Thursday Throughput: COVID Over Edition
Photo by The White House, via Wikimedia Commons [ public domain ]
[ThTh1] You may have seen this quote from President Biden, now being touted by COVID “skeptics” as proof that the whole thing is over and there never was a pandemic anyway and we’re in a perpetual tyranny that will never end:
“The pandemic is over. We still have a problem with COVID. We’re still doing a lot of work on it. But the pandemic is over,” President Biden tells 60 Minutes in an interview in Detroit. https://t.co/7SixTE3OMT pic.twitter.com/s5fyjRpYuX
— 60 Minutes (@60Minutes) September 19, 2022
So is Biden right? Is COVID over? Well, y’all know me. You know that the answer to that is inevitably going be … kinda.
It is fair to say that the immediate crisis of COVID is over and has been for some time. When COVID hit in early 2020, it was hitting an immunologically and medically naive population. That is, none of us had ever been exposed to a virus quite like it. And none of our medical personal knew how to treat it. It was a disaster in the making and the biggest public health emergency in a century.
We responded … reasonably, for the most part. But we also made mistakes. Our early experiment in hydroxychloroquine were a failure but our early experiments in Dexamethasone were a success. Shutdowns clearly slowed the spread of the virus but it turned out that a year of remote schooling was costly overkill. Masking helped but we still haven’t done enough to improve ventilation.
Skeptics will say all this did was, at most, slow the virus down. But that was precisely the point. We slowed it down until we had vaccines that, even if they don’t grant complete immunity, dramatically cut the risk of hospitalization, long COVID and death. We slowed it down until we had treatments like Paxlovid that cut the rate of death even further. We slowed it down until we weren’t an immunologically naive population anymore.
And so here we are. Almost everyone has had the vaccine or had COVID and most have had both. Almost everyone has some resistance to the virus even sans medical treatment. We have a bivalent vaccine that could make this year’s COVID far less deadly than the last two years (although the Administration needs to be pushing this much harder). We have treatments, protocols and medical personnel who know their stuff. None of this was true two and a half years ago. But, thanks to the past interventions, we got to this not-as-unhappy place with millions fewer deaths, tens of millions fewer hospital visits and tens of millions fewer long-term health problems than we would have gotten had the “let her rip” side gotten their way.
So it absolutely reasonable to say that we’ve gotten to the endemic state. COVID isn’t going to go away. But, at present, it’s not a public health emergency. It’s still taking a toll of about 2000 lives a week1 but … I guess we’re OK with that. Or at least, we can’t cut that further without massive societal and economic pain.
Now that doesn’t meant COVID won’t come back for more blood. As I’ve said before, viruses are not Pokemon. They don’t evolve to a certain form and stop. We could easily get deadlier or more contagious variants. So if you think COVID is over and you want it to stay over … get vaccinated. Stay home if you get sick. Take your meds … all of them. Get a reserve supply of masks. And be prepared if things suddenly get hairy again.
And, above all, let’s keep doing research to find better treatments and better vaccines. And make sure that, if something else emerges from a wet market, we’re ready for it.
[ThTh2] Why does the far side of the Moon look so different from the near side? A couple of my colleagues have an answer.
[ThTh3] Lots of telescope captured images of Monday’s impact of the DART mission. Here’s an explanation of what we’re seeing.
[ThTh4] Hey … it’s lasted longer than zip drives.
The Tripitaka Koreana – carved on 81258 woodblocks in the 13th century – is the most successful large data transfer over time yet achieved by humankind. 52 million characters of information, transmitted over nearly 8 centuries with zero data loss – an unequalled achievement. 1/ pic.twitter.com/TaNkmlldhA
— Incunabula (@incunabula) September 26, 2022
[ThTh5] I think it’s behind the paywall, but the NYT has a deep dive into the craze of “recovered memory”. Memory is one of those things we really don’t have a great understanding of.
