COVID-19 Megathread 6: Return of the Omicron

[Dan the Roman]

So I've been comparing virus histories by country lately, and it seems like Delta produces a short hard spike. India is a really spectacular example of this.

Based on this comparison, I predicted on July 30 that we were likely heading for a peak about one month from that date, during the last week of August.

I'm feeling pretty good about my prediction. In fact, I think I may have been a bit pessimistic - it's possible that we may be at peak right now. Cases have already started to decline in Missouri, the first state to have a surge, and Arkansas and Nevada (which both closely followed Missouri) have gone flat. National case growth is continuing, but it has slowed dramatically and continues to do so. Even Florida is improving - cases are dropping in Jacksonville and flattening in most other areas.

So this is almost certainly happening but death reporting is so backed up, we are talking up to a month gap between the deaths and cases. Ie. today the CDC just added almost 800 new Florida deaths.

So we probably have been above 1000 a day for at least a week, perhaps even two. That is going to get dumped so that even as cases are going down the reporting will make this last into late September/early October.

This should be worrying for DeSantis and others not so much for this year but because if the same thing happens next year, there is the prospect of 100+ deaths being reported a day in Florida right up until election day, which really would not be helpful.

[Dan the Roman]

It’s coming from that great resource covestim.com

The problem with those statistics for the US is that they don't work with data which is by date of report rather than by date of occurrence. And that means

1. You need states which provide the latter
2. You can only calculate two weeks after

That is what the UK does and all official statistical agencies.

Anyone trying to calculate daily R is not actually trying to estimate R because the data to do so doesn't exist. I say that as someone who worked on this last spring.That is not how any official government agency or statistical agency does it. Ie. France, UK, Germany, Canada, internal US state and CDC ones.

The reason is precisely what you mention.

Take Louisiana

There are no reports on Saturdays or Sundays
Some Parishes only report three days a week. Those days are different. Some report every day.
Parishes have no central recording. For deaths they simply report coroner reports. For cases they report what is notified but it is literally random ladies filling stuff in when they have a chance in many of those places.
Also some testing labs only report at certain times in batches which involve multiple days
Private providers like CVS also tend to not report cases as they come in but rather dump

They then report to the state statistical agency which then publishes.

The problem is on a given day what shows up for new cases are
Two days worth of cases for some parishes.
One day worth for others.
Zero days worth for others.

Which will get you an R that jumps like a yo-yo.

[Dan the Roman]

It is EXTREMELY suspicious that Florida’s deaths have dropped dramatically despite a sudden peak that rivaled the other two waves (even with the vaccines) but cases are still at the peak.
Deaths lag behind all other metrics, and that makes sense because it takes time for people to die from Covid. It’s very weird what is happening in Florida, I don’t see a similar trend in any other state so I am puzzled.

Florida has been really laggy and inconsistent in their reporting for a couple months now, so you'll probably just see a lot of deaths added retroactively in a few days.  I mentioned a few posts earlier that I wouldn't really trust any trends right now until a least a week out, and especially not in Florida.

Florida reported 150k cases this week down from 151K but positivity increased from 19.6% ot 19.8% implying the drop in cases was due to a drop in testing. That said it seems to be peaking. But worth noting the UK peaked, declined a bit and has been inching its way up. The Delta outbreaks generally have settled at a much higher level post-peak than previous variants.

As for deaths, Florida reported 1486 new deaths which averages to 212 a day. They weren't all over the last week, but given it was 1072 last week, we can probably assume on the trend we have been over 200 a day for perhaps 2 weeks.

[Dan the Roman]

It’s coming from that great resource covestim.com

The problem with those statistics for the US is that they don't work with data which is by date of report rather than by date of occurrence. And that means

1. You need states which provide the latter
2. You can only calculate two weeks after

That is what the UK does and all official statistical agencies.

