About That Pill - part the second

My Lordy! That was quick. Now, I consume the NYT in the dead trees version. Can't do a crossword other than pen/paper, so there's no reason to go just digital. Which means what I found this morning appeared earlier (29 November). Didn't see it. What matters, naturally, is that the piece includes lots of confirming quotes from famous experts.

At times, especially in the summer and fall of 2020, getting tested for the virus has required an hourslong wait in line, followed by a weeklong wait for results.

The real problem, other than cost: is it even possible to get tested with results within the 3 to 5 day window?

In clinical trials, which enrolled only unvaccinated people at high risk for serious disease, Merck's regimen reduced the risk of hospitalization and death by about 30 percent when given within the first five days of symptoms, while Pfizer's cut those risks by 89 percent when given within the first three days of symptoms.

Replicating these results in the real world will require people to act swiftly, perhaps at the first sign of the sniffle.
[my emphasis]

Of course, it helps if testing is easy and rapid:

"In the United Kingdom, you can go to a pharmacy and get a box of seven antigen tests for free," Dr. Bilinski said. "In the U.S., you have to be refreshing Walmart's website to hopefully get BinaxNOW tests during the 15 minutes that they're in stock."

Those Shithole Countries can't do anything right. Right? Here in the grand USofA, however:

"It is not unheard-of for people to have wait times of five days," Dr. Bilinski said. That delay alone could put patients at the edge of the prescription window, even if they got tested the moment they first felt symptoms.

Just as at the beginning of this epic, when test/contact/isolate was the regime of necessity, the USofA just doesn't do the test thing with gusto. I guess that frontier meme still persists in many American lower brain stems. "Can't and won't let the Damn Gummint tell me what to do!"

About That Pill

Not behind a paywall (they've said all Covid reporting wouldn't be, but some has been), STAT has reporting on the latest data on Merck's anti-viral, molnupiravir, which indicates lower effectiveness than initial reports.

Curiously, not this nor any of the other reports on mab's and anti-viral's I've seen (which doesn't mean all) discuss the effect on transmission by these 'alternatives' to vaccination. Moreover, the Merck pill must be started within 3 to 5 days from symptoms. We know that Covid-Δ (and Covid-Ο is worse based on initial data) is transmissible during that time, and for much longer for the asymps. We know, fur shur, that transmission of all Covid is driven (largely?) by the asymp population. We should be paying much attention, through aggressive testing; but that's another episode. What happens if Covid-Ο has at least Covid-Δ's asymp precentage and Covid-Β's lethality?? Can we say "Ta ta" to the Red States deniers? One can only hope. From one perspective, accepting that free-loading by the deniers is just OK, this is the worst-case scenario.

IOW, the Covid Morons are hanging their hats on clearly sub-optimal drugs. And, moreover, this is yet another variant to come from a wannaBePresident Huey Long 2024-ian Shithole Country, Beta being much earlier. It turned out that Covid-Δ out Darwin-ed Beta, and this fact was praised as a Good Thing, relatively speaking, because Beta is much worse.

The Beta variant was at the top of people's concerns at the beginning of the year because it was the best at escaping the immune system. But in the end it was the faster-spreading Delta that took over the world.

And, it turns out, based on current data, that Covid-Ο bears mutations with Beta. That is not Good Eats.

"The recently described Omicron variant includes mutations seen in the Delta variant that are believed to increase transmissibility and mutations seen in the Beta and Delta variants that are believed to promote immune escape. The combination of mutations represents a significant potential risk to accelerate the waning of natural and vaccine-induced immunity," Moderna said Friday in a news release.

I told y'all it was coming. Now, one possible future is that Covid-Ο does a Covid-Α, invading Canada and only (mostly) Michigan. Michigan isn't handling Covid-Δ all that well, but then most of the Cold States aren't either. Do you expect Covid-Δ to trundle South this winter??? Does a bear shit in the woods? The sunnier scenario is that the Delta mutations dominate, rather than the Beta, and Covid-Ο is kept in check by existing vaccines. That won't help the Red States, of course. But, at this point in the proceedings, Fuck Them. Die motherfuckers!!!

Cold Covid - part the fifth

Well, these missives mostly got it right. That does not warm the cockles of my heart. Back when Covid-Δ was beginning to wane, at least some places, it was postulated that further mutations would be nicer. Gulp.

