COVID-19

Happy day: rivals British Airways and Virgin Atlantic flew synchronized flights from London to New York to mark the end of Covid-based travel restrictions to the USA, reports Airline Geeks.

This piece by Sarah Zhang in The Atlantic articulates what I’ve been feeling the last few months: we don’t know what to do next re Covid.

On the ground, the U.S. is now running an uncontrolled experiment with every strategy all at once. COVID-19 policies differ wildly by state, county, university, workplace, and school district. And because of polarization, they have also settled into the most illogical pattern possible: The least vaccinated communities have some of the laxest restrictions, while highly vaccinated communities ⁠— which is to say those most protected from COVID-19 ⁠— tend to have some of the most aggressive measures aimed at driving down cases. “We’re sleepwalking into policy because we’re not setting goals,” says Joseph Allen, a Harvard professor of public health. We will never get the risk of COVID-19 down to absolute zero, and we need to define a level of risk we can live with.

National treasure David Mitchell knocks it out the park with his (SPOILER WARNING) review of No Time to Die.

The main spoiler is: they’ve spoiled it. The producers of No Time to Die have spoiled Bond ⁠— either a bit or totally, only time will tell.

Another darn piece that expresses perfectly what I was thinking and that I didn’t write myself. This is one where I feel: no matter what, I couldn’t have done it quite this well, this straightforwardly.

More Stanford student bikers are observed wearing masks than helmets. OK now it’s just a pandemic of idiocy.

Also today I noted a pic of Israel’s foreign minister Yair Lapid stepping out of an aircraft at Bahrain’s airport. He was alone on the middle steps, his aides up top at the aircraft doors, the welcoming committee on the tarmac, yet he was masked. Covid theater undermines our public confidence in following sensible guidelines when they are actually sensible and salutary.

Graffiti at Melbourne IKEA: NO JEW JAB FOR OZ, as reported by The Algemeiner. People can be so demented.

To understand post-vaccination Covid, read “Israeli data: How can efficacy vs. severe disease be strong when 60% of hospitalized are vaccinated?” by Jeffrey Morris, a statistical data scientist at the University of Pennsylvania. [via Marginal Revolution]

Scuzzball extraordinaire Piers Corbyn is caught on camera accepting a bribe from a bogus AstraZeneca investor with a request to focus his very righteous ire on Pfizer and Moderna. Awesome!

With this panegyric to airport culture, Eva Wiseman riffs on a Vice story about young Britons going to the airport to get (earthly) high and hang out. As a Briton I find this awesome, even while as an Israeli I find it a bit pitiful (ie, just go to the beach!).

In his Telegraph column, the invaluable Ambrose Evans-Pritchard lays it out that the UK has actually handled Covid pretty well:

We can see in hindsight that the UK began the war on Covid much as it has begun almost every major war over recent centuries: half asleep, in utter shambles, with obsolete contingency plans. The first wave had echoes of the Norway campaign in 1940, or the great retreat of the British Expeditionary Force in August 1914. It always seems to take time for Britons to pull themselves together. Ultimately they do. By the end of the First World War, the British armed forces were arguably the best-run logistical machine on the planet.

Nice backgrounder at Stat News on the history of mRNA vaccines.

From the CDC, US vaccination numbers. So far the state that’s done best is South Dakota at 3%.

2020, the good news, by Doron Peskin at Israel’s Calcalist

I’ve been surprised and disappointed by just how many people are hesitant to take up the COVID-19 vaccines now coming online. In this concerned Nautilus article “How to Build Trust in Covid-19 Vaccines”, the authors take on the issue with sober good sense, eg:

Mandatory vaccination policies should be avoided because they could backfire. More acceptable would be tying vaccination status to travel or access to public places.

A close-to-the-ground view of the current pandemic response in Southern California. Mentions of food insecurity, and there’s color in the comments.

“Because the Republic is at stake”: David Goldman for Trump. Allow me to also attest: as president, Donald Trump has passed George Gilder’s Israel test with colors so stratospheric it almost makes one cynical about cynicism.