Anyone trying to calculate daily R is not actually trying to estimate R because the data to do so doesn't exist. I say that as someone who worked on this last spring.That is not how any official government agency or statistical agency does it. Ie. France, UK, Germany, Canada, internal US state and CDC ones.

The reason is precisely what you mention.

Take Louisiana

There are no reports on Saturdays or Sundays
Some Parishes only report three days a week. Those days are different. Some report every day.
Parishes have no central recording. For deaths they simply report coroner reports. For cases they report what is notified but it is literally random ladies filling stuff in when they have a chance in many of those places.
Also some testing labs only report at certain times in batches which involve multiple days
Private providers like CVS also tend to not report cases as they come in but rather dump

They then report to the state statistical agency which then publishes.

The problem is on a given day what shows up for new cases are
Two days worth of cases for some parishes.
One day worth for others.
Zero days worth for others.

Which will get you an R that jumps like a yo-yo.

You can account for this, I guess (by adding smooth/lag).
Here's a good source.

https://epiforecasts.io/covid/posts/national/united-states/

LO has 0.99 (0.68 – 1.3)
NV has 1 (0.81 – 1.2)

Map + 10 states sorting by Rt.

So I am pretty sure LA is probably below 1 now. The way covid19 works it either is going up or down. Missouri clearly has been below 1 for some time as has been AR. LA is probably back of the hand(and this me guessstatmating given our data lag) around .95 or so.

I suspect MS is also just above 1, and Florida is likely around it.*

*What complicates matters is that counties/parishes have different growth rates. You can see this in LA even where some of the worst hit parishes in this wave already peaked. Mobile Alabama clearly peaked last week and is well below 1. The problem is it is unclear if that means Alabama as a whole is. Mobile was the worst part of the state and driving the cases, but it may be that outbreak spreads northward as it did in MS and is currently happening in Georgia and South Carolina.

The alarmists here are off in assuming Covid19 will keep going up. It dosen't work that way. But I think where the other side errs is seizing on limited data to declare either outbreaks over before they are(or when only one part is) and/or assuming that this outbreak will be the last. Most of these same areas probably get hit again this winter based on last year and even what we are seeing in India and the UK.

[Dan the Roman]

Florida does not try and measure residents just shots. That means actual vaccination rates are likely much lower, especially for older folks because those shots began in the winter when a lot of North Easterners were down. My parents got both shots in Florida but are not in the state currently.

Florida counts shots/population to get their numbers but if shots are from 180% of the actual state population, they are greatly increasing the rate.

A good comparison may well be teenagers. Florida has had a huge push to vaccinate them but the rates are still below Texas. That implies that Florida's actual numbers may be closer to Texas, or perhaps a bit below which would explain a lot.

If Florida's actual on the ground numbers this summer are not 62/51 but 52/41 or so it would make a huge difference.

[Dan the Roman]

Florida does not try and measure residents just shots. That means actual vaccination rates are likely much lower, especially for older folks because those shots began in the winter when a lot of North Easterners were down. My parents got both shots in Florida but are not in the state currently.

Florida counts shots/population to get their numbers but if shots are from 180% of the actual state population, they are greatly increasing the rate.

A good comparison may well be teenagers. Florida has had a huge push to vaccinate them but the rates are still below Texas. That implies that Florida's actual numbers may be closer to Texas, or perhaps a bit below which would explain a lot.

If Florida's actual on the ground numbers this summer are not 62/51 but 52/41 or so it would make a huge difference.

Is this reporting practice unique to Florida?

No though some states separate them out
https://www.covid19.nh.gov/dashboard/vaccination

Overall though the US generally is bad at tracking anything other than the shots given and where they were given. I strongly suspect several states(PA,IL) are classifying any shots which are not explicitly flagged as second as additional first ones given how large the gap is and how slowly it is moving.

It is (speculatively) probably more of a problem in Florida given when the major vaccination periods were(January-March when Northern transplants were around)(summer when international travel opened up for people to come in) and the skewed county results. We don't really know because Florida isn't particularly interested in telling anyone and in this case I suspect it is less DeSantis and more tracking this would be hard.