[ThTh6] Also behind a paywall, but a lot of anti-vaxxers are making a big deal out of this doctor, whose cancer appeared to get worse after vaccination. In this case, it’s a rare form of T-cell lymphoma. By stimulating the T-cells, the vaccine caused the cancer to spread. It’s good to know these rare risks. But no, the vaccine will not give you lymphoma or make any other cancer worse.
And while we’re up: the hysterical claims about mRNA in breast milk are indeed hysterical.
[ThTh7] We live near a dangerous star.
There it is, folks. The largest solar prominence I’ve ever witnessed. This is what I spent all day yesterday chasing down as it lifted off the solar chromosphere. The resulting CME was launched millions of miles into space. pic.twitter.com/tY2PnDNiGk
— Andrew McCarthy (@AJamesMcCarthy) September 25, 2022
[ThTh8] Well, I worried that a room-temperature superconductor was too good to be true. Now it’s looking more likely that it was.
[ThTh9] I’ve always been fascinated by the science of stone skipping. But there’s a human story behind it too.
[ThTh10] You may have heard this week that a woman was arrested for threatening to blow up the nuclear reactor at the University of Utah if the Utes lost. I can’t but think the charges are a bit ridiculous. While the media is showing pictures of big cooling towers, the actual reactor is a tiny research reactor with an output of about 100 kilowatts. You could stand next to this thing and be unharmed. It is literally impossible to blow it up. Even with a big reactor, they have all kinds of safeguards and literal guards. Maybe if you really knew what you were doing and went in with an army, you could cause a meltdown. We need to get over our reflexive terror of nuclear power.
[ThTh11] What’s the latest from JWST? Try these stunning images that peek through the surface clouds and highlight the rings of Neptune.
Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera (NIRCam) images objects in the near-infrared range from 0.6 to 5 microns, so Neptune does not appear blue to Webb. In fact, the methane gas so strongly absorbs red and infrared light that the planet is quite dark at these near-infrared wavelengths, except where high-altitude clouds are present. Such methane-ice clouds are prominent as bright streaks and spots, which reflect sunlight before it is absorbed by methane gas. Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI
[ThTh12] Speaking of planets, Jupiter is at opposition — almost exactly 180 degrees from the Sun — and the closest to Earth it’s been in six decades. If you have a small telescope, it’s the really bright thing that comes up after sunset. But even a really great pair of binoculars will give you a nice view.
[ThTh13] Another warning shot from the universe.
[ThTh14] Another study finds video games do no measurable harm.
[ThTh15] New tattoos may change color to measure glucose levels.
[ThTh16] General relativity is always right.
Skeptics will say all this did was, at most, slow the virus down. But that was precisely the point. We slowed it down until we had vaccines that, even if they don’t grant complete immunity, dramatically cut the risk of hospitalization, long COVID and death.
The “flatten the curve” campaign did a terrible job of communicating this. The idea that was being pushed was that we needed to limit concurrent infections to the number that could be handled by the medical system, and keep it up until we reached herd immunity.
I did the math on this, and it was obvious that this simply wasn’t possible, since it would take several years, by which time new variants would require us to go through the cycle again. As you say above, the actual thing we needed to do was limit infections until vaccines or better treatments became available. I had figured that out at the time, but it wasn’t the message we were getting from the media.Report
Its a well known and sometimes remarked on fact that the media employs few dedicated science reporters, and fewer former scientists as reporters. Which means the media isn’t capable of doing the analysis you did, or asking the necessary probing questions. on the federal side we are VERY BAD at messaging this stuff – both because it has to go through too many channels for clearance, and because we don’t employ people with PR backgrounds who could do effective messaging campaigns.Report
“we do public health but have no way of talking to the public about it” is a thing to be sure, as we all saw during covid. the situation was certainly complicated by having a destructive chaos moron cosplaying as a random tweet generator.
