Having fun with COVID numbers

Investment Analysis Clubs Macro Economic Trends and Risks
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I guess it’s human nature to believe what you want to believe. It took constant pounding and fear tactics to force a (warranted) masking and isolation upon the population of many of the countries of the world during a period when, despite ample evidence, many were all too eager to believe the plague didn’t exist. Nowadays, nearly the entire population (with the primary holdouts being a handful of old coots and nearly all ethnic Chinese) is willing to believe that they no longer should take protective measures and, most politicians are following the flow and saying “the pandemic is over” to the cheers of most businesspeople.

I just read an editorial in a magazine devoted to playing duplicate bridge - a game perfect for the spread of disease (as decks of cards and pairs of player promiscuously rotate in opposite directions). They have been enforcing 100% vaccination requirements at all face-2-face tournaments, despite pressure from many to drop the action. At the last national tournament, “over 100 players” were infected. It is now being proposed that checking for vaccinations be halted as it is judged by now that the unvaccinated know that they have higher risk and the onus is on their shoulders. My attitude is that, while I am no longer concerned about them taking higher risks, I am concerned that their ease of acquiring the disease will turn them into spreaders among those whose vaccination status does not provide protection against getting sick (just reduces the risk of landing them in the hospital or croaking).

Keep your eye on the ball (while remembering that there is a difference between risk and uncertainty).

Jeff

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22

Husband and I are among a very small handful of folk we know who haven’t been struck down…yet. I’m still not complacent enough to not bother with basic infection control precautions. I wasn’t tremendously surprised at the Covid denialism back in the early days of the pandemic. I’ve had a but of a fascination with the anti-vaxx/anti-science movement for a few decades. Started off quite early back in the UK when a rogue doctor promoted the idea that “brain damage” was connected the pertussis vaccine back in the 1970s. The press latched onto it, of course, and the idea became so prevalent even without the power of the internet that folk were forgoing vaccination for their little cherubs and, by the time my daughter was ready for her shots, Whooping Cough was so prevalent it almost felt like pre vaccine days.

Fast forward to the resurrection of the movement back in the late 1990s/early aughts and another “brave maverick doctor taking on The Establishment”, Andrew Wakefield, carried on the movement with the MMR (specifically measles) vaccine emerged as the darling of the movement. Even when it was apparent that he was a fraud and a huckster, the notion that the diseases that vaccines have been successfully preventing are themselves innocuous or their severity has been oversold has remained ingrained within the minds of a surprising number of people…from MMR, flu etc to, apparently, Covid and RSV…not to forget polio!?! It’s a headscratcher for sure

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23

I realize this is a stretch, but we dealt with long Covid for our dog, whose lungs are now much better after 18 months of meds and has grown all his hair back after losing much of it, the hair having gone from black to whispy white to thick black again. He had an isolated stroke about a year ago in the midst of taking that nasty Prednisone, and a grand mal seizure last week, with no prior history of either. My first thought was this is the joys of having an elderly dog but my mind then wondered to all of us having had Covid and wondering what was in our future.

Can’t let those thoughts slow you down, though.

IP

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I’m not sure what the experience was like in the UK, but speaking from my experience in the US:

Post-vaccine period 2021, a high percentage of people had fresh antibodies, and a lot of people were still taking precautions like masking in public and avoiding crowds. By April/May 2022, most people’s vaccinations were more than a year in the rear view mirror with only a fairly small minority getting boosted. A large majority of people had given up all precautions. And we had variants of the virus circulating that had evolved at least partial escape from what immunity was left from prior vaccinations or infections.

So, I don’t think you can draw any conclusions about the virulence of the particular variants by the death rates of those times, given the widely varying societal and vaccine status of the population.

I don’t doubt that Omicron variants are still a dangerous disease, by the way! But, I have seen multiple studies of both humans and lab animals that indicates that they do not attack the deep lungs nearly as readily as pre-Omicron variants.

I take it you have not seen any good data on incidence of long covid among the vaccinated? I think it’s reasonable to assume that the incidence of long Covid has dropped among the vaccinated, just like incidence of hospitalization and death has dropped: still something to worry about, but I expect your statement below is not valid for vaccinated people, especially those who are keeping up with boosters.

around 15-30% of people get long-term sickness that affects their ability to work.

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I expect a large majority of those who haven’t been vaccinated have caught the virus at least once already, and so aren’t ‘virgin territory’ any more than vaccinated people are.

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I am interested in the example, which I find wholly wanting and not carefully researched at all. Indeed, I went searching for other such examples, and was able toi find none. Yo might think that with such a terrifyingly infectivity there would be hundreds, even thousands (if not millions) of such examples, yet …l there are not. There are multiple reports of this same one as a few outlets picked up this one, single story.

And I find myself wondering, how do we know that this event was causative? Maybe the people were in church the day before. Or in an elevator. Or something.