But I do know from February that for Florida proving residence involved:
Having proof of address which could be a rental of at least four weeks

Whereas New Hampshire required either drivers license, or bills/deed etc. Ie. renting a condo for four weeks made one count as a Florida resident for state statistical purposes(at least in Nassau county) whereas other states had much higher standards involving actually being resident in the state.

I think it is worth comparing Florida even to Louisiana or Alabama or South Carolina. New Orleans, Charleston, and Huntsville, all with around 51-52% two shots are by and large resisting this surge and at about 60% of their statewide rate of cases and barely blips on deaths. Miami-Dade on paper is at 64%. It is performing much worse than areas with 52% in states with serious outbreaks. That implies either something unique about the weather in Miami v. New Orleans or Huntsville or Charleston or that 64% of Miami residents really have not received two shots.

[Dan the Roman]

Yeah, if you've been spending more of your time on criticizing FL than NY, NJ and MI, you're a hack.

It was similar last year.

FL got hit hard during Summer - DeathSantis.
MI, IL and CA got hit, perhaps, even harder during Fall/Winter - radio silence.

Real test will be whether CA/NE get hit this winter.
Whether Florida gets hit again next summer.

If North East mostly escapes and this happens again next summer, I suspect that is the scenario where DeSantis is in trouble for reelection. He can survive this if it is in fact the final wave. But if herd immunity is achieved through natural immunity which fades after 9 months, and everyone gets reinfected again next summer and you have 100+ deaths a day going into 2022 elections then there is a huge problem.

That said DeSantis created a lot of his own PR problems here. Had he stopped at opposing lockdowns, blocking enforcement of those, and then let local school boards hang themselves on unpopular mask mandates while also avoiding a clash with Disney/Cruise lines he would be at 60%+. He went in 125% on a winning strategy and ended up taking the fall for things which were entirely foreseeable*

* the blocking of daily data releases on June 4th was an astronomical blunder for all the reasons you note. He proclaimed that Covid was over and therefore there was no need to even monitor it weeks before he should have known a wave was coming and when one was already building in Missouri. Furthermore, he handed control over the narrative, and Florida's daily numbers to the Biden CDC.

DeSantis has played Covid horribly since about May of 2021. Whether that makes him responsible for many if any deaths is more debatable. But virtually all the political damage he is suffering is self-inflicted by really stupid decisions anyone with a room temperature IQ could see would play out the way they did.

Addendum to that. Urban legends about Vaccines causing autism meant a generation of parents whose kids developed symptoms of autism and had a vaccine blamed vaccines for it. Because they like blaming things. Long Covid has horribly defined symptoms which basically include any symptoms of Autism, ADHD, or even being teenager, namely moodyness, low energy, sleeping in, lack of motivation. DeSantis may not have given a single kid long covid. But there are going to be tens of thousands of mothers of whom thousands will be willing to go on TV and in effect say DeSantis crippled my child and gave them ADHD.

There is no requirement for any evidence masks work. All that will be needed is the kid showing any symptoms whatsoever, and for the kid to have tested positive for covid and DeSantis personally will have crippled their kid.

[Dan the Roman]

Yeah, if you've been spending more of your time on criticizing FL than NY, NJ and MI, you're a hack.

It was similar last year.

FL got hit hard during Summer - DeathSantis.
MI, IL and CA got hit, perhaps, even harder during Fall/Winter - radio silence.

Real test will be whether CA/NE get hit this winter.
Whether Florida gets hit again next summer.

If North East mostly escapes and this happens again next summer, I suspect that is the scenario where DeSantis is in trouble for reelection. He can survive this if it is in fact the final wave. But if herd immunity is achieved through natural immunity which fades after 9 months, and everyone gets reinfected again next summer and you have 100+ deaths a day going into 2022 elections then there is a huge problem.