i don’t, however, buy that there’s too many channels for clearance – this is a poor excuse for bad planning. the cdc has a public info team, just like every other major org – some of them presumably have public communications backgrounds? and there’s lots of complicated inter-institutional systems out there – you just need to build a methodology that accounts for them. they just sucked at it, in large part because they wanted to counter the randomness with strong moral certitude and respect for their authority, hence falling back on personality-driven messaging and some light fibbing.Report
Let’s say that, as a fed I get asked by Congress to answer a question about how I’m using autonomous surface platforms to do oceanography research. That question starts on the Hill with a staffer, and goes through 8 layers before it hits my desk. I have to shove it back up through those 8 layers, each of which has both editorial and approval authority over what I wrote. And that’s assuming it doesn’t need lawyers looking at it – which adds at least two more layers. Like it or not, a whole week can be consumed just to move that back and forth. That’s the system, and given what we know about the COVID response in the last administration, I’d suspect that here were at least that many layers if not more between any good reputable CDC scientist and the press.
As to staffing – yes, we have public comms back ground people. We even have graphic designers, trained technical editors, and every once in a while a former reporter. But the messaging Brandon was referring to falls squarely in the realm of public relations – which is aligned but not the same thing – which federal agencies are actually statutorily forbidden to do, so we don’t hire people with that background.Report
in my admitted imperfect understanding, the prohibition on propaganda activities or whatever the term is is not a prohibition on public relations activities like campaign planning, communications planning, communication protocols, emergency comms planning, etc etc and so on – after all, we experience them every time the federal government talks to the public, including when they lie to our faces. they can’t use the term because of dumb history, but it’s pr through and through – just called “public affairs” or “public information office” and so on.
while it is also entirely possible i’m misunderstanding – fully stipulated, entirely possible – but i personally know two former pr professionals who work for the gubmint in dc (not for pols) doing “public information office” work. Again, that’s just another name for public relations – a difference without a difference.
i have no doubt your info exchange pathway sucks as a non-comms person being summoned by congress for question(s), but that’s very much not what we’re talking about in this instance.
any way you slice it this dude is a pr flack – https://www.cdc.gov/about/leadership/leaders/adc.html
Now, in their defense – though their performance is going to be in case studies in any public comms/public policy comms classes for at least the next decade – was very difficult because of the twin millstones of unprecedented pandemic and trump, though they got better at it as the years wore on. i worked for a trumpy-esque uni president many years ago and she was the woooooooooooooooooorst. it is quite hard to balance a personality that is absolutely dedicated to being unbalanced and messing up things for those around them.
but some level fibbing and inconsistencies, the general on high attitude (which was largely missing from the monkeypox rollouts, though that’s obviously much easier to manage) and maniacal lack of message discipline at times are completely manageable issues – not easy, as i’ve indicated repeatedly – but totally manageable, even for a “public information officer”.Report
for us at the staff level the differienc in PR versus pub information looks like this – for most of its history – until the early 2000’s, AMTRAK couldn’t tell people that taking a train was a better way to travel then flying. They couldn’t even say it was better then taking a greyhound bus or driving, because that put AMTRAK in competition with private enterprise. That got interpreted to mean that all Amtrak could do was put out gorgeous photo based print ads showing their routes, and nothing more. It took Publix Supermarkets (yes that Publix) using an Amtrak train video under license in a holiday ad to get Amtrak to even admit to being able to pull heart strings and invoke nostalgia.
So in government we are taught to strenuously avoid anything that looks like advertising, judgement, picking winners or anything else that private sector PR does. The guy you highlight may well be a classis private sector PR hack, but what he’s doing at the CDC isn’t going to be that. Even when we do press releases about things like our hurricane hunters (!) we aren’t allowed to write anything that comes off as bragging or insisting they are the best – even though only NOAA and the Air Force do those sort of flights.
As to campaign planning – yes there’s some of that, but if you look at the products produced, the interviews and pressers given, there’s no sales of the thing being rolled out or spoken about. There’s no “This is WHY this a great thing and this is WHY government had to do it.” Contrast that with every emanation form any Fortune 1000 company which starts with why they are the best in their market segment and how great their leadership team is and then, somewhere in the fine print in a foot note tells you about what ever gidget they are hawking.
