No news is (often) good news.
At old Magic: The Gathering tournaments, judge Tony Parodi would often tell us, ‘if your opponent did not show up, that is your best possible situation.’
Every week, when I set out to write the Covid update, I held out the hope that at some point, perhaps soon, you would never read one of these again. There would be nothing to report. That the reports would no longer help anyone. I could go think about and write about something else.
Today is that day. I had to go see about… well, to start off, the possibility of AI destroying all value in the universe. Not my desired first pick. Once again, I much prefer the worlds where over the next weeks, months and years I get to deep dive into other very different aspects of the world instead.
It is still a joyous day. After three years, the weekly Covid posts are over.
From this point forward, I am no longer going to actively seek out Covid information. I am not going to check my Covid Twitter list.
I will continue to compile what Covid and related information I come still across, although with a much higher bar for inclusion going forward. If it seems worth its own post from time to time, I’ll do that. If not, I won’t. Unless something changes a lot, that will be a lot less common than weekly.
We have normality. Cherish it.
You’ll miss it when it’s gone.
Executive Summary
- This will be the last weekly Covid post unless things change radically.
- We have normality. I repeat, we have normality.
- Anything you still can’t cope with is therefore your own problem.
Let’s run the numbers.
The Numbers
Predictions
Predictions from Last Week: 210k cases (-6%) and 2,625 deaths (-7%).
Results: 210k cases (-6%) and 2,396 deaths (-15%)
Predictions for Next Week: No more formal predictions. Expect continued slow declines in underlying numbers for a while.
Arizona reported 23k cases, which has to be a backlog dump, so I cut them down to a high but plausible 4k. Colorado reported negative deaths, so I changed that to zero.
I entirely forgot about Presidents Day, which makes the case number here unexpectedly high, and largely accounts for the deaths result. Overall slightly disappointing given the holiday.
Deaths
Cases
Physical World Modeling
I was alerted to quite the case of modeling: Metaculus has been successfully working with the Virginia state government to help them make better decisions. They are currently running the Keep Virginia Safe II contest with a $20k prize pool, which where the link goes. I have been informed that such information is actually listed to and used in real decision making, which makes it exciting to consider participating. Perhaps this will even spread to additional jurisdictions. You never know.
Bloom Lab goes over the long term history of pandemics, especially flu, and speculates on what to expect from Covid going forward – most of the thread is from January but seems fitting for the final update. The last note is new, suggesting that Omicron might not actually be less virulent after all, with the difference in outcomes being due to immunity – older adults with no prior infection and no vaccination were found to have similar mortality rates. China would presumably tell us a lot, if we had any data we could rely upon.
In Other Covid News
State Senator in Idaho introduces a bill that makes providing or administering any mRNA vaccine a crime. I have learned not to be all that concerned by ‘politician introduces terrible bill,’ almost none of them go anywhere. Still, wow.
A fun note: Bret Stephen says in his column that the conclusions of new study on the efficacy of masks were unambiguous. The study says ‘relatively low adherence… hampers drawing firm conclusions’ and ‘there is uncertainty about the effects of face masks.’ Same as it ever was.
Remember the Vaccine
Vaccines saved lives, in one chart.
This is all-cause mortality. The zero point is actually zero.
Once you are vaccinated, there is no noticeable correlation between times where was a lot of Covid and unvaccinated people had substantially higher death rates, like December 2021 and January 2022, and all-cause mortality among the vaccinated.
In terms of death, once you were vaccinated, Covid was irrelevant.
Now there has been convergence between death rates for the Covid and non-Covid groups, and when there was a recent modest surge of cases, neither line responded. This suggests that Covid simply isn’t a substantial risk of death anymore, even for the unvaccinated.
Going forward, Covid is one more disease in your life. Infectious diseases are bad for your day, for your week, for your health. Sometimes people have persistent issues afterwards. We should cure them, prevent them, vaccinate against them, treat them.
