To My Students Þis Fall: SARS-CoV-2 Overview as of 2021-08-19 Th
What I think my students this fall need to know...
A week before first lecture is a good time to undertake an overview of the current state of the Delta variant plague wave, the fourth wave that is now beginning to hit the United States. The best source I have found so far is Max Roser & al.: Our World in Data: COVID-19 Data Explorer <https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer>
At the moment, the United States is reporting that every day brings 400 new confirmedcases per million people—that means that a month will see about 1/1000 people confirmed to have caught the SARS-Cov-2 plague:
But that is just confirmed cases. There are many others, some of them asymptomatic, who catch the virus. The United States right now is only testing 1/400 of the population each day:
If you are not tested, you cannot become a confirmed case. How many unconfirmed cases are there? And how serious are they? The Center for Disease Control has been disappointingly and irritatingly—and, I would say, incompetently—evasive at providing us with reasonable scenarios on how our testing frequency and the number of confirmed cases our testing infrastructure reports scales up to a sense of how the plague is moving through the population.
What we do know is that, right now, 1/7 of all COVID-19 tests are positive:
Suppose we were testing at the rate Israel was testing—testing seven times as large a fraction of the population—would we be reporting 7 times as many confirmed cases? No: we are testing people because we have reason to think that they might have the disease, or because there is some requirement that they get tested. But we would be reporting perhaps three times as many confirmed cases. We really do not know. And the CDC, again disappointingly and irritatingly—and again, I would say, incompetently—never set up the random sample of people in the country to be repeatedly tested to allow us to use standard statistical tools to find out.
We do know that right now 2/1,000,000 Americans are dying each day of this plague. If you are going to die, it takes about a month from your confirmed diagnosis to death. A month ago the United States had 1/8 as many confirmed cases as it does now. That means we can look forward to a likely daily death toll in a month of 16/1,000,000 Americans.
How high will the Delta wave of this plague go? We do not know.
The university places great trust in vaccination. Guy Nicolette and Anna Harte write <https://calmessages.berkeley.edu/archives/message/89204>
The extremely good news is that while the current vaccines are not 100% protective against infection, especially with the delta variant, they clearly remain very effective against severe disease. CDC data show that to date, the prevalence of a fully vaccinated person experiencing a breakthrough infection resulting in hospitalization or death is 0.0048%. We cannot completely contain this virus.... There will be infections on campus and we must accept that. Our main focus is to avoid significant spread and to avoid severe disease that puts... [people] in the hospital, or worse. Given our vaccine mandate and extremely high vaccination rate, we feel confident stating that your risk of contracting and transmitting is going to be higher when you are out and about in the community than when you are on campus.... With nearly 90% of the campus community reporting vaccination... we’ve been incredibly successful in this effort. We expect these numbers to go even higher as the mandate is enforced. Our rates significantly outpace the fully vaccinated populations in our surrounding communities...
For context, the 1/20,000 vaccinated people dying of the plague covers a period in which confirmed cases amounted to a total of 2% of the population. If the Delta wave leads to confirmed cases of 10% of the population—which it might, but which I think is likely to be an upper bound—then only 1/4000 vaccinated people will die. And for vaccinated students in their 20s, the fraction will be more like 1/40000. In other words, it is not unlikely that we will see 1 healthy student without comorbidities die of SARS-CoV-2 this fall as the Delta wave sweeps over the country. But it does now, right now, seem unlikely that we will see more.
Thus healthy students' concerns should be overwhelmingly focused on how to keep themselves from getting the plague and then infecting those more vulnerable, and more at risk, rather than on risk-to-self.
Yours,
Brad DeLong
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Your analysis is assuming death is the only thing to fear.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/eclinm/article/PIIS2589-5370(21)00324-2/fulltext -- which finds universal cognitive impairment from COVID -- is at least highly suggestive that while not dying is goal zero, not getting the disease needs to be ranked higher than the "vaccinated? everything is fine" policy we're seeing being made.
https://twitter.com/chrischirp/status/1418696473177362432 discusses this paper in terms of creating a tragedy of chronic illness; I'd prefer to discuss it as a moral failure of requiring certainty to spend money, when the certainty shall without question arrive well after the harm.
Vaccine escape is a real possibility; we have no way to judge how likely, but can be certain that the more reproductive events COVID viruses have, the more likely any particular mutation becomes. If this does happen, when it happens, the event of escape, will be a surprise; all we've got are lagging indicators.
That's the simple long-term harm; the vaccines stop working at all, rather than quickly. (The range of numbers available for full vaccine effectiveness has an upper bound of nine months. The lower bound is five.) The Uncommon Cold becoming inescapable and certain to damage your cognition every time you catch it will, eventually, become identified as just that. Contemplate how the social consequences of such knowledge becoming a general matter of emotional conviction might play out. Consider what it is worth to spend and to do to keep those events from coming to pass.
Is UC Berkeley doing mandatory Covid testing on all students on a regular basis as part of the containment protocol?