That said DeSantis created a lot of his own PR problems here. Had he stopped at opposing lockdowns, blocking enforcement of those, and then let local school boards hang themselves on unpopular mask mandates while also avoiding a clash with Disney/Cruise lines he would be at 60%+. He went in 125% on a winning strategy and ended up taking the fall for things which were entirely foreseeable*

* the blocking of daily data releases on June 4th was an astronomical blunder for all the reasons you note. He proclaimed that Covid was over and therefore there was no need to even monitor it weeks before he should have known a wave was coming and when one was already building in Missouri. Furthermore, he handed control over the narrative, and Florida's daily numbers to the Biden CDC.

DeSantis has played Covid horribly since about May of 2021. Whether that makes him responsible for many if any deaths is more debatable. But virtually all the political damage he is suffering is self-inflicted by really stupid decisions anyone with a room temperature IQ could see would play out the way they did.

Addendum to that. Urban legends about Vaccines causing autism meant a generation of parents whose kids developed symptoms of autism and had a vaccine blamed vaccines for it. Because they like blaming things. Long Covid has horribly defined symptoms which basically include any symptoms of Autism, ADHD, or even being teenager, namely moodyness, low energy, sleeping in, lack of motivation. DeSantis may not have given a single kid long covid. But there are going to be tens of thousands of mothers of whom thousands will be willing to go on TV and in effect say DeSantis crippled my child and gave them ADHD.

There is no requirement for any evidence masks work. All that will be needed is the kid showing any symptoms whatsoever, and for the kid to have tested positive for covid and DeSantis personally will have crippled their kid.

I do think that they will mostly escape it. Simply, because they will be hit later, when more people get vaccinated.

As I said the states, I mentioned, got hit harder then FL in terms of death per capita, despite DeSantis "stupid" policies and Democratic great [anti-]science policies.

The only thing that really matters is the vaccination rate (among older pop). Let's take a look at top 5 states by death per capita.

The Top 5 state by death per capita (all time) are

(D) NJ 301 per 100,000
(D) NY 276
(R) MS 269
(D) MA 264
(D) RI 260

Florida has 197, slightly over US average of 189 per 100,000. Despite much  older population

Vaccination rate

...........65+ at least 1.... 65+, fully.....All, fully
(D) NJ ....92%................85%................60%
(D) NY ...89%................82%................59%
(R) MS ...81%................74%................37%
(D) MA ...98%................88%................65%
(D) RI ....97%................93%................64%

(R) FL 94%....................82%.................52%


So MA and especially RI are clearly better, though not THAT much. NJ and NY are just slightly better, but they almost 50% more overall death per capita.


Did DeSantis "play" it badly? Well, yeah. He was taken totally aback by Delta. Still, most damage came because of biased media. Did (D) Edwards get similar coverage despite Louisiana having even worse #'s right now (though FL will get worse soon enough) and even worse vaccination rate?

Spoiler alert! Click Show to show the content.

Show

By the way, Biden didn't "play" it well, either. https://apnorc.org/projects/fewer-approve-of-bidens-handling-of-the-pandemic/

I think DeSantis's policy last summer and fall was by and large vindicated. In fact, had he followed it this summer, ie. said yes we are going to get hit what we need is

1. People to make smart choices
2. State to enable those choices by providing maximum possible information(ie. opposite of what he did with ending daily updates) and urging masking/vaccines while stating categorically that coercion does not work and lockdowns do not work

I think he would have been hailed as a hero by all except the really extreme karens. Ie. He would have been seen as aggressively pushing personal responsibility, and providing a model of a government which enabled decision making.

DeSantis' errors political are self-inflicted. Despite the alarmism here, they have killed far fewer people than Cuomo's and I suspect less than the J/J screwup. But, they indicate a distinct lack of political foresight and judgement which is why I feel they say a lot about his prospects as a future presidential  candidate. Another wave was clearly coming and from about May onwards DeSantis did pretty much every single thing wrong politically. And he has given cover to other people whose mistakes likely killed a lot more people, or are even more scientifically illiterate(hello Kate Brown).