Great long piece in The Guardian on the aviation meltdown.

Parathyroid surgeon Dr Deva Boone informs us on Vitamin D.

A solitary voice suggesting Vitamin D, Matt Ridley in The Spectator:

The bottom line is that an elderly, overweight, dark-skinned person living in the north of England, in March, and sheltering indoors most of the time is almost certain to be significantly vitamin D deficient. If not taking supplements, he or she should be anyway, regardless of the protective effect against the Covid virus. Given that it might be helpful against the virus, should not this advice now be shouted from the rooftops?

I do believe that the Western media ⁠— and therefore Western society in general ⁠— is actively uninterested in a biological reason for why darker-skinned people are suffering more from the novel coronavirus; such a materialistic and addressable cause does not fit the fashionable angle of systemic racism. So who suffers?

The Daily Mail has 8:38 minutes of police bodycam footage of the George Floyd arrest.

Given what this American Spectator article contains ⁠— the transcript of the exchange between George Floyd and the arresting policemen before he was even on the ground and the toxicology report stating George Floyd’s death was in all likelihood due to an overdose ⁠— the shit gonna hit the fan whether the courts find police innocent or guilty.

On Vitamin D and Covid-19 [via Marginal Revolution]. If there’s any truth in the conclusion here ⁠— that vitamin D deficiency worsens Covid-19 deadliness by an order of magnitude ⁠— then surely it is criminally negligent to not be running public awareness campaigns encouraging people to take vitamin D supplements ⁠— especially for darker-skinned citizens, adapted to block out sunlight and consequently vitamin D, and especially in sunlight-challenged locales.

The editor of Spiked castigates the media for misreporting facts on Dominic Cummings’ lockdown behavior. But Brendan O’Neill’s focus on possibly disingenuous facts misses the larger disheartening truth.

Which is that a senior head needs to roll for the UK Government’s humiliating and deadly botching of its initial response to the pandemic. (That many of the leaders themselves contracted the disease is emblematic of this failure.)

Since elections will not be held for years, the next best thing to the PM’s head is that of his high-profile advisor. And this is fitting: as the great visionary and strategist, Cummings should have been the one who got the PM to take the pandemic seriously in good time.

So the details of Cummings’ hypocritical behaviours under lockdown are merely the pretext for some just humiliation for him and this Government. His firing would be the catharsis that marks entry into the next phase of this pandemic; indeed these are political norms. Instead however we slouch further into uncharted territory ⁠— political as well as medical and economic.

SARS-CoV-2 apparently interferes with the body’s one-two process of knocking out a virus, reports Stat News on discoveries made by Benjamin tenOever of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. The virus blocks the production of interferons by infected cells, which slows down viral replication. But the signal to bring in killer cells goes unabated. The result is an arms race of virus and inflammatory cytokines within the lungs. Ingestion of interferons could redress this problem.

Hail Freedonia, a Covid-19 vaccine is in sight! Hail Moderna, hail Massachusetts!

The biggest balagan ever, the USA’s flailing then failing pandemic response:

By the time the virus broke on American shores, the problem was not that the United States didn’t have a single plan for an international pandemic. The problem was it had dozens of plans, totaling thousands of pages, issued by different agencies and by different administrations, apparently with little thought to how they would be combined or who would implement them.

More people will die from Covid-19 because we cannot study drugs more quickly, writes Matthew Herper in STAT.

Yes. Anonymized data from all patients should be accessible to all. The social media giants have demonstrated that it can be done ⁠— data entered from all over the world into a single system that produces meaningful output. Indeed, the web is the perfect medium for it. Rather than setting up trials to evaluate the efficacy of a treatment, researchers could instead be checking the global treatment knowledgebase.

Using their web-connected devices, registered medical practitioners would log each step of a patient’s treatment as it happens; in medicine a new understanding would take hold that the practice is to both treat the individual at hand and publish that treatment because every facet of every case history can contribute to a myriad of studies.

A standards body could set the data model that is a medical case. Presumably the model would emanate out to include such information as the identity of the treating hospital, so that, eg, the geographical locale can be factored in by researchers.