One framework is that there's likely an upper limit to how bad the virus can get. It probably can't get worse and worse forever.

Well Covid-Ο blows that notion out of the water. At least, today.

It's also worth remembering that SARS-CoV and MERS both were so virulent that they both killed so quickly that they were easily contained. Transmissibility has been lower in these virulent viruses. If Covid-Ο is closer to either of those, it will likely be as self-limiting. What made Covid-Δ successful was that it allowed hosts to carry on their lives while mindlessly infecting their neighbors. Esp. in Red States that banned masks and distancing and such. So, the conclusion so far is that virulence and transmissibility can't both increase during mutation. Let's hope that continues to be true.

Tribal Council

It should be well known, by now, that the failure of the Left, as manifest by the Democratic Party, is the inability to respond to Right Wingnut tribalism with likewise. This is not a new problem, it goes back at least as far as FDR, and may be Teddy. The Left says, and does, seek to better the lives of those less fortunate. But, being catholic (original meaning) in these efforts, they still reward those who seek to oust them from administration. The rednecks like the free goodies, but they continue to elect, at all levels, Right Wingnuts who care only to scavange the poor to support the rich.

Well, Sleepy Joe's knuckleheads are doing it again.

[Department of Health and Human Services] is doling out $7.5 billion to more than 40,000 health care providers in every state and six U.S. territories through the American Rescue Plan, a sprawling relief bill that Congress passed in March. The infusion of funds will help offset increased expenses and revenue losses among rural physicians during the pandemic, the agency said.

Of course, those rural healthcare providers are mostly in states that either don't 1) directly support such services and/or 2) refused to accept expansion of Medicaid to support such services. Passive aggression, along with overt violence, is among the tools the Right Wingnuts employ. "We ain't gonna waste money on white trash and Negros. No how, no way. If the Feds wanna, OK by us, but we'll continue to scavange our poor folk, yes sirree, Bob! We know they're too stupid to vote us out; they believe us when we crow that WE got them the support."

A bit more tribalism would be a good thing. The Dems could start by always, always hammering home the fact of who actually is looking out for the betterment of Joe Sixpack. Telling the white trash that they're naturally superior to Negros too is a bit of problem. Work on it.

Cold Covid - part the fourth

Leonhardt's column today attempts to backpedal and shift blame for his egregious nonsense in early October. One of the hallmarks of the current situation is the, overall, lower slope of the case count graph. But let's see. These missives have postulated that the explanation is simple: the current infections are, almost completely, within the unvaccinated, which are both more sparse (from a national perspective) and more concentrated (in, mostly, the Red States; and, naturally, the Red enclaves of the Blue States). Thus we should find the lower sloping graphs in higher vaccinated states, and higher sloping graphs in lower vaccinated states. And we do.

The bad news about the virus's unpredictability is that surges can sneak up on us: The lack of a Covid increase across most of northern North America a month ago was not as reassuring as it may have seemed.

Of course, as I said on 8 October, there was, at that time, no such thing as a "lack of a Covid increase". It was plain in the NYT's own maps and graphs. You just had to look.

Well, lookie here. By one measure, West Virginia (not yet a Cold State, but still...) has the lowest full vaccination rate at 41%. In that same data set, Connecticut is at 71%.

Viewing the graphs at the NYT, one can see clearly the difference in infection uptake between the two states, slower/shallower with high vaccination, faster/steeper without. Now there are unexplained anomalies, particularly Vermont, which is at 72%, yet has gone hypersonic. But, there's always a but, Vermont was declining from the recent peak... until 1 November when cases took off. Cold Covid, indeed. Of particular note is the 'Hot Spots' map which doesn't show Burlingtono's county as one. The two really hot spots are Essex and Rutland counties; the former a pretty much empty county, while Rutland not so much. Rural redneck deniers are everywhere.

Another state, which has (finally) garnered some ink in the Fake News press, is Michigan. A cold state, especially the UP, it was increasing at the shallow rate one would expect (vaccination at 54%; not great but not horrid) of a pandemic of the unvaccinated, then skyrocketed from the end of October. In this case, not surprisingly, the hot spot counties match quite nicely to the vaccination (or, lack thereof) map. Who wooda thunk it?

