Omicron Is Here: So Hunker—Until It Is Clear Þt Þis Is Lower-Mortality...
& BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2021-12-21 Tu
First:
Omicron is here. Time to hunker down until it becomes clear that this is a lower-mortality virus. Or, if not, we are going to lose 20% of our unhunkered unvaccinated over 80s, 10% of our unhunkered unvaccinated over 70-80s, and 4% of our unhunkered unvaccinated 60-70s in the next two months:
Nsikan Akpan: ’Welp, that escalated quickly. Omicron now makes up 92% of sequenced cases in the New York and New Jersey region, based on the latest data from the CDC. That’s up from the 13% reported last week. Nationally, omicron is 73%, up from 12% reported last week <https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#variant-proportions>. But even if the severity profile holds true and omicron is mostly mild for people with immunity, a sh*t ton of unvaccinated people could still be in trouble because society is fully mixing. Hospitals are saying they can handle the coming surge despite fatigue among HCWs…. But unvaxxed adults who have not been previously exposed (and there are a lot of you), the time has arrived to get vaxxed or literally take every precaution you can to not catch omicron. By doing so, you can also help protect unvaxxed kids…
LINK:
One Video:
Hudson Institute: “History of the Future”: A Symposium Celebrating Max Singer <https://www.youtube .com/watch?v=qTg9rpsrEoY>:
Very Briefly Noted:
Sarah Waldock: Renaissance and Regency Rummage Repository <http://sarahs-history-place.blogspot.com>
Wikipedia: George Scialabba <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Scialabba>
Heather King: Stable Practice in the Georgian Era <https://regencywriter-hking.blogspot.com/2020/02/stable-practice-in-georgian-era.html>Anne Kim: Quit Moping: Democrats Had a Great Record in 2021: ‘Despite inflation, the Biden economic boom is on. Shots are getting in arms. We’re out of Afghanistan… <https://washingtonmonthly.com/2021/12/20/quit-moping-democrats-had-a-great-record-in-2021/>
Julius Bakke: ’Me: likes one tweet by an anti-trump conservative after liking dozens of tweets from progressives and Democrats Twitter: here’s some anti-vax propaganda you might like from your favorite grifting provocateur WTF, Twitter…
Samuel Hammond: ’The ACA’s Medicaid expansion saved a lot of lives <https://t.co/vYjuF3ntIZ> <https://t.co/TRHwZxnYXY>… <
Paragraphs:
Mark Borgschulte & Jacob Vogler: Did the ACA Medicaid Expansion Save Lives?: ‘We estimate the effect of the Affordable Care Act Medicaid expansion on county-level mortality in the first four years following expansion using restricted-access microdata covering all deaths in the United States. To adjust for pre-expansion differences in mortality rates between treatment and control, we use a propensity-score weighting model together with techniques from machine learning to match counties in expansion and non-expansion states. We find a reduction in all-cause mortality in ages 20 to 64 equaling 11.36 deaths per 100,000 individuals, a 3.6 percent decrease… largely driven by reductions in mortality in counties with higher pre-expansion uninsured rates and for causes of death likely to be influenced by access to healthcare…
LINK: <https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32592924/>
Scott Lemieux: John Roberts Took Live-Saving Insurance Away from People Based on an Argument He Didn’t Believe to Inflict Political Damage on Barack Obama: ‘It seems very bad, to me, that the Supreme Court re-wrote the revisions of a program that had already been revised many times to make it much easier for states not to take the expansion, based on a nonsensical application of a doctrine that has not been used to restrict federal spending before or since. And what’s even worse is that the swing vote heard these arguments (perfunctory throwaways that were an afterthought even for the Federalist Society Industrial Complex) at oral argument and rejected them, but decided to revive them in the name of the real doctrine behind his decision, “we must do something to damage OBAMACARE and this is something.” This is a ridiculous way for an alleged judicial body to proceed in any context, let alone a literal life-or-death one. But because he didn’t accept the most extreme form of the anti-ACA argument Roberts will never get more than a tiny fraction of the criticism he deserves for have done this…
Rana Foroohar: The Lessons for the US from China’s ‘Common Prosperity’ Push: ‘The Chinese Communist party has been on something of a charm campaign in the US. Amid all the stories about a silenced tennis star, a #MeToo scandal, disappeared billionaires and Uyghur concentration camps, Americans are also beginning to hear about Beijing’s efforts to reduce inequality and create a healthier and more balanced type of economic growth…. There are nonetheless important lessons that America should take… the focus on quality over quantity in terms of growth…. But… in China, the Communist party itself remains the biggest market risk…
LINK: <https://www.ft.com/content/0910e0b8-98e1-4d21-b7b8-61c0f7003ddd>
PAID-SUBSCRIBER ONLY Content Below…
I am asking my next-semester students in “Economic Growth in Historical & Intellectual Perspective” what they would like to study. Here is the quiz I sent out to them:
Quiz: There are a large number of topics that we might cover in Econ 135. How eager, on a five-point scale—with one being "not eager at all" and five being "must cover!"—are you to see each of them? There are no wrong answers: The purpose of this quiz is to find out what you think.