We don’t do private sector PR. And frankly, I think if we did, government might not be the perennial whipping boy it is.Report
“So in government we are taught to strenuously avoid anything that looks like advertising, judgement, picking winners or anything else that private sector PR does. ”
That you are not permitted to perform advocacy in your communication does not give you an excuse to be bad at communicating.
It’s interesting to me that your response to people suggesting that government agencies are bad at communication is to throw up your hands and give us a jobsworf rant about how it’s not your problem.Report
“The “flatten the curve” campaign did a terrible job of communicating this.”
I’d disagree; I feel that the campaign did a fine job of communicating the intent, it’s just that A) it took longer than anyone thought for the vaccine to come along, and that burned through the morale that was necessary for the discipline of “slow the spread” behaviors; and B) when the vaccine did come along the authorities switched a little too readily from “slow down COVID” to “zero COVID” as their expressed goal.Report
it took longer than anyone thought for the vaccine to come along
Really? I thought that a year was freakin’ AMAZING. Like, the plan to roll it out was called “Warp Speed”.Report
yeah, it was a LOT faster than I thought it would have been. One of the things that made me wonder if I’d be able to mentally survive the pandemic (if you had asked me in, say, June 2020) was that people were saying “five years minimum until we get a vaccine” and I was thinking “holy Hell, most of the rest of my career, until I retire, will be me teaching into a dumb camera on my computer and never seeing another person” and worrying some dark night I’d just snap and….not be there the next day
it was amazing. Even if I’m still sad that we didn’t get a fairytale happily-ever-after of the vaccine giving sterilizing immunity, and even if enough people in my region have refused it that the virus still circulates pretty freely, still: I’m back in the classroom, which probably saved my life.Report
People honestly expected it in June.Report
I think it was more “flatten the curve until we know more about treatment”. As for the professed goals, they were always pretty unrealistic. I remember California set goals for crazy-high percentages of negative test results. Nobody under 70 took the authorities seriously, including (as Jaybird likes to point out) the authorities. At least, outside of NYC for one bad month. And it turned out the authorities there were doing the worst possible thing they could.Report
The vaccine came out sooner than anyone expected. Early on we were told that clinical trials would take 14 months at a bare minimum, with high probability of failure, but we had vaccines ready by the end of the year. IIRC Trump was accused of irresponsibly trying to accelerate the process more than was safe.
Anyway, look at the chart that went viral here. The blue curve shows uncontrolled spread, while the yellow curve shows the flattened curve. Note that they have roughly the same AUC. They both depict the same number of people getting infected and requiring hospitalization, just spread out over a longer period of time.
There’s a brief aside about vaccines and new treatments in the article, but no mention of the fact that unless they come along soon, that flattened curve is several years long, nor does the chart show a truncation of the right side of the curve due to vaccination.
If the vaccine hadn’t come along when it did, we’d still be flattening the curve now, and not even halfway through.Report
IIRC Trump was accused of irresponsibly trying to accelerate the process more than was safe.
More that it was suspected he might. When no vaccine came out before the election, that suspicion expired.Report
ThTh3 (the middle one): “There’s no fixed way to calculate this, but 52 million carved Chinese characters is around two gigabytes of information.”
52 million times two bytes per character is about 100 megabytes, not two gigabytes.
Notably, these are all written in classical Chinese, as the Hangul script wasn’t invented until the 15th century.Report
I got my bivalent booster and, yes, it wrecked me. I got it on a Friday afternoon (got my flu shot at the same time), and, about an hour later, I felt the “bass drop” special effect in my head and I swapped into my PJs and just sat in the basement and I went to bed around 10ish.
Woke up on Saturday and I was *WIPED*. Oh my gosh. I managed to make some yogurt for breakfast. Around 4PM, I found myself saying “maybe I should play a game?” and I tried to goof off for the rest of the night but I didn’t even have energy to goof off.
Sunday was fine. I was back to, oh, 75% or so. Monday I was at 90% and able to work.
So, if nothing else, I have the “I have had my gas tank emptied… that must mean it’s working” experience.
