their taxes and fees go into a big pool called “government” and are then distributed to different agencies. That’s not how it works at all!
YY_Sima Qian
There is no scientific basis for the 8 week quarantine that Shenyang in Liaoning Province is implementing. It is what the Chinese public, occasionally even state media, calls “lazy governance”. It is when a local administration takes the most extreme policies irrespective of impact on this affected, or whether there is remotely reasonable justification, all in an effort to reduce risk to their own positions to zero. Every outbreak in China has led to scores of officials from community to district to municipal levels being dismissed or disciplined.
The lesson? Do not enter China at Shenyang. Shenzhen in Guangdong Province, for example, still only has 14 days of centralized quarantine upon entry & 7 days of home quarantine after that. Some places in China do not even have additional quarantine after the 14 days one, just health monitoring & periodic testing for another 14 days.
Central Planning
@Soprano2: That’s true, but they should have seen this coming. And, we are one of (if not the most) affluent districts in the county. We have millions in reserve funds, and there are ARP and CARES funding sources that could probably be used to fund that.
it will be interesting to watch parents lose. their. shit. because there are no busses to take their snowflakes to after-school sports.
Nicole
Tonight my kid’s school is presenting a Zoom seminar about the vaccine (all eligible students are to have received their 2nd shot by the time they return from the end-of-year break). Two days ago, a parent sent out an anonymous survey trying to rally the anti-vax parents before the meeting. Said parent was promptly doxxed by another parent who downloaded the data from a PDF filled with anti-vax nonsense the parent had included with the survey as “information” and identified the creator. Ha!
Matt McIrvin
@Soprano2:
If the long-term net effect is to drive liberals out of the state, they could still benefit politically. Anything that accelerates the Big Sort benefits Republicans structurally. Red America deciding to simply tolerate high levels of COVID disease has the effect of herding everyone else into less than a dozen states.
PAM Dirac
@Fair Economist:
Yes, there has been limited data on long COVID in general and even less on how well the vaccines protect against long COVID, so this study is a significant contribution. It looks pretty solid and there are lots of numbers, but since it comes from VA data there are demographic holes: less than 10% of the study were women. I didn’t notice an age breakdown, but certainly there will be no children and might under-represent young adults.
New Deal democrat
@Robert Sneddon: >>”You can find low case numbers and high case numbers anywhere if you torture the data sufficiently,”
So, why assume that Europe and not Israel is the better exemplar? It’s only “torturing data” once you make the assumption about which set is the signal and which is not.
Last autumn both the EU and the US had major outbreaks with cases doubling about every 2 weeks. This summer the US had a major outbreak of Delta, whereas in the EU it was muted (why didn’t both have same outcomes then???). Now the EU is having a major outbreak, with cases doubling about every 2 weeks again. So far, the US is not.
Again, between this summer and now, which is the signal and which is the noise? Which conjecture about this winter is “torturing data” and which is not?
The 50 US States are like 50 real world lab studies. In the context of a fast-moving pandemic, where you can’t wait to know causation with scientific certainty, when 3 of the worst States for vaccinations with 3 of the worst autumn outbreaks last year this year are in effect in the calm of the eye of the hurricane, that seems noteworthy.
Matt McIrvin
@Fair Economist: Yeah, even if something is intuitively plausible, you still have to test it. I’ve been frustrated by the lack of really good data on long COVID in breakthrough infections for a long time. It’s slowly emerging.
Matt McIrvin
@New Deal democrat: I suspect that the clumpiness of COVID-19 infection–the dependence of the pandemic on superspreader events, especially in the months before the Delta variant appeared–has created a significant “luck of the draw” component. Lots of places escaped a major outbreak early on, through some combination of good policy and chance, and got hit worse when Delta came along because they didn’t have the prior infections.
Meanwhile, every time a place with a high level of vaccination has an outbreak, it turns into a new piece of antivaxxer fodder and countering this noise is like paying Whac-A-Mole. Now their latest proof that the vaccines are a fraud is about Gibraltar.
Robert Sneddon
@New Deal democrat: You are assuming a “state” is a spherical cow of unit radius. A US state is a series of counties, some of which tend majority liberal, some conservative. They have differing populations with differing age distributions, different levels of comorbidites (diabetes, heart disease etc.), different levels of medical services etc. all of which affect vaccination numbers, infection rates and medical outcomes. Within those counties you have urban and rural areas, again distorting the results when the data is collected and analysed.
Half-assing the data analysis process in the comments section of a top-10,000 blog with cherry-picked data sets and untrained assistants is not the way to make or even critique public health policy. It’s the pro-vaccination equivalent of “I did my own research”.
Shalimar
Ciara should have done a George Foreman and named her kids Super Bowl Win Wilson I and Super Bowl Win Wilson Ii. That way she could say she gave her husband more Super Bowl Wins than the Seahawks.
YY_Sima Qian
Chinese state propaganda around the Fort Dietrich conspiracy theory for COVID-19 origin is curious. I can honestly say that the subject has not come up in any conversation w/ family/friends/colleagues for the past year and half, not since the early days of the pandemic. I do not see anyone in any WeChat group that I participate in posting about the CT, nor is anyone I have added WeChat connections to posting such CT in WeChat Moments. I have hundreds of contacts, many w/ only the most tenuous connection from work and life (customers that I have met only once, express deliveryman, Taobao sellers, etc.). Not even the easily excitable nationalists in comment sections are calling for sanctions against the US, wage war against the US, or punish US citizens or sieze US businesses in China, which would be the logical conclusion if people truly believed the CT. Blog posts or articles that talk about the CT only shows up very infrequently on my Toutiao (Chinese news aggregator) newsfeed. Perhaps the algorithm does not push such articles to me because I do not click on such articles/posts or search for the subject. OTOH, the algorithm does not hesitate to stick hagiographic screeds lauding Xi Jinping’s latest to the top of my newsfeed, even though I never click on them.