One problematic aspect of a case is the patient’s anonymized identity, required for factoring in pre-existing conditions. A new price of our medical care would be its worldwide publicization, and the understanding that motivated organizations could connect even anonymized medical data with other aspects of a person’s life, such as a cessation of credit card use during hospitalization. Yet given what we now see is the catastrophic fallout of a pandemic, we will surely come to accept this cost, just like say driving licenses. Moreover, perhaps this could justify to Americans why healthcare should be free: one is contributing one’s medical biography to the knowledgebase.

Such instant availability of global treatment data would be useful not only to researchers but also ⁠— and possibly primarily ⁠— to doctors devising treatments in the moment.

Marc Andreessen: Build, baby!

The eleven days in question are 12th ⁠— 23rd March. Eleven days in which the [UK] government decided to give up with contact tracing and do, well, nothing. Mass gatherings were still allowed (because “science”). Concerts and racing and Champions’ League football. Pubs. Public transport. Everything. The over-70s, it must be conceded, were advised to avoid cruises.

Some Israeli preppers.

A brief survey of Israeli exit strategies for coronavirus lockdown, including the 5/2 and the alternate week plans.

Forbes lists Israel as the #1 safest country from the Wuhan. Germany then South Korea are next. The USA and UK aren’t even in the top 40.

The WHO Global research on coronavirus disease links to other good resources.

We can now all view for free the 21,000+ articles on COVID-19 at ScienceDirect.

Two useful data visualization resources on Covid-19 (AKA the Kung Flu, lest we forget):

• “COVID-19 Dashboard by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University (JHU) “:https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html
• Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) ⁠— Statistics and Research by Our World in Data

This one’s a corker: “Plan A for the Coronavirus” by Curtis Yarvin.

The right organization for a Coronavirus Authority starts with an experienced CEO who has taken a company from the garage to three commas. We are not starting from nothing ⁠— just from incompetent. Palo Alto has no idea how to reform incompetence. No one does. All we can do is replace it ⁠— starting, literally, with one person.

World 2.0.

In 2006, Schwarzenegger as Governor of California built up a pandemic stockpile in the wake of avian flu that Jerry Brown subsequently sold off for pennies on the dollar. The initial cost was $200m, the amount saved annually by eliminating the program $6m. Which shows the issue of unpreparedness is totally bipartisan and systemic; indeed it is civiliizational.

Viral dose is being ignored yet is almost certainly hugely important.

Bret writes a very nice one about his great Mum during these terrible days of Covid-19.

Humane, authoritative video by Dr Jeffrey VanWingen, a family physician in Grand Rapids, Michigan on sterilizing groceries.

Complete with photos, the fucking Chinese wet market is back in business. From the Daily Mail article: “The only difference is that security guards try to stop anyone taking pictures.” So I am finally posting this thought for posterity: #nukeWuhan.

Devi Sridha, Chair of Global Public Health at the University of Edinburgh, had been trying to sound the alarm about the British herd-immunity approach with pieces such as “Britain had a head start on Covid-19, but our leaders squandered it”.

What a lovely piece by Peggy Noonan: “My Corona (or Is It Schmutz?)”.

In times of infectious airborne disease, the burden of proof shouldn’t on wearing a mask, it should be on not wearing one. Scott Alexander at Slate Star Codex reviews the scientific literature on mask-wearing.

In The Atlantic, a cogent overview of America’s response to COVID-19.

Andrew McCarthy painstakingly reviews the confusion in establishing the Covid-19 fatality rate.

Down in the weeds regarding the management of Nightingale Hospital London.

Can the novel coronavirus hang around in the air behind someone infected? It’s unlikely, concludes this article in the newly justly famous Statnews.

Tim Ferris disseminates instructions for making a single medical ventilator work for multiple patients.

There’s just so much obviously that we are all reading about the novel coronavirus, i haven’t been posting here. Starting now, here is an important one: Tyler Cowen (who is great when something big is happening) announces the Emergent Ventures prize winners for coronavirus work.