Now I just get to wait for the inevitable “we may have oversold the efficacy of the shot” interview from a senior official. “But you are protected for three months! Two. Definitely two.”Report
bass drop effect? ngl that sounds kinda dope.Report
This sound told me “let’s sit down. For a while.”Report
that’s wild and also talk to your doctor? neither covid nor boosters gave me any dubstep sample packs.Report
yeah, that’s why I’m risking waiting until December (had plain-old booster #2 in July and it knocked me down for 2 days, and I didn’t feel “right” for a week*) for the bivalent: I am going to get it while at my mom’s for Christmas, so if something goes really bad with my immune response there’s someone there who could drive me to an ER. Or if things go less bad, someone to make me chicken soup and tell me they’re sorry I feel bad.
(*It’s also possible that getting a booster shot during a run of 110 F temperatures while one’s body is simultaneously deciding to speed-run menopause caused some of that)Report
You’re killing me with this. Against my better judgment I signed up for a booster tomorrow since I was going in for a flu shot anyway. I already had what I assume was one of the two omicron strains that was going around in June (I believe one has since become the strain while the other is either gone or soon to be). It will be my first mRN, previous were J&J. Also decided that it will be the last time I do this absent a new more deadly strain. Now you’re telling me I may have a ruined weekend to look forward to. Woohoo.
We have decided not to even deal with this for my son for the time being given the incredibly stupid way it is now being handled. He also had (and indeed gave my wife and I) whatever the strain was in June. However the omicron booster is not approved for his age group and even if it was, as of now, they would require kids to go through 3 shots of the old vaccine for the strains that have now vanished and that do less and less for the existing one. If it was a 1 shot deal for the current strain like a flu shot I’d have gotten it for him already but this makes no sense to me. And before anyone bites my head off his pediatrician confirmed it was hard to see the value in it under the current rule set, but suggested keeping an eye out if they do approve omicron only shots for little kids.Report
Okay, trying again: that’s why I’m waiting until Christmas break; I will be at my mom’s to get the booster. I had a REALLY strong immune reaction to plain-old booster #2 and was down for 2 days and didn’t feel “right” for about a week. I want someone there if my immune reaction to the bivalent is even stronger.
Could have been the unusually hot summer, though. Could have been that I inhabit a fifty-ish year old woman’s body and it was doing what fifty-ish year old women’s bodies do, IDK.
I go get the flu shot Friday. I’m hoping I don’t get much more than a sore arm.Report
testing? Apparently my comment got sent to moderation or else just wiped from the face of the earthReport
Okay so apparently I am not alllowed to comment that I had a strong immune reaction to the b**ster #2, despite my being pro-vaccine and STILL planning on getting the bivalent b**ster in a couple months..
*grump*Report
There were three comments in trash. I dug them out.Report
The string “boo” was included in the list of strings that throw comments into moderation. I removed it from the list, so “booster” should be fine now.Report
Oops, it was also in the list of string to throw comments into the trash. Fixed that as well.Report
Any idea why? Some of them I understand, but why “boo”?Report
At least one of the editors, when banning someone whose email is “Boo@foo.bar” puts both “Boo@foo.bar” and “Boo” into the list. WordPress’s string matching for that test is case-insensitive and matches substrings. So “Boo” matches “I got my second booster” in the comment text or “mcain@checkbook.bar” in the email field.Report
Interesting.Report
oh. And here I thought you either wanted to keep OT ghost-free, or force us all to really say “BOOURNS”Report
hehReport
They’re not booing. They’re saying “FILLYJONK!”.Report
Earlier this year the string “zed” got onto the moderation list and then there was a post where people wanted to respond with resized and amazed and realized.
