All of Daniel S's Comments + Replies

Trevor Bedford took a crack at estimating the steady state back in October (so pre-Omicron). He came up with estimates of 20-30% of the population infected annually and deaths of 40K-100K per year in the US. https://twitter.com/trvrb/status/1448297978419101696 . Unfortunately, he didn't show enough of his work for me to understand where the 20-30% number comes from. Deaths is just multiplying number of infections by IFR. The big question mark here is whether high risk people will continue to get boosters; Bedford is guessing yes. Here is my own attempt to estimate number of infections. I googled "how long does covid acquired immunity last" and looked for useful studies. My impression is that no one really knows, but experts generally give numbers in a range of 6 months - 5 years, and tend to center their guesses on 2-3 years. (Since this is presumably an exponential decay process, it isn't crazy to think that we could have estimates on the half life of immunity, even though the disease has only been around 2 years.) A very naive guess would then be to expect people to get infected every 2-3 years, so 30-50% of the population each year. But life is better than this! The infectious period is about 5 days, so if the natural immunity period is 2 years then one can't expect more than (5 days)/(2 years) = 0.6% of the population to be infected at a time. In a population with only 0.6% infected, one could live a 2019 lifestyle for months or probably years -- without getting infected. And this forms a virtuous cycle where the small number of infected people means one can go on longer without being infected. I didn't attempt to solve for equilibrium in the mathematical sense, but 3-5 years between infections doesn't seem crazy. If people kept getting boosters, the numbers would be much better. And we could start timing them to the seasonality of the disease, just like with the flu. To me personally, it is clear that the cost-benefit of getting a COVID booster every Fall fo

Go to your profile page. (Will be something like https://www.metaculus.com/accounts/profile/{some number}/). Then in the track record section, switch from Brier Score to "Log Score (continuous)"

Also, some comments at MR suggest that the situation is more complicated. If I understand it correctly, there are things you need to do in order to enter the country, and things you need to do in order to participate in the tournament... and while he did the latter (by getting an exception, but anyway), he failed to do the former.

I’m still finding these very useful at their current frequency. EDIT: I should add, much of what I’m getting here is learning to appreciate the way Zvi thinks and his Not Covid section this time around was pretty good. The silver-lining of the pandemic for me is that my epistemic reasoning has improved substantially, and I have a renewed appreciation for good science communication. This is a real word scenario where we all have skin in the game and decisions have consequences. It’s an island of learning opportunities in a sea of dystopian tragedy, yes. But I really enjoy the visits to the island a few days a week. It’s at least a break from treading water in the sea.

Personally I think the repetition is OK, not least because many people don't have time to read all the posts, nor in full (e.g. I don't); and I expect many new readers will only read one or two posts, and it's potentially useful that they see such egregious examples at least once, to get the gist.