The Mitch and Joe Show

If you never again go where I tell you, just go here. It's the latest (dead trees over coffee this morning) set of maps from the NYT. (They take up a full page on paper!) And blew me away. In case you don't get the title of this missive, well just compare Kentucky and West Virginia to any Northeast state.

It's worth noting that these death numbers are nearly wholly Covid-δ; the second Delta wave.

But, there's some conundrums in the maps. A declining death rate up the Red State spine (west TX to Canada) seems suspicious; not in concert with everything else we know about Covid in those counties. Now, these are rate values and the counties on the spine are, mostly, shitkicker counties, mostly empty. And, on yet another hand, is this report, also in today's paper, that meat plant folks are getting more nervous; not much support from managements, again.

For negligence leading to the deaths at the Greeley plant [in 2020], the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration later fined JBS $15,615.

Thought For The Day - 29 December 2021

From the mouth of a moron:

Listen, we all hoped and prayed the vaccines would be 100 percent effective, 100 percent safe, but they're not. We now know that fully vaccinated individuals can catch Covid, they can transmit Covid. So what's the point?
-- Ron Johnson, (R) Wisconsin/ 27 December 2021

Well, lots of points, but the one that matters more than any other: Covid-ο will generate some other, possibly more virulent (remember, Constant Power^© isn't a guarantee of diminishing virulence, only balance of that and transmissiblity) variant if it has a large enough pool of morons to infect. That's just the math, which Ronny doesn't grok. Johnson is proposing to keep the pool of morons growing. If only Covid stayed in the Red States.

Cold Covid - part the fourteenth

Busy day on the Cold Covid beat. We get reporting that what we had expected is, sort of, confirmed: Covid-ο is not only displacing Covid-δ, but also functions to increase immunity. Much like Covid-δ did to Covid-β and Covid-α. I'm not willing to go all in on the silliness that 'all virus mutate to less virulent'; that Covid-β and Covid-γ and Covid-μ came to be prove that Constant Power^© is a different, very, proposition.

People infected with the heavily mutated omicron variant of Covid-19 may have increased immune protection against delta, a new study says.

As a consequence, omicron could displace delta, according to the small study published by South African scientists this week.

It is from South Africa, which some folks have disparaged (shithole country and all), but they've been finding important Covid data from the beginning. Don't blame the messenger.

Epidemiologists have warned that even if omicron proves less severe than delta, it could still overwhelm hospitals simply by spreading much faster than delta.

Don't forget that part, you antivaxx idiots.

Cold Covid - part the thirteenth

Just another note, likely with some frequency, on the penetration of Covid-ο. Reader may recall earlier reporting that the CDC 'nowcast' number was 73% of cases are Covid-ο, and that some took issue with the reporting of that number. Turns out it's stat estimate off the end of the curve, so to speak. Turned out the CI/PI was 34.0-94.9%. Kind of a sloppy estimate.

Today's data is a bit of a comedown:
point estimate - 58.6%
CI/PI - 41.5-74.0%

Not so overwhelming at the point estimate, and a tad tighter.

Cold Covid - part the twelfth

Puzzlement galore. One might expect in this time of continuing Covid-δ and emerging Covid-ο that similar cold states would have about the same experience. But then...
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson

Covid-19 will have none of that. Consider Maine and New York in today's data (likely missing some due to the holiday, but I can't wait). In particular, Maine is experiencing hospitalizations and deaths at about the same slope of increase as cases. New York, on the other hand with case count nearly vertical, is so far experiencing some increase in hospitalizations, but little in deaths. If the continuing data holds, that Covid-ο is less virulent than Covid-δ, we should see a lowering correlation from cases to deaths as Covid-ο takes the lead in the same way that Covid-δ did to both Covid-β and Covid-ε. One hopes so, anyway.

Thought For The Day - 27 December 2021

Hell of a way to wind up a year. There are now 44 college football bowl games!! And, not too surprisingly, ESPN and the other networks/channels showing them, are loaded with sports betting app adverts. Is there a clearer omen of the collapse of Western Civilization? Our economy is all about sports and betting on same. And the more I see, the more it is also clear that the powers-that-be within each sport, from the top-level Czar to the lowly players, more frequently refer to what they do as "entertainment". Given the corrupt officiating that has infiltrated sport, soon they'll all be just like WWE. Just ask Lewis Hamilton; but then, sports betting Over There has been around for ages. May haps wannaBePresident Huey Long 2024 will be the next QB for The Washington Football Team; they'll revert to 'Redskins' to encourage him to take the job. I mean, he tossed a mean paper towel roll in Puerto Rico.