Will we learn that lesson more generally? No, of course that. Oh well.
Is vaccination still worthwhile going forward? Yes, I believe that it is. The benefits continue to exceed the costs. What I would not do is boost on a regular basis, or apply the kind of pressure that causes a drop in willingness to get vaccinated for other things, where the benefits, both to the individual and to society, are much larger.
Other Medical and Research News
I am starting to think the thing these people hate is attempting to be effective.
Vaccine-stockpiling agency does a structural reorganization in light of lessons learned. Better than nothing I suppose. Does not seem likely to address any of the reasons why, when we need vaccines, we won’t have them until too late.
H5N1 sentences that are not as comforting as they seem to have been intended:
#H5N1 #birdflu is garnering headlines galore. I’m not here to tell you H5 isn’t a dangerous virus. But how likely it is to ever be able to spread easily among people isn’t currently knowable. Few people alive know more about H5 than @CDCgov‘s Tim Uyeki.
When there is a dangerous virus, saying the risk of a pandemic ‘isn’t currently knowable’ is not a but. It is an and. I would very much prefer it if we did know the chances. Also, the post linked to says that no, mink-to-mink transmission would not change the assessment of the risk to human health, which is somewhere between Law of No Evidence and Obvious Nonsense.
Scott Alexander offers Declining Sperm Count: Much More Than You Wanted to Know. Doesn’t relate it to testosterone. Overall made me less worried rather than more worried.
Some observations from Scott Sumner on obesity. He notes that income and obesity are correlated for women – the more income, the less likely to be obese – but not for men.
Another hint at what might be happening can be found in this primer on the concept of ‘food neutrality,’ which I found via an NPR profile.
Food neutrality is the understanding that no single food holds superior nutritional or moral value over another.
This idea often receives pushback in a world of diet culture, a system which advocates for foods that change the body weight, shape or size.
Practicing food neutrality is achieved through:
- identifying and dismissing food rules
- developing a relationship of trust with our bodies.
- dismissing rules about moderation
- identifying and exposing ourselves to fear foods to decrease anxiety around specific foods
- purchasing, prepping, and enjoying all types of foods
If anything, this is worse than my extrapolation from basic concept, because it includes ‘dismissing rules about moderation’ and literally ‘there is no such thing as unhealthy food.’
This doesn’t answer the question of how we have reached the point where people can advocate for such things with a straight face. Such attitudes do go a long way towards explaining why one might have a large obesity problem.
Do I often choose to eat foods that are, shall we say, less than maximally healthy, because I enjoy them more? Yes, absolutely. It would be a sad world if one didn’t. What I don’t do is fool myself about what I am doing.
I hope you stick around as I explore other, non-Covid topics that I believe will have higher value going forward. There are always infinite things out there. Let’s go exploring.
Don't Worry About the Vase 
On H5N1, I would like to know the chances…but not badly enough to accept the most likely ways to find out. These would be 1. Observing it to actually be happening, 100%, and 2. Gain of function research, which gives us that info but also makes it much more likely unless done perfectly. Is there an alternative method that would tell us whether to worry without simultaneously making a pandemic more likely? I would rather live in ignorance than have people conducting GoF.
I mean, there is a method that eventually tells you how much to worry – “keep track of in-birds epidemics and see how many cross over”.
I don’t think we have enough datapoints yet to get a precise understanding of the likelihood, but I know this isn’t the first “bird flu epidemic noted” scare.
Thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for keeping up with these weekly COVID posts from March 2020 onwards, on top of everything else you wrote about and had to do. You were the center for Rationality in COVID, making things make sense and filtering stuff down to the important developments in a world that often didn’t know how (or did and didn’t want to).
Reading your posts every week, especially in the thick of COVID uncertainty, was something I looked forward to, and your posts helped me see that we were, indeed, approaching the moment where we could be done with all this.
