& BRIEFLY NOTED: For 2022-01-01 Su: First: South African Omicron Mortality 0.3% vs. Delta 2%. Yes, the South African population had more acquired immunity vis-à-vis against Omicron than it had had against Delta earlier, but so do we, and so does everybody else. And it now looks like Omicron mortality was 0.3% of reported cases, compared to Delta and earlier mortality of 2% of reported cases, Influenza in the United States hits 20 million people a year, and kills 20,000—an 0.1% mortality rate. Omicron in the United States looks now to be a measles-contagious triple flu. If it hits 100,000,000 people, that is still 300,000 more deaths. But it is so much better than it might have been...
Speaking of the Rasmussen graf: My problem with crypto isn't the bros. Fools gonna be fooled; jerks gonna jerk. Instead, I'm angry with the press, that keeps treating the topic as novel and legit despite 15 years of solid evidence to the contrary.
That Finnish teacher study -- there's an immense structural difference between trying to produce optimality and trying to produce sufficiency.
If you go "best on the test", you're trying to produce optimality. Never mind if you have, or could have, written a test able to identify optimal capability. Structurally, systemically, you're trying to produce an optimal outcome.
If you filter the applicant pool by checking for sufficiency -- does the applicant have scores above the minimum for each of the following areas of concern? -- and then, if necessary, filling spaces by lot from a potentially too-large pool of applicants, you get (as the study found!) better results.
That happens whenever we can't know the optimal outcome; providing a more diverse pool of good-enough gives better odds of effective responses to both unknown and novel requirements. Since teaching careers are meant to be long, some requirements are unknown (or the test-for-the-optimum approach would work better!) and the future always contains novelty, sufficiency is obviously a better approach to selecting teachers than optimality.
It's important to watch out for someone trying to do optimality via notional sufficiency and adjusting the definition of sufficiency to that end; it's important to be sure the things you're checking as part of sufficiency are important to the job you want done. But in general, for long careers, sufficiency approaches will work better.
Can't do that, through not having the power? Well, is the Berkeley medical school doubling admissions as a matter of ongoing core policy? No? Why not? Medical system capacity is no longer great enough for the population; it was marginal before, and it's been substantially reduced. Can't start addressing that crisis of people dying because there's no capacity to provide them care any sooner than right now.
Is Berkeley as a university getting together to correct the gaping rent in nosology around post-viral conditions? It's not just COVID-19; ME/CFS and Lyme disease leap to mind. All those things where you get sick and never get better. Nobody has diagnostic criteria for "Long Covid", and until that exists, it doesn't exist. A condition which doesn't exist can't be studied, and if can't be studied, the vast gulf of ignorance on the subject cannot be filled. If it's NOT filled, millions of people stay condemned to the slow-death-by-torture that is medically unrecognised severe chronic disability.
In the meantime, the "Let's have endemic COVID-19" faction (which is the actual position of what presents as the "herd immunity! give everyone the disease and this is over!" faction) needs to address:
The more infections, the more variants. "Diseases evolve to be less severe" is one of those unshakeable faith statements, but that's certainly not what we're seeing and no, not in general. Measles is still very bad, millennia later. The plague stayed very bad for centuries and is still horrific when people catch it from a marmot, etc.
https://www.mdpi.com/1422-0067/22/11/6151 COVID-19 increases your physiological age. The severity of the disease is closely correlated with your physiological age. "Make it endemic, we'll be fine" is not obviously a factually well-supported position; the disease ages you into a condition of greater vulnerability.
https://assets.researchsquare.com/files/rs-1139035/v1_covered.pdf?c=1640020576 SARS-CoV-2 actively reproduces in non-lung tissue for months after acute infection is over without causing inflammation other than in the lungs. Does Omicron (less likely to inflame the lungs) cause less organ damage elsewhere? We aren't going to know that for awhile and a lower prompt death rate is going to make that harder to study. (The molecular dissection necessary to study this question is already challenging to perform.)
Omicron infects more children than any previous variant. It's not implausible that Omicron has moved the age of vulnerability curve about twenty years lower. But we don't know. The trend is there -- successive variants seem to be infecting more and more children -- which makes it plausible that endemic COVID would be much worse than childhood diseases for which we already have mandatory vaccination.
Reactive responses -- "wait for the horrid thing to get bored and go away" -- are always going to give the worst outcome because the reactive position about unknowns is "it'll be fine". When it is not fine, the full damage happens. We know, with grim certainty, that many things about COVID-19 infection are not fine. We don't know exactly how much they're not fine. So the question is how many people we're condemning, not if such people exist.
Proactive responses -- "this ends when we end it" -- presume harm and seek to limit that harm. Which in turn means limiting transmission with the goal of getting the number of infections to zero. We know this is possible. We need to decide to do it, even if it makes billionaires sad, but the ability to do it is not in question.
We have 50 different states doing 50 different policies and thousands of public and private universities making their own tweaks running from fully online to laissez faire. Over two years we should have enough data to do better predictions. If you walked around mine during finals you would think you were in 2019 again with nary a mask in sight. Yet, no campus related deaths I am aware of, but certainly illnesses (statewide, though, yes, rates much higher than CA). We need a massive dumping of American university health data for some smart person to sort through so that Chancellors and Presidents can make better informed decisions. That said, we’re I Chancellor, facing a triple flu, I’d open with masking.