I don’t follow Chinese officials on twitter or read English editions of state media, but the propaganda effort seems to be outward facing, rather than inward. The notorious “Wolf Warrior” Foreign Ministry Spokesmen tend to being it up whenever there are accusations from abroad. My take is that it is a diversion tactic aimed to deflect foreign criticism, from legitimate ones questioning the regime’s opaqueness at the start to bad faith ones insinuating the COVID-19 is a biological weapon manufactured by the WIV. It’s almost like trolling, or counter-trolling. Pretty depressing state of affairs either way.
lowtechcyclist
Fair question. The answer is, there’s a lot of them down there, and just us up here in Maryland. Also, my FIL is 80 years old and in poor health; traveling would be hard on him. Thank goodness we finally persuaded him to get vaccinated earlier this fall.
lowtechcyclist
Unfortunately, not enough of them, and not fast enough, to change the political calculus noticeably anytime soon.
PAM Dirac
@Matt McIrvin:
This paper has a lot of stuff to dig through. Since we are having holiday visitors and my wife has assigned me tasks, I need to get to that rather than spend the rest of the day playing with data, but I did notice that the breakthrough cases were much sicker before COVID than the controls; around double the amount of cancer, cardiovascular disease, pulmonary disease, and a host of other measures. These people might be sicker after COVID than controls because they were sicker before COVID. On the other hand they were sicker than non-vaccinated COVID patients before COVID and were BETTER than the non-vaccinated after COVID. I notice that the current version of the paper is a pre peer review draft. It will be interesting to see how it changes after review.
New Deal democrat
@Robert Sneddon: Nice wind-up.
Btw, the 50 States as “the laboratories of democracy,” giving you 50 different natural experiments, is and has been a commonplace in the US for a very long time.
We will see in a few months.
Unique uid
@New Deal democrat:
could you please do a comparison of Michigan (about 7200 cases yesterday for 10 million people) and Ontario (about 500 cases for 15 million)?
Robert Sneddon
@New Deal democrat: It will take several years of rigorous data analysis to figure out “The TRVTH!!!” about these early days of the COVID-19 pandemic and its fallout over the next decade or so of epidemic spread. That includes the “long COVID” situation that has everyone’s panties in a bunch since there’s no-one on the planet who’s been suffering from this affliction for more than 18 months or so — real chronic illnesses last for decades and change dramatically in individuals over those sorts of timespans. The real data just isn’t there.
“A few months” just won’t cut it, a few months ago in Scotland COVID-19 was over and done with, new case numbers per diem down in double digits and no deaths reported for weeks on end. Yay, let’s open up everything and go back to normal they said, oh fuck where did all these new cases and dead people come from they said while frantically trying to stuff the genie back into the bottle.
That’s why torturing the data (aka foccussing on short-term indicators and trends over days and weeks) until it confesses is actually a bad idea, it leads to imperfect decision-making at the social and political level. Fortunately the folks who actually know what they’re about regarding epidemics and viruses don’t read this blog or its comments.
Sebastian
Two days ago I attended a company social gathering, everyone was unmasked but allegedly vaccinated. A few of the folks present are Republicans and I am not sure it they actually followed the rules but I digress as the interesting part were some of the conversations I had.
In this group of ~25, at least four people expressed a strong “I have no more fucks to give” sentiment and when I said that the rising number of cases doesn’t bother me at all, that I actually draw a dark satisfaction from it, I got a lot of agreement.
A very interesting hypothesis was brought up too, namely that FDR’s success might have been made possible in part by the anti-maskers of their time dying from the Spanish Flu in higher numbers.
This happened in San Diego CA but folks were from SoCal and Colorado.
Bill Arnold
@Matt McIrvin:
Great. COVID Roulette every year (or twice a year), with a 99 percent chance of survival, and a 95(90?) percent chance of no permanent organ damage (including brain damage).
With those odds, the USA will have to double its healthcare spending, or maybe if we go full Fascist, just kill the infirm (sacrificed to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy for the good of the Nation.), especially those who vote incorrectly.
(It is said that the Nazis did not treat the infirm well, some of whom were long-Spanish-flu sufferers. I haven’t personally examined the history.)
Bill Arnold
@Matt McIrvin:
Ugh. That’s a depressing point.
OTOH, many Americans living in pro-public-health States would quite gleefully uphold tradition and disparage/discourage visitors from disease-ridden US states, especially if encouraged with even a gentle influence operation push. It might even be arguably ethical in the COVID-XX case and/or if such states significantly discourage vaccination and other public health measures for other infectious diseases.
The Foreignness of Germs: The Persistent Association of Immigrants and Disease in American Society (2002, long and interesting)
dopey-o
I think this chart showing rates in red vs. blue counties should convince anyone who can count past 3.
kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2021/09/03/covid-trajectories/
Kayla Rudbek
@Bill Arnold: my own personal hypothesis about the post-WW1 attitude towards the sick/infirm/disabled is that the syphilis rates were higher postwar, with historically no good cure. Nobody wanted to admit it, but the fear was in the back of their heads.