Thank you, again, and I look forward to your future posts.
I agree, thank you for your weekly posts. I read almost every one, and learned an enormous amount.
Maybe you have time for some game reviews now!
Merry farewell to weekly covid news, long live the weekly Colorado zombie outbreak news.
The last one makes perfect sense as a recovered anorexic writing to an audience at risk of anorexia. “Most of [the difference between healthy and unhealthy foods] is rooted in diet culture and can destroy our relationship with food at best, or leave us severely malnourished at worst.” Later, in section “Can My Body Really Tell Me What Foods It Needs?” she straightforwardly assumes her readers follow the nutrition advice in the latest Cosmopolitan. (Also, apparently “thousands” is her idea for “off-the-scale big number”.)
I actually just watched To The Bone last night. The standard advice totally does go out the window if you have an eating disorder, for obvious reasons.
Yeah, it’s easy to see how this “food neutrality” advice could be useful for anorexics and those who tend to obsess over “healthy” food. If you’re actually at risk for being severely underweight, better to relax some of the food rules even if it increases the chance of ending up mildly overweight. The problem is that advice meant for people with severe anorexia ends up being peddled to the 98% of us who are at zero risk of underweight and at high risk of obesity.
Unfortunately, we mostly don’t have the social tech beyond “pour this advice, and also its opposite, into the culture soup and hope everyone finds, and has the self-awareness to recognize, the one correct for them”. The closest nearby things I know of are:
– trigger warnings (expect people writing things to think about whether they may harm the reader);
– yanas (expect people writing things to think about kind of insight is necessary to understand what they are saying).
My impression is that the first went out of fashion in a few years, the second tended to “drift” like grade inflation, and relatedly, chapter summaries (in which writers are expected to think about what is important in said chapter) and epistemic statuses likewise respectively left, and never entered, widespread use. I don’t expect a hybrid of them to get very far either, but it would probably be good on the margin.
The social tech is just putting some parameters in the advice though. This is pretty one-size-fits-all, at least for men:
“Eat as much meat as you comfortably can. If you’re trying to gain muscle, eat a bit more than that.
Eat enough carbs that you have enough energy to do whatever your day requires. Unless you’re really young and/or thin, don’t eat any junk food carbs, just stuff like rice and pasta and whole-grain bread. If you’re trying to lose weight, eat less carbs and replace them with something else.
Don’t eat desserts more than once a week. Eat at least one piece of fresh fruit like every other day or so.
Don’t bother tracking how much fat or cholesterol you’re eating, or avoiding eggs or butter, or any other nonsense somebody made up after 1900.”
Diet’s not really that complicated for most people, we’ve just had years of incredibly bad propaganda from institutions on the subject. e.g. the phrase “red and processed meat” tells you what kind of faith they’re acting in in one shot.
How about content about the current massive public health crisis, in East Palestine Ohio?
Oh no: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NN6gjWT7dI
Less than two minutes in: “This was 100% preventable. We call things accidents; there is no accident. Every single event that we investigate is preventable. […] Know that the NTSB has one goal, and that is safety and ensuring that this never happens again.”
The first part has a perfectly reasonable interpretation, coming from an investigative organization. The bold part does not.
At 31:30, a reporter presses her on the “100% preventable” part. The answer is she doesn’t like the word “accident” because always Something Could Have Been Done. That… is not the reasonable interpretation I referred to.
Another from 49:20. “This is why the NTSB exists, so that we can get to zero, in all modes of transportation, to improve safety over time.”
15:30 “[The public] need to know — absolutely deserve to know — whether they live or work next to a hazmat route.” Congratulations. For 90%+ the answer is “yes”.
50:08 “It is frustrating when our recommendations [!!] don’t get implemented […] sometimes our recommendations are not implemented, that is frustrating; if they were, those numbers I read you would be much lower.“
Zvi, you put a tremendous amount of your time into these weekly posts, and for a long time you were nearly the only source for critical thinking and gears-level models of the pandemic. I imagine it often felt like a total grind; there must have been many moments of thinking, “why the hell did I take this on in the first place?”
