tl; dr: there is a mutated strain of COVID that seems to spread a lot more quickly. Here is its Wikipedia page. Last Monday (Dec 14) the UK MP's were informed of a new strain of COVID-19, named "VUI – 202012/01". This strain seems to spread more quickly than other...
In writing a reply to Zvi’s recent post on Covid-19 predictions I realized I had been procrastinating on writing out my thoughts on Covid-19 in full. In this post I will explain in detail how I think about the Covid-19 countermeasures for the next few months, and explain why I...
If your colleagues are regularly giving unrealistically optimistic estimates, and you are judged worse for giving realistic estimates, clearly your superiors don't care for the accuracy of the estimates all that much. You're trying to play a fair game in a situation where you will be rewarded for doing the opposite of that.
Personally I've had good mileage out of offering to lie to the people asking for estimates. When asked for estimates during a sprint, or the likes, and if I sufficiently trust the people involved I would say something like "You are asking us to do X, which I think will take 2 months. My colleagues are giving estimates of 2-3... (read more)
A shot in the dark, but the Malthusian theory of population suggests war is beneficial to local officials and leaders when they think the younger generation is growing at a sufficiently rapid pace that they are about to be replaced ('vent the testosterone', so to speak). The absence of such a growth spike is a mark against this explanation.
More generously: if the birth rate is below replacement, losing young people in a war has drastic consequences for the population ~20 years from now, since it will at least for a while drop far below replacement. If the birth rate is higher the consequences of losing a fraction of your youngest people are, in the long run, less severe.
The first example seems to be an issue of legibility, not fungibility.
I think the section on Don't Look Up, in particular the comments on the relationship between science and policy, misses the mark in very important ways. The naive model of [science discovers how the world works] --> [policymakers use this to make policy to improve the world (for themselves, or their constituents, or everybody, or whatever)] does not give enough weight to the reverse action - where the policy is fixed, and the science that supports it is promoted until the policy is Scientific(TM). I think most science-that-determines-policy is selected this way (regardless of the intentions of the scientists involved).
If I remember correctly you've mentioned this in a previous COVID post, where... (read more)
Looks like both Paxlovid and molnupiravir are set to receive FDA approval soon.
The link on severity of Omicron infections (https://www.nrk.no/urix/tall-fra-danmark_-omikron-forer-til-like-mange-innleggelser-som-delta-1.15769977) raises an interesting question. They deduce the severity by comparing the number of hospitalisations from Omicron with the spread of the variant 5 to 6 days prior to hospitalisation, which is the correct thing to do if we assume it takes 5 days from infection to developing symptoms severe enough to be admitted to the hospital. My two questions:
Since the doubling time of Omicron is so short this has serious knock-on effects.
As an aside, the link does not claim anywhere the patients were admitted for Omicron, just that they were admitted, and diagnosed with Omicron. So for now I'm withholding updating on this.
The paper seems to describe the Delta variant and classify its properties compared to older strains. I'm not an expert so I might well be misunderstanding it, but that paper seems to classify and compare two wild strains, not modify them? Maybe I'm missing something, but what is the relation with omicron?
I thought the fact that South Africa does far more sequencing than other countries in that part of the world (for example, check the reported Delta sequences by country, where South Africa is listed as 25th globally with 11,004 sequenced samples, and the next sub-Saharan country seems to be Nigeria, 49th, 2,075 sequenced Delta samples) is more than sufficient to explain... (read more)
Would you prefer that the FDA involves itself over that it stands by the sideline?
This seems correct to me, but I don't immediately see the importance/relevancy of this? At any rate the escape is speculative at this point.
tl; dr: there is a mutated strain of COVID that seems to spread a lot more quickly. Here is its Wikipedia page.
Last Monday (Dec 14) the UK MP's were informed of a new strain of COVID-19, named "VUI – 202012/01". This strain seems to spread more quickly than other forms of COVID-19, and wikipedia claims that this might be related to the mutated spike protein.
Two days ago (Dec 18) the NERVTAG (an expert panel advising the Chief Medical Officer of the UK, who in turn advises the UK Department of Health and Social Care) meet and release their meeting minutes, stating that:
In writing a reply to Zvi’s recent post on Covid-19 predictions I realized I had been procrastinating on writing out my thoughts on Covid-19 in full. In this post I will explain in detail how I think about the Covid-19 countermeasures for the next few months, and explain why I think all this.
Disclaimer: my predictions are among the most pessimistic (and speculative) of the ones I've run into. Having expectations that COVID-19 will be worse than people are thinking so far can and does have negative effects on your mental health, so stop reading, now.
I’d love to be proven wrong on all of this.
There has been a... (read 1621 more words →)
My previous go-to for understanding why we didn't adopt nuclear power on a massive scale is https://rootsofprogress.org/devanney-on-the-nuclear-flop (even citing some of the same sources and using the same charts). Note that the post summarizes Devanney's book, and the post author does not necessarily agree with the conclusion of the book.
Devanney places a lot of the blame with regulators, in particular the Linear No Threshold model, ALARA legislation and regulator incentives. Do you think this is inaccurate and/or overblown?