So, are we headed the way of Austria? Or may be Brazil? Only the Shadow knows.

Thought For The Day - 20 November 2021

Are you as irritated by the new adverts for the iPhone 13 units as I am? In particular, the set that feature some 20-something delivery boy on a moped and $1,000 13? As if this makes any sense? Another sign of the destruction of Western Civilization.

Cold Covid - part the third

If you're in the mood for tightening up the old sphincter, take a gander at the Germany page over at the NYT.

Two things to note:
- the warm to cold axis runs west to east, so the Hot Spots map isn't contradictory
- the cases graph is to die for (many will)

Will deaths spike as badly as they did following the case/hospitalization spikes last January? Only the shadow knows. If it does here, proportionately, the Red Cold States are in for a heap of trouble, especially if they drive above last winter's spike as Germany already is.

As of today's graphs/maps, two things are unambiguous: A) the Cold States are, nearly all, either still climbing or plateauing near their latest peaks or recouping recent declines and B) the Cold State census is creeping South (would you believe it?).

It's coming.

The Tyranny of Average Cost - part the sixteenth

Well, well yet another episode in this continuing series, a paean to the controlling power of amortization. Naturally, Apple is the culprit; of its own designs. Hee, Hee.

Well known, the point of this series is that increasing the capital fraction of a production process reduces the flexibility of production. There's only so much non-amortization (of that capital cost) in the BoM to cut if output has to fall.

Apple also benefited from enormous economies of scale. Because the iPhone is one of the most profitable products ever sold, the company could afford to invest billions in a custom chip operation — and then to repurpose its iPhone chips for the iPad, the Apple TV and now the Mac.

Apple's investments have helped spark a new race in the chip business. Intel is investing $20 billion on new chip-making plants, and other chip manufacturers — Samsung and TSMC, which manufactures processors for Apple — are collectively investing hundreds of billions of dollars to increase capacity.

Even Apple will be caught between a rock and a hard place if iPhone, etc. demand falters even a tad. It would be a gas to be a fly on the wall during negotiations betwixt Apple and TSMC/whoever with regard to chip output; how many units is Apple obligated to suck up no matter what and who is forced to eat the unit amortization cost should demand for Apple products, and thus chips, declines? Welcome to the dilemma of capital. It's also worth noting that the processor architecture wasn't developed by Apple, but by ARM over the last couple of decades. Near as can be determined, Apple has, mostly, just made various hardware manifestations of the sub-units wider/longer/shorter as needed. And it's worth noting that Apple has leveraged the production facilities of others. The fiasco with sapphire is instructive. Would they be bold enough to try such a gambit with a corporation the size of TSMC? Intel, being dogged, didn't take advantage of TSMC/Samsung. Until very recently.

Black Gold

Joe Manchin, nee Mancini, is only it for his own money. I suppose that's true of many politicians; the difference is that Joe continues to insist he has Joe Sixpack's better welfare at heart. Chief among Joe's assertions is that King Coal must continue to rule. Joe, along with the other Coal Princes, likes to blame the Woke Crowd for seeking to destroy good, hardworking coal workers. As if the decline in coal miner employment were the result of the Woke Crowd since, say, Obama.

Well, they're all full of shit. Coal employment has been on the decline since the before The Great Depression. You might remember that the USofA supplied much, if not most, of the hardware used by the Allies in both theaters of WWII. In order to do that, steel was needed. You make steel from iron ore and coal. There was a minor spike, in the midst of the steady deline. A substantial part of the USofA's endowment of both resources went away during those years.

So, Joe, shut the fuck up. (Note, closely, that the spike in employment from 1973 came with the inclusion of office workers. Nice try.)

the wiki

Cold Covid - part the second

Well, things are heating up, so to speak. Last night gave us a report on the MSNBC night shows that's about time; what you've been finding here for some weeks. The Cold States are getting worse, from Maine to Washington. Surprise, surprise.

Colorado, not in the initial set of Cold States, has been getting more ink, and not in a good way. If you look at the NYT page, one thing stands out, in particular: the slope of the rise is utterly different (much shallower, and thus longer in duration) from earlier cycles, in all the Cold States. This lack of meteoric rise may account for the lack of concern across the Cold States so far, as the difference in slope is common. I first noticed this characteristic in the Michigan graph, which instigated my rant about Leonhardt.