DeSantis' actual handling of Covid19 is not the disaster liberals like to portray it as.

His political handling of it, far from indicating he is some sort of messiah, as some Republicans seem to have wished him to be, on the other hand, has shown he is a one trick pony.

[Dan the Roman]

There is some evidence Delta plateaus and sticks around a lot longer than Alpha variants. Take a look at the UK which when you remove the Euros peak has basically been sitting around 30k cases a day for 11 weeks now. Missouri has plateaued around 2300 or so cases a day.

While Florida has peaked it is possible it flatlines at around say 13K or so cases a day, at which point due to higher death rates due to lower vaccinations it may never drop below 70 or so deaths a day through next spring.

Real question is whether everyone can live with that.

We also really need more data at some point re when natural immunity wears off.

[Dan the Roman]

Two Top F.D.A. Vaccine Regulators Are Set to Depart During a Crucial Period
The announcement that Dr. Marion Gruber and Dr. Philip Krause will leave this fall comes as the agency conducts sensitive reviews of coronavirus vaccines for children and booster shots.

WASHINGTON — Two of the Food and Drug Administration’s top vaccine regulators will leave the agency this fall, a development that could disrupt its work on deciding whether to recommend coronavirus vaccines for children under 12 and booster shots for the general population.

Dr. Marion Gruber, the director of the F.D.A.’s vaccines office, will retire at the end of October, and her deputy, Dr. Philip Krause, will leave in November, according to an email that Dr. Peter Marks, the agency’s top vaccine regulator, sent to staff members on Tuesday morning. One reason is that Dr. Gruber and Dr. Krause were upset about the Biden administration’s recent announcement that adults should get a coronavirus booster vaccination eight months after they received their second shot, according to people familiar with their thinking.

Neither believed there was enough data to justify offering booster shots yet, the people said, and both viewed the announcement, amplified by President Biden, as pressure on the F.D.A. to quickly authorize them.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/31/us/politics/fda-vaccine-regulators-booster-shots.html

Imagine the outrage, if "Two Top F.D.A. Vaccine Regulators" resigned because of pressure from Trump... Anti-science Drumpf.

I fear, it will be used by anti-vaxers.

For anyone wondering why Biden's numbers are falling and looking for scapegoats in Afghan coverage, Covid has been

1. Screwing up JJ
2. Not pushing Under 12
3. Making up for #2 by trying to steamroll boosters(and we are pushing Pfizer for both when there is evidence Moderna may be a whole lot more effective and that a lot of Israel's problems may be due to some yet to be fully understood issue with Pfizer which might be a reason to look into it but oh well...)
4. Feuding with GOP governors ineffectively to no clear end while getting sucked into a war over masks which probably will not work as a public health measure due to compliance and proper usage concerns, while also distracting from vaccines
5. Failing to reciprocate with the EU and getting America travel-banned

[Dan the Roman]

Reported deaths per 1 million pop using the 2020 Census instead of 2019 estimates (which Worldometer and CDC are still using)

1--New Jersey      2882
2--Mississippi       2755
3--New York         2705
4--Arizona            2606
5--Louisiana         2601
6--Massachusetts  2588
7--Rhode Island    2515
8--Alabama          2389
9--South Dakota   2321
10--Connecticut    2310 
11--Arkansas        2241

An update:

1--Mississippi       2968
2--New Jersey      2907
3--Louisiana         2773
4--New York         2725
5--Arizona            2668
6--Massachusetts  2605
7--Rhode Island    2536
8--Alabama           2468
9--Arkansas          2371
10--South Dakota  2342
11--Connecticut     2328
12--Pennsylvania   2193
13--Georgia           2184
14--Florida            2181
15--Indiana           2168
16--New Mexico     2161
17--Michigan         2159
18--South Carolina 2148
19--Nevada           2138
20--Illinois            2089
21--Oklahoma       2073
22--Texas              2031
National                2025
23--North Dakota   2012
24--Tennessee       1998

Oklahoma and Texas have enough momentum to knock Nevada and Illinois out of the top 20.  GA and FL will pass PA this week.  TN is the only state below the national avg that will likely move above it

Given trajectory of cases/deaths and backlog to CDC I think it is highly likely Florida will be around 51,000 a month from now, and hence above CT. There are clearly 600-900 missing August deaths, and 1200-1500 from September even if no one further dies. Then maybe an average of 2000-3000 for the rest of the month.