Due 2021-12-24 Fr, if you want your answers to be of any use to us...
REVIEW: What is "thinking like an economist"??
REVIEW: The theory of economic growth
Economic thought in classical antiquity
Pre-industrial Malthusian economies
Post-industrial information-attention economies
Is the "Great Filter" in our past or in our future?
“Singularities" in our future
"Singularities" in our past
"Malthusian" agricultural economies
Pre-industrial "efflorescences"—civilizational & imperial
Dark Ages
Reasons for glacial pre-industrial technological progress
Forms of pre-industrial "entrepreneurship"
The Axial-Age efflorescence
The Late-Antiquity pause
The original colonization of the Americas
Corn, beans, squash, potatoes & states in the pre-Columbian Americas
Cycles of History in Muslim-Arab-Turkish polities
Gunpowder empires
The ca. 1500 Imperial-Commercial Revolution
The ca. 1500 Commercial-Imperial Revolution
The 1500-1750 Europe-centered economic world
The conquistadores & post-1500 Latin America
Commercial enterprise & seaborne commerce in the post-1500 Asia-Pacific
"Utopia" as a benchmark or as a possibility post-1500
The rise of the British Empire
The British Industrial Revolution
Why was Britain-not the Lower Yangtze—the first region to industrialize?
The transition to modern economic growth
Modern economic growth: rate, structure, & spread
The international system & its great-power hegemons
Plutocracy & economic growth
Patriarchy in historical perspective
Feminism & the demographic transition
The construction of "race" & global inequality
Globalization
The post-1870 development of "underdevelopment"?
The post-1800 global divergence in income levels
American exceptionalism
The temperate regions of late European settlement
Imperialism 1850-1950 & its consequences for economic growth
Tropical Latin America
Temperate Latin America
Enlightenment-Era utopians
Industrial-Era utopians
Victorian-Era utopians
The central-European "separate path"
The southern-European "separate path"
The eastern-European "separate path"
The post-1500 relative economic decline of the Islamic ekumene
Behind the Iron Curtain: Russia-pattern really-existing socialism
China's relative economic decline, 1500-1975
Hamilton-pattern "developmental states"
Japan & the Asian tiger-states?
China stands up, 1978-?
The post-colonial Middle East
Resource curses
"Deep roots" & path-dependence
“Institutions” & path-dependence
Trade & development
Foreign aid & foreign intervention
The Bretton-Woods institutions & harmonized globalization
Containerization-era globalization
Value-chain globalization
Neoliberalism & globalization
Neoliberalism & growth
Growth & fluctuations
Global-north institutional decline
The persistent attraction of fascist and fascist-adjacent movements
Economic growth & industrial-era war
The future of "work"
The future of "consumption"
The coming of the attention-information economy
Economic growth & economic inequality
The near-term future: the next 80 years
The medium-term future: the next 1000 years
The long-term future: The next 10,000 years
The disenchantment of the world
Work ethics
Science & other fiduciary institutions
There's not much expectation that Omicron is lower mortality.
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/mrc-global-infectious-disease-analysis/covid-19/report-49-omicron/
Different infection profile, though:
The distribution of Omicron by age, region and ethnicity currently differs markedly from Delta, with 18–29-year-olds, residents in the London region, and those of African ethnicity having significantly higher rates of infection with Omicron relative to Delta.
Important to note that the much-amplified "mild" isn't actual facts, it's the impression of one (1) South African doctor, talking about a young (media age ~27) population who have mostly had Delta in the last four months.
Also important to note that there's more than one Omicron. Still getting untangled.
Other thing is that vaccine effectiveness against Omicron is not well-understood; protection against infection drops fast. We don't know that severe disease protection doesn't drop, we haven't got the stats. (we will, in a couple months, but today we don't.) One thing I'm assuming is that the vulnerable age has moved a couple decades younger; that's what we're seeing with infection of 18-29 as an uptick and greater infection of children.
So I'm going to assume that the sudden-bend-in-the-mortality-curve is around 50 now. If I'm wrong, well, an even more cautious couple of months won't hurt me.
Oh, and burn your cloth masks. Might as well not be there versus Omicron. N95 or better. (I have been very pleased to note that the industrial safety folks are making half-face respirators specifically for covid -- no exhaust valve and a speaking diaphragm -- and P100 cartridges beat the besnackers out of disposables on cost over time. If we could get absolutely everyone into these, COVID is dead in three months.)
80? Rank choice 80 topics? Where's that forehead slapping emoji???