Some other anomalies.
Oregon is on the downslope, but it's falling at a much slower rate than its rise.
Both Dakotas are in plateau mode, at or just below this current infection peak.
Vermont continues to climb, and even beyond the last winter peak, spiking like mad since 1 Nov.
Washington is also displaying a shallower decline than its rise, and the last few days may be a new rise.
Maine has already gotten to within a smidgen of the all-time peak, and is back to rising.

May haps the Red States are well on the way to de-population. Stupid is as stupid does.

You Make Me Itch

OK, so Rogers is claiming he's 'allergic' to something in the mRNA vaccines. What might that be? Turns out, the only known allergen is polyethylene glycol, aka PEG. Turns out the frequency of reactions is smaller than an RCH.

There have been approximately 5 cases of a severe allergic reaction to these vaccines per 1 million doses administered.
...
A review of the scientific literature reported 37 cases of an allergic reaction to PEG from 1977 to 2016. However, only 28 of these cases actually met the criteria for a severe allergic reaction (i.e. anaphylaxis).

And, no, there is no test for PEG allergy. In other words, Rogers is full of shit.

There is no commercially available blood test for PEG allergy at this time.

Artificial Intelligence? - part the first

It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future.
-- Yogi Berra

Well, Zillow has stepped in it, up to their neck. These endeavors have touched on the folly of AI here and there, but this story is way too juicy to let slide.

Zillow CEO and cofounder Rich Barton explained the shuttering of Zillow Offers by citing "unpredictability in forecasting home prices" that "far exceeds" what the company had expected.
...
Zillow declined a request for an interview with Krishna Rao, the company's vice president of analytics.

Well, no shit Superman!

The essence of the problem, at least from the point of view of longstanding stat practice (first told by Dr. McElhone, IIRC): "you don't make predictions beyond the range of the data". Some stats do that as a matter of course; generally when the client demands an answer for the demand for widgets five years hence, and the like. Any stat who intends to stay in the business will CYA bigly with "these estimates are likely if the historic trends continues for five years", and such.

If The Great Recession taught us all anything (and, apparently, no one in the suites listened), it is that history doesn't continue smoothly into the future. Data results from events, not the other way round. This sort of AI can be made to work, more or less, in the natural world where the rules of engagement (aka, the laws of physics) remain static in the local space in the near future. IOW, you can predict climate pretty accurately until a black swan, like Mt. Tambora going nucular in 1815 messes up the 'model'.

Summer temperatures in Europe were the coldest on record between the years of 1766-2000. This resulted in major food shortages across the Northern Hemisphere.

When it comes to events driven by human decision making (notoriously volatile), betting on AI to supplant the human brain reading the NYT is a losing bet.

Thought For The Day - 6 November 2021

More than once, in these endeavors, it has been asserted that vaccinated folks are more important to masking than the idiots in these days of vaccination. The reason has always been obvious: the vaccinated want to think they need take no precautions, so do not. Unfortunately, the vaccinated who do come in contact with infecteds end up asymp; just look at NYT Michigan Vaccination and Hot Spot maps. And we know without question that the asymps are the transmission vector that matters. Get a clue folks. You're smart enough to get the shots. Be smart enough to halt the spread of Covid-Δ.

New science showing fully vaccinated people infected by the delta variant after vaccination can transmit the virus.

If you review the NYT Covid data pages, it's kind of interesting that not only is there a continuing epidemic in the cold states, but that the higher concentration counties tend to be higher concentration vaccination counties. How can that be?

Some of the text is earlier, but the map is current.

The CDC words

Current evidence indicates that fully vaccinated people without immunocompromising conditions are able to engage in most activities with low risk of acquiring or transmitting SARS-CoV-2, with additional prevention measures (e.g. masking) where transmission is substantial or high.

Don't be a DeSantis.

Table of Covid

The BBC has a very useful table display of Covid data. The default, not surprising, is Europe where we see that the Shithole Countries (aka, Eastern Europe, aka Former USSR stans) have the worst per capita mortality numbers. Kind of like our Red Cold States. It's coming.