[Dan the Roman]

We are actually kind of lucky Delta is so infectious as it is acting as a very effective block for more vaccine resistant strains.

The consistently high case rates are in some ways a good thing. Because if it was less good then ones which were better at causing serious illness for the vaccinated would be more likely to break through

[Dan the Roman]

It should be ending soon then right?

It almost has to. Some of the states with a higher number (such as Florida) seem to be dropping quite a bit.

We don't know length of natural immunity. Which is partially linked to horrible data collection on reinfection, which is not a conspiracy. The UK for instance does not consider 2nd infections to be distinct "cases".

We will know a lot more, sadly, in about a year.

1. How bad will things be in the Northeast this winter?
2. Will the SEC states have another, smaller, winter surge like last year? On top of this one.
3. Will the SEC states have a another one next summer and will it be bigger or smaller than this one?

[Dan the Roman]

It should be ending soon then right?

It almost has to. Some of the states with a higher number (such as Florida) seem to be dropping quite a bit.

We don't know length of natural immunity. Which is partially linked to horrible data collection on reinfection, which is not a conspiracy. The UK for instance does not consider 2nd infections to be distinct "cases".

We will know a lot more, sadly, in about a year.

1. How bad will things be in the Northeast this winter?
2. Will the SEC states have another, smaller, winter surge like last year? On top of this one.
3. Will the SEC states have a another one next summer and will it be bigger or smaller than this one?

By “SEC” states, you mean the Bible Belt. If this thing is going to end, I’d expect it to be substantially weaker as we head into October and November. None of this crap about the news getting jammed with gender reveal parties turning into a scene at the ER after a 100 car pile up.

If this vaccine/herd immunity deal doesn’t work, that basically leaves us with Regeneron or something that’s going to be a slow motion Civilization Ender.

Vaccines are not a binary. They absolutely work. What they are not is magical forcefields. If you look at the UK they have had a fairly steady 30K cases a day, about 150K in US per capita terms, for four months now. But deaths are around a third as high.

If 90% took vaccines(instead of 76%) we can fully open up, drop most other restrictions and yes case numbers will wax and wane, and deaths will be a constant but they will be about 70% lower than at the moment.

The future is higher deaths, but bearable at least in the cities and suburbs with high uptake and decent health standards. Notice that even in the Deep South this wave passed Atlanta, Charleston, and New Orleans by.

The real dark spot will be rural America, which will have one more cause of death to add to the opiod epidemic, suicide, etc. Covid19 will hammer those communities relentlessly, and I fully expect many to lose 1.5% or more of 2020 population numbers to Covid19 by 2030.

My back of envelope math says about 800K more deaths by the 2024, elections but probably 700k of them unvaccinated and 90K of the vaccinated over 85. It will be two different American epidemics. And it won't destroy normal life because those who care will realize at some point vaccines protect pretty much everyone under age 80 w/o cormodibities. Perhaps with the need for a booster every 6-9 months but still.

[Dan the Roman]

The vast majority of people have moved on from the pandemic a while ago, only the hyper online and political hacks like us care about the restrictions

Large employers generally brought back some COVID workplace rules in August, so I don't think this is quite true yet. 

Has everything to do with the Karen-esque nature of modern parenting. It needs to be grasped after California and Canada that parents WANT restrictive rules. They do not want to follow them for themselves, but the greatest annoyance to any parent, especially at nicer/private schools is someone else's kid being allowed to slide with "anti-social" behavior. Which usually "means" they have a bad mother. Speculating is the favorite topic.