Understand I’m not being at all critical of people who are careful. I still wear a mask in crowded circumstance, but for most casual situations I’ve relaxed. I’ve lost 7, including 3 family members, but both Mrs. Goofy and I have remained uninfected even while attending movies (only giant theaters, weekday matinees where perhaps 6 other people are there), WW meetings (with good distancing), etc.

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27

I finally caught it in Sept.

Recent news Paxlovid does reduce long Covid. NYT article reported earlier today. I do not have the facts, just a quick scan. I have been busy.

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You were able to find no more than these two examples of ‘cases where a single covid infection could be tracked in detail passing through a population with certainty about where and when the infection occured, precise to the second’ ?

And you’re surprised? Were you born in 2022?

Do you realise how few countries had

a. zero covid

b. the good fortune of a CCTV-recorded opportunity to observe an initial case showing up and spreading in this level of detail?

It’s like complaining that there are barely a half dozen examples of mankind landing on the moon. Well, yes, because few countries have the situation of being able to make that happen, and it requires considerable attention and good fortune.

It’s like complaining that a particle physicist has only observed a few neutrinos in a decade, while claiming that in fact there are trillions of neutrinos pouring through our body every second. Well, yes, it’s unbelievably damn hard to do and requires the right conditions and considerable attention to be paid to get even a single result.

Maybe you should try doing it yourself.

And I find myself wondering, how do we know that this event was causative? Maybe the people were in church the day before. Or in an elevator. Or something.

Well, it seems you aren’t very wondering very hard, because if you had looked into it as part of your ‘skepticism’, you’d have known.

First of all, there were almost exactly zero cases in Australia at the time. Secondly, all cases got sampled and sequenced. Thirdly, all possible contacts were traced.

Do you not think epidemiology teams who were tracing all possible contacts in real time in a zero-covid country after it happened, have perhaps a little more experience at this than you?

I’m sure though that you know more about this from your quick google search than the Australian health officers (e.g. Jeannette Young) or the Australian university virologists (Lara Herrero) who were interviewing about it at the time.

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Someone asked about whether aerosol transmission in hotel rooms was really a risk.

Here is a research paper, from 2020 - 2020!!! - with 300+ citations, which noted that covid can linger and remain infectious in air for up to 16 hours.

“our findings suggest retained infectivity and virion integrity for up to 16 hours in respirable-sized aerosols.”

It is MIND BLOWING to me that people are still ‘I’m just asking the question…’ ‘is it a real risk though…’ in 2022 with tens of millions dead from it.

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Actually Japan, China, and Australia are wildly and widely surveilled, not to mention nearly every other country on the planet outside of Africa. YOu know how often a car accident happens in front of you? Yet we have millions of videos of them actually happening. Meteorites landing. Airplanes crashing.

Sure, they have more experience. That doesn’t preclude them jumping to a conclusion and/or making a mistake. I refer to my original thesis: if this is so astonishingly transmissible then we should have thousands, nay millions of such incidents. Surely a few would be captured besides this tiny cohort. But they’re not.

Again, my “quick google search” looked for additional examples. I spent over an hour doing so (happy to provide you the browser history.) I search Australian news sources, CDC histories, global news purveyors, blogs, and anywhere else I thought might have additional mentions. None. Not one.

Anyone can make a mistake, which is why we don’t accept a single experiment to determine the path of science, we require multiple, repeated, and repeatable experiments. In this case, that doesn’t exist.

I’m not saying “it couldn’t have happened that way.”I’m saying that “it might not”, and that with multiple other plausible explanations, this single incident would not suffice as determinative evidence.

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I have no doubt, surely it depends on the air circulation in any particular situation. Some rooms have good circulation, doubtless some do not.

However, 2020 was the beginning, when people didn’t know much. Later on it was generally accepted that the “airborne infectious” stage was somewhere between 20 minutes and 3 hours:

Finally, I’ll just point out that I have responded to anti-maskers many times; here is a well received one I posted on the MeTAR board before the format change:

The point about a pillow in a hotel room is well taken, I’ll say. I will mention that to Mrs. Goofy who does a lot of travel and stays in both hotels and AirBnB’s, where hygiene may not be as well maintained as she likes.

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To what extent? All this says is that they deliberately looked for something, anything, any detectable amount of virus. Found one. And concluded, “Ya now if somebody had actually inhaled this they could get COVID.” Chances please! Percentage. How easy, likely, difficult would it be to get covid from this specific finding in this exact environment? Answer: One in a jillion or something. This is why people are asking questions and why this kind of activity and reporting is more and more being dismissed as hand-wringing panic mongering. The Truth is never as self-serving as we’d like it to be.