All of us who have been reading them owe you an enormous debt of gratitude. If there’s ever an opportunity to buy you dinner (whether or not I’m there to eat it with you), it’d be very much my pleasure.
This is that I came here to say. I’ve been reading since 2020 and these posts helped me more than anything. I owe Zvi a huge debt of gratitude.
North Dakota tried to do some goofy COVID-adjacent legislation too a while back, had a bill that read:
“If a pharmacist receives a prescription for ivermectin for the off-label treatment or
prevention of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 identified as SARS – CoV – 2, or any mutation or viral fragments of SARS – CoV – 2, the pharmacist may not refuse to dispense the drug based on the pharmacist’s professional judgment regarding the appropriateness of the prescription.”
Far as I can tell it didn’t pass but they did manage to sneak a bit into law about how the ND Board of Pharmacy is barred from punishing a pharmacist for dispensing ivermectin for COVID.
Congratulations on wrapping up a very successful project. It was a great source of relevant information matched with clear thinking. Not least did I appreciate the willingness to tackle difficult issues, whether the difficulty was due to politics or ambiguous evidence or something else. This necessarily entails the risk of being publicly wrong. The risk was worthwhile and well managed.
Thanks Zvi. Thanks to your blog, I’ve been lightyears ahead of the curve in knowing what’s going on with COVID and the world. I will keep reading for sure.
Thank you for your great work
Gonna second the praise and appreciation. These posts helped me a lot when the world was being confusing and overwhelming. Thankfully my local government was 80% sane and reasonable (NZ outside Auckland).
But from the wider media and especially for overseas news I didn’t know who to trust or what to listen to… except these posts. I felt I could trust the guy publishing regular reliable updates, including probabilities and predictions, sharing explicit gears and physical world modelling, plugged into the twitter news, capable of digging into academic papers when needed, with a shared intellectual background in lesswrong.
Even when I suspected you were getting it wrong, it was easy for me to see where and how I disagreed, and what the disagreement hinged on, and what the consequences would be. If only our local journalists were half as principled, careful, and thoughtful.
Interesting study if accurate: https://www.city-journal.org/new-cochrane-study-on-masks-and-covid
Zvi, what do you think of the Bitcoin maxi’s hypothesis that fiat currency is an important meta problem in *all of this*. That it distorts all kinds of incentives and causes the kind of absurd government overreach we see in the FDA, CDC, public school systems, etc? Not interested in debating Bitcoin as a solution at this time, just focusing on understanding the problem. Are you familiar with Saifedean Ammous’ arguments?
Thanks again for all your time and effort through the pandemic. You’ve been a source of light & truth in a sea of terrible journalism.
I don’t see the incentive warping argument. I do see what I think is their real argument, which is that government is bad and fiat currency gives it more power. To which I guess I shrug?
Why the shrug? You advocate for destroying the FDA, how might one do that? The maxi hypothesis that cutting the FDA off from its infinite money printer is a necessary (and possibly sufficient?) step holds a lot of water to me.
Do you think the FDA, CDC, WHO, etc. could have reached their current state in a world where all developed countries remained on a strictly-enforced gold standard over the past 100 years?
(Spamming here because I can’t find an email for you: if you’re interested, we’re doing another TCP event on Friday at 3 pm talking about construction costs and what can be done about reducing them. https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1c2QaljIjnFFzW9Vm1arzUU8PKLSGaD9_4PVkDAogFTQ/edit)
Ah yes, thanks. I actually think I did get emails about this. I’ll see if I can make it.
Zvi, thank you, I’ve become a huge fan and you’ve also help nudge my opinions away from unrealistic poles one way or another.
I appreciate your work on Covid Zvi. It was insightful and very useful.
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