Place Your Bets - part the second

Just saw the headline, Kaine blaming House and Senate Dems for McAuliffe's loss. Well, two in particular, but not by name, that I've read.

So, here's the bet. In three parts.

Part 1 - Youngkin immediately drops the facade and goes all in on MAGA, MVGA (sounds like a vomit sound, doesn't it?)
Part 2 - He ends up pissing off those Northern VA (well, all (sub)urban) soccer moms that he conned into believing he was the 'kinder, gentler' wannaBePresident Huey Long 2024 who would make their lives better.
Part 3 - The VA legislature gets the message and gets rid of him before 2022 because they don't want a repeat of 2018.

I'll just say 1 & 2 are dead cert, and 3 is 50-50. Now, if the Barrett court really does a job on Roe, let the blood roll through the streets.

Cold Covid [update]

Well, it's been about three weeks since Leonhardt trigger me, so let's go see how the cold states are doing.

Here's the state of the cold states back then:

These states have either yet to fall over (case counts, not deaths), or have just started to (start, peak)
Alaska - 1 July, 27 September: 3 months so far, still above previous maximum
Hawaii - 1 July, 2 September: 2 months so far, still above previous maximum
Idaho - 4 July, 13 September: 2 1/2 months so far, oscillating just below peak
Michigan - 1 July, none: still climbing
Missouri - 4 June, 7 August: but is in gradual decline, not precipitous
Montana - 6 July, 23 September: oscillating just below peak
North Dakota - 28 June, none: still climbing
South Dakota - 1 July, 14 September: but is in gradual decline, not precipitous
Utah - 2 June, 13 September: was in gradual decline, now climbing
Wisconsin - 2 July, 21 September: was in gradual decline, now climbing
Wyoming - 5 July, 13 September: oscillating just below peak

This is their status as of the 2 November update
Alaska - not fully fallen over, oscillating near peak
Hawaii - fallen over, but still three times minimum
Idaho - falling, but only a third down from peak
Michigan - was falling from peak, but now headed back up
Missouri - very broad decline, still three times minimum
Montana - starting to fall, but a long way from minimum
North Dakota - was declining from peak, but headed back up past week
South Dakota - in long decline, but still 30 times minimum
Utah - broad plateau below peak with oscillations
Wisconsin - broad decline with oscillations, well above minimum
Wyoming - slowish decline from peak, well above minimum

In sum then, Covid-Δ ain't over. None of the decliners is within spitting distance of their June/July minimum. Whether the rest of the lower 48 are in for a nasty winter is up in the air. If past is prologue, of course, we'll see yet another pandemic within the unvaccinated. And we know what states those are.

[update]
Well, lookie here. The USofA isn't the only country with its more northern states (northern hemisphere division) that are experiencing outbreaks.
There's Germany (wintertime for Hitler?)

Lothar Wieler, president of the Robert Koch Institute (RKI) -- the German federal government agency for disease control and prevention -- told the same press conference, "If we don't act now, this fourth wave will still bring a lot of suffering. Many people will become seriously ill and die, and the health care system will be heavily burdened."

If you visit the wiki and the NYT Covid graphs, you'll see someting interesting. Temperature differences among the states of Germany aren't as clearly north/south as here. The difference is driven by the distance from the sea; remnants of the Gulf Stream keep western parts of Germany warmer. What you'll also see is that both the low vaccination and Covid-Δ increases fit like a glove on the climate map. Gee whiz?

Now, today, we find that China is experiencing a 'surge'. As the reporting says, the absolute numbers are minuscule compared to the USofA and Europe, but there are two buts. One is that the Chinese government has the Olympics to worry about. The other is the government's stated intention to be 'zero-Covid'.

The ongoing outbreak began on October 16, when infections were detected among a tour group of fully vaccinated senior citizens from Shanghai traveling in northern China. Cases quickly ballooned and spread across northern provinces; by the following week, officials from the National Health Commission warned of "multiple scattered local outbreaks" in the north and northwest that were "expanding rapidly."

The Right Wingnuts are going to kill quite some of their citizens this winter, if the temperature correlation remains in place. And why wouldn't it? It always has so far. Look at the Brazil NYT graphs: upside down to us, but then summer there is winter here.