All of Tamay Besiroglu's Comments + Replies

Got it. My fair is probably at around 50% right now.

3Zvi
Reasonable. In the realm of such bets we're not that far apart. I'd take a bet at 50% (1:1) but there's no value to you there. I'm in process of reading new sources.

To be clear, I'm not proposing a bet that no newly emerging variants are going to be consequential. I'm interesting in making a much narrower claim about the global reach of Omicron.

Yea. Gamma was the dominant strain in Brazill, Luxembourg, Chile,  Argentina, and a few other places in early-to-mid 2021, but never become the dominant strain in the US. Similarly for Lambda in Peru, Mu in Colombia, 20B/S:732A in Mexico, 20A/S:439K in Slovenia, 20E in Lithuania, and a handful of other strains in some other countries. This is all from Covariants.org. Many of these countries do roughly as much sequencing as SA does, so it seems like an appropriate reference class for thinking about Omicron.

8Neel Nanda
What fraction of these fizzled out because they were displaced by a fitter variant vs just not spreading further? That seems very important for figuring out how much to freak out

Thanks for writing this, I found it useful.

> Chance that Omicron will displace Delta: 70%.

I think this is a little overconfident given my read on the currently available evidence. There have also been a dozen or so instances when new variants dominated some country that subsequently fizzled out and never went global (either because a fitter variant emerged shortly after or because it turned out to be less infectious than was initially thought). Since I called you out last time on being overconfident ex-post, let me try doing it ex-ante this time.

I'... (read more)

2Norman Borlaug
That website covariants.org is amazing. I've been looking for something like that for so long.
3TheMajor
I completely failed to notice this, whoops. Do you have some more information on this?
4Zvi
66% by March 1 is very close to 70% eventually, and I noted my confidence level is low, but I will consider if I become more confident within the window. Thank you for the offer, in any case. What is your fair? 50%? 30%?