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A few months ago I read an article (a scientific article, not a junk media article) that claimed that there is not a single verified case of catching COVID-19 from a surface. The article also mentioned the L-shaped restaurant where they traced the diners seating location that caught the virus due the way the ventilation was installed at that restaurant. Unfortunately, I can’t find the darn article again! I searched for quite a while and just can’t find it. So annoying, and seems to happen more and more lately.

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34

We’ve decided to hit the road in mid-January for six months of roaming around in South America, Africa and Asia. We have had the initial two shots as well as three additional boosters - the last of which was at the beginning of September.

I wonder what the legality and/or efficacy of taking another booster before we leave in January (it will be over 4 months since the last one).

Jeff

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speaking from my experience in the US… only a fairly small minority getting boosted…

What a strange comment. Why on earth would you think your subjective, personal USA experience is more relevant than NHS-tracked national data on vaccine and booster uptake in the UK? In terms of healthcare, the UK is not the US in any way, shape or form. And thank god for that.

I don’t think you can draw any conclusions about the virulence of the particular variants by the death rates of those times, given the widely varying societal and vaccine status of the population.

Maybe you should use data about the topic at hand, rather than limited subjective experience and your imagination, about a totally unrelated topic, to guide your conclusions.

https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/details/vaccinations

→ People who have received booster or 3rd dose vaccinations, by report date
→ Total
→ 40M of a population 67 million had a booster.

Small minority… smh. 60%

The figure for the USA for boosters was not ‘a fairly small minority’ either, it’s 43%. By May 2021 it was 35%.

I don’t see much point in arguing with people that rely entirely on creative fiction to justify their beliefs about medical matters.

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36

I want to offer you a practical tip for hotel travel. Take any clean or clean-ish t-shirt, and lay it on top of the pillow case before you rest. It’s not perfect, but it is better than nothing. Also worth inspecting bedsheets with a glance for stray pubes, that’s usually a tell for unchanged linen since the last person was there.

I started inspecting & t-shirting, after I stayed in a hotel and before lying down I noticed that the pillow case had, uhh, human fluids on it. The hotel clearly hadn’t bothered to change out the pillow cases. The front desk was empty when I went down to ask for a new room or full linen change & clean, so I slept sitting upright in a chair that night.

T-shirt trick for life.

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Why be an 4ss? Serious question. Did I say anything rude to you to deserve such a response.

I’m far more familiar with trends in the US, so I mentioned them. Glad to hear the UK had a better uptake of boosters than the US, but is it not true that social measures to cut the spread of the disease in the UK were drastically reduced in 2022 compared to April/May 2021?

I see you once again ducked my question about whether you’ve seen data on incidence of long Covid amongst the vaccinated. I guess you’d rather act like you know everything and put down people instead of actually discussing interesting questions. A little research just now tells me studies do show a reduction in long Covid incidence after vaccination. With wide variations in definitions and study design, there are wide variations in results, but a large study in Nature fairly recently showed a 15% reduction in long Covid incidence for those with vaccinations.

Not sure what source or precise definition you’re using (notice I’m refraining from insulting you, instead giving you the benefit of the doubt), but the latest number from the CDC for US people who’ve had at least one booster is 112.5 million, or about 34% of the population. Only 28.8 million have gotten a second booster, less than 9%. I think either qualifies as a ‘fairly small minority’, depending on your point of view.

You dismissed my claims that multiple studies showed Omicron to be less virulent than prior variants. Seems like the UK government believes those studies even if you don’t:

“decrease in severity found in the Omicron variant”

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Life is about probabilities. As you might expect, the concentration of airborne virus is highest after release and declines fairly rapidly after. By 16 hours the airborne concentration is quite low. Detectable perhaps, but low. I suspect most virologists would say that the probability of getting symptomatic disease from a 16 hour airborne virus is very low and a severe disease even lower (based on suggestive but not conclusive evidence that the size of the infectious innoculum correlates with the likelihood and severity of the disease).

Covid is here to stay. The precedent is the Spanish flu of 1918 that was worse than Covid. Variants of the H1N1 virus that caused the Spanish flu are still with us and periodically cause significant epidemics, the most recent the 2009 swine flu pandemic. The Covid virus is found in deer and China’s zero covid policy means that there are a billion people with low immunity to the virus. Covid is not going away.

You can either stay in a cocoon for the foreseeable future or learn to live with Covid, as we have with all the other influenza viruses running around. I’ve often thought that the ideal situation is to be periodically exposed to low levels of the virus, enough to stimulate the immune system but too small to cause symptoms. If true then being exposed to the few viruses hanging around in hotel room air and pillows after a few hours might actually be a good thing.

Want to add for context that I have traveled a fair amount in the past two years and only recently came down with Covid. This was immediately after a vacation in Italy where there were a lot of tourists, crowded restaurants, basilicas, museums, and little mask use. I had received the most recent bivalent booster (Moderna) about three weeks before the trip. The symptoms were a moderate head cold and cough (no fever) for about four days, annoying but not life threatening.

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