Speaking of the Rasmussen graf: My problem with crypto isn't the bros. Fools gonna be fooled; jerks gonna jerk. Instead, I'm angry with the press, that keeps treating the topic as novel and legit despite 15 years of solid evidence to the contrary.
That Finnish teacher study -- there's an immense structural difference between trying to produce optimality and trying to produce sufficiency.
If you go "best on the test", you're trying to produce optimality. Never mind if you have, or could have, written a test able to identify optimal capability. Structurally, systemically, you're trying to produce an optimal outcome.
If you filter the applicant pool by checking for sufficiency -- does the applicant have scores above the minimum for each of the following areas of concern? -- and then, if necessary, filling spaces by lot from a potentially too-large pool of applicants, you get (as the study found!) better results.
That happens whenever we can't know the optimal outcome; providing a more diverse pool of good-enough gives better odds of effective responses to both unknown and novel requirements. Since teaching careers are meant to be long, some requirements are unknown (or the test-for-the-optimum approach would work better!) and the future always contains novelty, sufficiency is obviously a better approach to selecting teachers than optimality.
It's important to watch out for someone trying to do optimality via notional sufficiency and adjusting the definition of sufficiency to that end; it's important to be sure the things you're checking as part of sufficiency are important to the job you want done. But in general, for long careers, sufficiency approaches will work better.
It's a pity people hate them so much.
All of this analysis of Omicron is fundamentally misguided because it's reactive.
Active steps? Well, active steps stay "lock down, and stay that way until test-and-trace is possible, and then keep that up until extirpation". (Let me cite an expert: https://twitter.com/yaneerbaryam/status/1338120658534842368)
Can't do that, through not having the power? Well, is the Berkeley medical school doubling admissions as a matter of ongoing core policy? No? Why not? Medical system capacity is no longer great enough for the population; it was marginal before, and it's been substantially reduced. Can't start addressing that crisis of people dying because there's no capacity to provide them care any sooner than right now.
Is Berkeley as a university getting together to correct the gaping rent in nosology around post-viral conditions? It's not just COVID-19; ME/CFS and Lyme disease leap to mind. All those things where you get sick and never get better. Nobody has diagnostic criteria for "Long Covid", and until that exists, it doesn't exist. A condition which doesn't exist can't be studied, and if can't be studied, the vast gulf of ignorance on the subject cannot be filled. If it's NOT filled, millions of people stay condemned to the slow-death-by-torture that is medically unrecognised severe chronic disability.
In the meantime, the "Let's have endemic COVID-19" faction (which is the actual position of what presents as the "herd immunity! give everyone the disease and this is over!" faction) needs to address:
The more infections, the more variants. "Diseases evolve to be less severe" is one of those unshakeable faith statements, but that's certainly not what we're seeing and no, not in general. Measles is still very bad, millennia later. The plague stayed very bad for centuries and is still horrific when people catch it from a marmot, etc.
https://www.mdpi.com/1422-0067/22/11/6151 COVID-19 increases your physiological age. The severity of the disease is closely correlated with your physiological age. "Make it endemic, we'll be fine" is not obviously a factually well-supported position; the disease ages you into a condition of greater vulnerability.
https://assets.researchsquare.com/files/rs-1139035/v1_covered.pdf?c=1640020576 SARS-CoV-2 actively reproduces in non-lung tissue for months after acute infection is over without causing inflammation other than in the lungs. Does Omicron (less likely to inflame the lungs) cause less organ damage elsewhere? We aren't going to know that for awhile and a lower prompt death rate is going to make that harder to study. (The molecular dissection necessary to study this question is already challenging to perform.)
Omicron infects more children than any previous variant. It's not implausible that Omicron has moved the age of vulnerability curve about twenty years lower. But we don't know. The trend is there -- successive variants seem to be infecting more and more children -- which makes it plausible that endemic COVID would be much worse than childhood diseases for which we already have mandatory vaccination.
Reactive responses -- "wait for the horrid thing to get bored and go away" -- are always going to give the worst outcome because the reactive position about unknowns is "it'll be fine". When it is not fine, the full damage happens. We know, with grim certainty, that many things about COVID-19 infection are not fine. We don't know exactly how much they're not fine. So the question is how many people we're condemning, not if such people exist.
Proactive responses -- "this ends when we end it" -- presume harm and seek to limit that harm. Which in turn means limiting transmission with the goal of getting the number of infections to zero. We know this is possible. We need to decide to do it, even if it makes billionaires sad, but the ability to do it is not in question.
We have 50 different states doing 50 different policies and thousands of public and private universities making their own tweaks running from fully online to laissez faire. Over two years we should have enough data to do better predictions. If you walked around mine during finals you would think you were in 2019 again with nary a mask in sight. Yet, no campus related deaths I am aware of, but certainly illnesses (statewide, though, yes, rates much higher than CA). We need a massive dumping of American university health data for some smart person to sort through so that Chancellors and Presidents can make better informed decisions. That said, we’re I Chancellor, facing a triple flu, I’d open with masking.