Genuine concern about Covid has merged with the desire to signal out the parents of kids who would not wear masks as a means of social control, and the fact that the louder parents being signaled out are exactly the sort people the Karens have always hated(either because they are annoying or they are married to someone above/beneath them/both) they are effectively waging war on "white trash" and nonconformists.

That their war on white trash also hits the less integrated "wrong sort" of blacks and latinos is probably as much of a concern as the fact that all the policing and zoning polices they back also work that way.

What is missed is that while at the national level the Rightwing position is anti mandates at the local level it is reversed.

And this, btw is why I think this is not playing out well for the GOP in wealthier higher end areas. The same people who may very well rant about Biden in abstract, also want the power to terrorize nonconformists(especially black ones) in their exurbs. And some GOP governors aren't letting them.

[Dan the Roman]

The Florida stuff is silly on both sides.

Was Desantis' general approach closer to the ideal initially, and more or less what pretty much everyone eventually settled close to?

Yes

Is Desantis' political operation and instincts those of a control freak which means they have a tendency to lash out violently at the media and try and control information(ie. limit data releases, prohibit the release to counties themselves of death and hospital statistics out of fear they were being used by the media. Being so dependent on political loyalty that in the current climate being too loudly pro-vaccine or mask was seen as loyalty to Fauci/Biden?)

Yes

Did these things rise to level of altering data as opposed to erratically trying to control it?

Nope. We get the death numbers and if anything the gamesmanship with formats may have made them look worse with the rise sharper than it otherwise would have been. Maybe an argument can be made that when the county data was released again for deaths it shows that the second wave hit low vax counties REALLY hard, just like everywhere else but unclear what the agenda here was other than control. There is no evidence there is anything wrong with the numbers we are getting. We are just getting them far later and in a much more confusing format at the cost of far more work on the part of the State.

Did more people die?

This is a trickier one. As is noted here, there are likely multiple facets

Schools Staying Open
Mask bans for kids

Both probably had no impact on deaths or very little

On the other hand some of the grandstanding regarding banning private employers from mandating masks or vaccines especially nursing homes, retirement communities etc almost certainly did.


Basically there is a lot to criticize about Desantis, much of which stems from his decision to pivot from adopting a light touch approach for ideological and scientific reasons in 2021, to then using his association with that approach and its success to "troll the libs" with it in 2021.

I suspect the above will also be the view of many middle of the road Florida voters in 2022. Do they wish DeSantis would tone it down a bit and pay less attention to online Republican twitter/out of state R primary voters? Yes. Do they find his staff and some of his methods abrasive? Yes. But all in all, would they trade that for the alternative, even say a Jeb Bush or Mike Dewine, much less a Charlie Crist. Probably not.

DeSantis almost certainly has annoyed people with this, and his militant online fans are not an asset. But those thinking he has turned into #deathsantis are as delusional as those who put together that idiotic ad.

[Dan the Roman]

So while politically unpopular to say this, the fact is this is a learning process.

The MRNA vaccines are miracles in that the technology allowed for the development of largely effective vaccines in a shorter period of time than anyone thought possible.  At the end of the day they are a new technology, and we were in a rush. There is little to no evidence that this rush resulted in serious trade offs in terms of safety, but it is understandable that some choices were made in the dark.

Among those is Pfizer going for a lower dose than Moderna.

The proper approach should have been grateful for how good these vaccines were given the context of their development. That would have involved recognizing that both the vaccines themselves, and their deployment could and would be improved. For instance, we now have a large amount of data that extending the gap between first and second doses as the UK did resulted in much better protection than the shorter 3-4 week gaps.

