Crypto is the "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" of finance. Matt Levine's newsletter periodically describes amusing examples of crypto bros reinventing some financial wheel that's been around for centuries and making it square.
Despite the UK rapidly instituting a travel ban on SA, 2 cases of the Omicron variant were detected in England. A number on the SA-NL flight were also infected. History repeats. It would not surprise me if cases emerge in the US and we are off to the races again, especially as the Thanksgiving and Xmas partying season is underway, recreating last year's surge. It just remains to be seen how effective our current vaccines are, and if we need new versions ready in a few months.
As ex-PM Gordon Brown noted, this pandemic is proving to be the largest health care failure in our lifetimes, as vaccines have been hoarded by rich countries and inadequate supplies shipped and dispensed to other countries with low vaccination rates (although my US county is barely over 50% vaccinated due to half the population being "vaccine-hesitant" - ie mis-/disinformed and just plain selfish about their rights vs. community health.
We have incomplete immunization with a functional vaccine. This is -- there's a literature on just this situation in battery chickens -- nigh-certain to increase the virulence of the disease. (For obvious and inescapable selection reasons.)
Coronaviruses are known which are much more contagious and much more lethal than current COVID-19 strains; there's lots of evolutionary headroom. "Everyone gets their boosters" is not a plausible stable end-state goal _even if there were any evidence the civil power would be exercised to that end_. Mammonites have enough mind share to prevent vaccine mandates in an immediate emergency; without major political change, general vaccination will not take place.
Death is best avoided, but it's not enough to avoid death; not avoiding infection means accumulating damage, and while all our "how damaged?" statistics are that little bit squishy, it really isn't possible to rule out "everyone who gets it gets hurt". Therapeutics are not being evaluated on "avoids organ damage", they're being evaluated on "avoids death". We don't know if we can avoid damage by any means other than not getting infected.
(You think white natalists are freaking out now? Wait a few years when the data on covid infertility comes out, and slides into their narrative as a deliberate hostile act.)
So, no, not going to be a vaccination steady state. We can go for extirpation, accepting mammonite capitalism as a necessary casualty, or we can not go for extirpation and experience what looks likely to be enough collapse to take mammonite capitalism with it.
Crypto is the "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" of finance. Matt Levine's newsletter periodically describes amusing examples of crypto bros reinventing some financial wheel that's been around for centuries and making it square.
Regarding the Nu variant, please allow me to draw your attention to this Stephanie Nolan twitter thread: https://twitter.com/snolen/status/1464226622127677476?s=20
Despite the UK rapidly instituting a travel ban on SA, 2 cases of the Omicron variant were detected in England. A number on the SA-NL flight were also infected. History repeats. It would not surprise me if cases emerge in the US and we are off to the races again, especially as the Thanksgiving and Xmas partying season is underway, recreating last year's surge. It just remains to be seen how effective our current vaccines are, and if we need new versions ready in a few months.
As ex-PM Gordon Brown noted, this pandemic is proving to be the largest health care failure in our lifetimes, as vaccines have been hoarded by rich countries and inadequate supplies shipped and dispensed to other countries with low vaccination rates (although my US county is barely over 50% vaccinated due to half the population being "vaccine-hesitant" - ie mis-/disinformed and just plain selfish about their rights vs. community health.
People not dying is great, but!
We have incomplete immunization with a functional vaccine. This is -- there's a literature on just this situation in battery chickens -- nigh-certain to increase the virulence of the disease. (For obvious and inescapable selection reasons.)
Coronaviruses are known which are much more contagious and much more lethal than current COVID-19 strains; there's lots of evolutionary headroom. "Everyone gets their boosters" is not a plausible stable end-state goal _even if there were any evidence the civil power would be exercised to that end_. Mammonites have enough mind share to prevent vaccine mandates in an immediate emergency; without major political change, general vaccination will not take place.
Death is best avoided, but it's not enough to avoid death; not avoiding infection means accumulating damage, and while all our "how damaged?" statistics are that little bit squishy, it really isn't possible to rule out "everyone who gets it gets hurt". Therapeutics are not being evaluated on "avoids organ damage", they're being evaluated on "avoids death". We don't know if we can avoid damage by any means other than not getting infected.
(You think white natalists are freaking out now? Wait a few years when the data on covid infertility comes out, and slides into their narrative as a deliberate hostile act.)
So, no, not going to be a vaccination steady state. We can go for extirpation, accepting mammonite capitalism as a necessary casualty, or we can not go for extirpation and experience what looks likely to be enough collapse to take mammonite capitalism with it.