One of these evenings, when I’m feeling energetic and site traffic is low, I’ll clean up the two lists, removing any strings I think are potentially troublesome, and getting rid of the redundant entries.Report
Early on during the pandemic, LeeEsq theorized that people would put up with social restrictions for a pandemic for about two years before getting restless. He received a lot of pushback for this on another blog but it turned out to be a fairly good prediction. Asian countries always took COVID much more seriously than the United States and they are largely ending their last COVID restrictions. Individual tourists can start visiting Japan again on October 11th, Taiwan’s quarantine for arrivals ends on October 13th, Singapore ended mandatory masking and app-based contact tracing in the spring.
There are still hold-outs for “the pandemic is still real” but at this point, I have to imagine they have different desires that they are not openly honest about. I think a lot of introverts saw lock-down (as it existed in the United States) as a kind of paradise and do not want to give it up.
On a different level, hybrid working seems here to stay.Report
Biologically the pandemic is waning, but its not over.
And yes, as a social introvert I relished being home all day and being able to switch off the noise. In a world built for extroverts it was delicious.Report
Most humans are extroverts but this is some weird thing I don’t understand about politics. Leftist politics are supposed to be about the good of the community and society over the individual at least on some level. Many people attracted to leftist politics, especially further leftist politics, tend to be rather introverted and not like being around other humans. Extroverts flock to the Right even though rightist politics should favor introverts. I mean I see a lot of ostensibly left people brawl about the problems of Bowling Alone and community death but they don’t seem to actually want to say join a bowling league or something.Report
It not about who you want to associate with – its about how you recharge emotionally and psychologically. My really SWAG her eis the introverts can get removed enough form the crowd to see what’s actually good for a community.Report
In addition to what Phil said, I am part of a community (and society, for that matter).
I have a gaming group that I go to every other weekend. I play with people that I have known for decades. “The New Guy” has only been there for 4 years.
I like other humans. But I prefer deep gulps of a very few select flavors to dozens and dozens of sips of Bertie Bott’s foray into soft drinks.Report
On social issues, I bed you’d find the left side more focused on the individual and the right side more on the community and society.Report
And yet the right advocates publicly for things like personal responsibility and small government all through a lens of individual freedom.Report
Some see rights and individual freedom as the goal, some see it as an important means of achieving the goal of a sound society. There’s rarely conflict between the two sides on practical matters – maybe like internet freedom or something. They can get into theoretical arguments though. Broadly, I’d say the first group has a more libertarian leaning and the second group is more socon.
Like, I think a lot of what people have written about the three legs of 1980’s conservatism misses the point. You can start with “a good society gives people freedom” or “freedom is the foundation of a good society” and get to spreading freedom abroad, limiting government spending, and limiting government control. Those three are natural allies.Report
I thought I was an introvert until 2 1/2 years ago. Seeing how actual introverts responded to social distancing has convinced me that I’m much closer to the center of that particular bell curve than I thought.Report
Exactly. Turns out most people were using introversion as an excuse to blow stuff off.Report
Also, you can be kind of introverted but still not want to spend 2 years without human contact.Report
There are many ways to have human contact. We use one of them here daily. I was sad to miss Leaguefest but my love of all of you isn’t diminished just because we have yet to break bread together.
Frankly my nuclear family – which is mostly extroverts – was and remains enough in person peopling for me.Report
You don’t need an excuse to blow stuff off. If you don’t want to do whatever, that’s your right. My point was that more people than I expected (although probably heavily overrepresented on the Internet, for obvious reasons) welcomed social distancing, while I hated it. I don’t hold that against them; I was just surprised to find myself on the closer-to-normal side of a line I didn’t even know existed.Report
You can read one of those threads here.Report
And here’s your old Life Under Quarantine post.Report
I definitely nailed the enforcement time.Report
ThTh16: Wasn’t it veronica d here who quoted someone saying that quantum space-time occurred at a scale such that “the real numbers are a useful approximation”?Report
[ThTh10] I’ve said it before, but a big problem is that people have this notion that a nuclear reactor is the same thing as a nuclear bomb only it doesn’t explode as quickly.Report
Yeah, the public is extremely ignorant or actively misinformed about most things nuclear and radiological.Report
You can drop the last three words.Report
A nuclear bomb, but we flattened the curve.Report