The problem is that everyone is demanding perfection in different ways from a product which is 95%  perfect. Anti-vaxxers say that 5% proves it is bad. Pro-Vaxxers insist that 5% means it does not work and they demand to be shot full of more of it rather than waiting for more research into how to get it from 95% to 99%. If they waited an extra three months we could find out from those current studies on mixing Pfizer shots with Moderna Boosters etc and see if we could get a much more effective and longer lasting approach. But no. Everyone is in a hurry

[Dan the Roman]

Re this being the final wave

I find that fairly doubtful given the behavior of this sort of virus, and the trajectory elsewhere in the world.

I suspect we may see longer gaps between waves, and that in the very high vax areas which also have seen semi-permanent changes in behavior, see the example of Atlanta with this wave, the impact will be negligible.

In terms of raw numbers of deaths, however, I do not think we are even one third or fourth of the way through to where we will be in 2032. I fully expect Covid19 to batter rural communities with poor health infrastructure, an already unhealthy population, and vaccine rates which peaked in the first months of 2021 prior to polarization.

Natural immunity is holding up at a year, but there are no coronaviruses for which it lasts beyond 3 years and the WHO expects everyone to get it three times over the next decade. For those getting boosters, and otherwise in fairly good health, those three times may be one serious flu and two light colds. But for counties with 25%-30% vaccination rates now, hospital systems which will not recover from the last 18 months, and where everything is being bet on natural immunity, those will be waves which will hit for 200-250 per 100,000 each time.

So when we look at NYC which is at 410 or so, I would be shocked if it reached 600 by 2032. But I wouldn't be shocked if most of the rural South was around 1200-1400 per 100k by 2032.

Basically I expect MS and Alabama to have at least 3-5 more waves at least 50% as bad as this one. And I feel that is very optimistic.

[Dan the Roman]

Prohibiting any NPIs going forward and closing down the WHO seem like the thing to do.

Prohibiting is a stupid move like banning mandatory vaccinations across the board. Even if you do not think they are justified for covid, there probably are viruses or situations where they would be, and its literally any society cutting off its own arm out of spite.

If the people running your government are morons fire them. But the thing is if you elect new people there is no need to prohibit anything because if people elected on an explicitly anti-NPI platform are persuaded to go with them odds are they have a good reason and you want them to be able to do so,.

The idiocy of the lockdown forever crowd is only exceeded by the idiocacy of those who have turned it into an emotional temper tantrum of a 7 year old.  At least the lockdown forever folks are acting like karens. Not self-harming suicidal goths desperate for attention

[Dan the Roman]

This forum probably thinks this was a righteous act of civil disobedience.

American Airlines flight bound for London turns around mid-flight over mask rule compliance

An American Airlines passenger plane bound for London turned around mid-flight due to a mask-related disruption on Wednesday.

"American Airlines flight 38 with service from Miami (MIA) to London (LHR) returned to MIA due to a disruptive customer refusing to comply with the federal mask requirement," American Airlines said in a statement.

Local law enforcement met the flight at Miami International Airport, the airline said.
The Miami-Dade Police Department told CNN it was called by the airline regarding a female passenger who refused to wear a mask.

"Once the plane made it to the gate, the passenger was escorted off the plane by MDPD officers without incident. The passenger was then dealt with administratively by American Airlines staff," said Detective A. Colome from the Miami-Dade Police Department.

Why does the plane need to turn around in these cases?  That seems counterproductive to everyone.  Why not just have him arrested when the plane lands at its destination?

Bigger mystery is that with Plan B still in effect were they planning not to comply with mask rules in the UK? European police are tired and media demonization of American anti-vaxers has conflated them with anti-maskers and reduced both to caricatures. Americans can expect very little indulgence from police currently inclined to expect and think the worst of them.

I do expect that to change in a few months however. Everyone is sick of this not just in the US but in Europe. But I do think the difference will be that whereas anti-vaxxers seem to have managed to piggyback on anti-maskers(latter are numerous and reasonable former nutty), the reverse has happened elsewhere. Ie. even Younkin's EO's dropping requirements for state employees would be seen as cultish and fringe.