Naturally, more bowl games are being cancelled every day, due to Covid-ο (and, one suspects, Covid-δ, too). I mean why go to the trouble, it's just like a mild cold, after all.

Cold Covid - part the eleventh

Helen Branswell of STAT interviews a real disease expert. A computational one, at that. And, naturally, his views coincide nicely with Constant Power^©; not that he outright uses such a term.

But I still could easily imagine 100,000 people [in the United States] dying every year from Covid in the endemic state just because you have a very big number of infections, even if the infection fatality rate is quite low.

One source, Novavax, has been touting its various technologies as being capable of the fastest turn-around among all drug companies. They may just get the chance to prove it. If their vaccine works, of course.

In order to have doses available in September you'll need to have made your strain selection decision for an mRNA vaccine, say, in June.

But, it may be that turn-around for mRNA vaccines is just as rapid. We'll see.

And, of course, a dig at CDC. Deserved in this case, although the 'science' reporters out there who read through the CDC PRs and have made the Big Mistake deserve some blame too.

What happens is there's an algorithm ticking along behind the scenes at the CDC website. It's a fine algorithm. Because the genomic data takes two weeks to come in, it tries to do a "nowcast" to predict what the variant distribution is today. And then that algorithm does its update and comes up at 73% Omicron with some wide confidence intervals [CIs], and now the media cycle is reporting that the CDC data finds that 73% of current cases are Omicron.

It's a model. It's not data. And they're wide CIs. We don't know what proportion of cases are Omicron in the U.S. right now, because genomic surveillance lags.

So, what are the numbers? 34.0-94.9%
Wide enough to drive a cruise ship through. He has reason to bitch.

The Tyranny of Average Cost - part the seventeenth

You many have seen that Samsung is going all in in Texas, to the tune of $17 billion. Yet another example of betting on full production.

Samsung's investment is expected to create more than 2,000 high-tech jobs

Texas's average manufacturing wage is $14.48, add in $10 for bennies and round up to $25.

So, what's the vig on the capital? We'll go with 10 year straight-line depreciation. Keeping in mind that crafty capitalists often front load with accelerated depreciation, using all manner of IRS (one hopes) approved methods. We need only one additional number: residual value. Let's guess just a billion; the machinery will be long past obsolete (whether the nodes installed will ever become 'legacy' for micro-controllers and the like as has happened in the past, is an open question; much of those larger nodes have not been replaced by more recent smaller nodes), and the building may, or may not, have much value as a real estate asset.

Therefore: 16 billion / 10 = $1.6 billion/year capital cost. Labor cost/year (8*50*25*2,000): $20 million.

What then can we expect Samsung to do if demand falls? Not much from a cost avoidance perspective; labor is a drop in the bucket. Materials, likely so too.

SOL.

Cold Covid - part the tenth

In case anyone is wondering why the medical community is calling Covid-ο "a tsunami coming" for the unvaccinated, a bit of arithmetic will do:
1% of 1,000 = 10 (this is Covid-ο)
2% of 400 = 8 (previous Covid-19)

Scale that example up to the millions, and consider what happens to the healthcare system. A report within the last few days now pegs Covid-ο's replication at 70 times Covid-δ!! That's some mojo. (I heard one teeVee report say 70 times transmission, which really got my attention. Details, details.)

In lung tissue taken from a human patient, the researchers found that the Omicron variant replicated roughly 70 times more in the bronchial tissue that makes up tubes leading into the lungs than did the Delta variant after 24 hours. However, Omicron variant replicated more than 10 times slower in lung tissue than the original coronavirus variant. It's difficult to extrapolate clinical outcomes from this type of lab-based research, but the researchers suggest in the news release that the fast bronchial replication could explain why the Omicron variant seems to be so highly infectious — spreading more than twice as quickly as Delta
[my emphasis; and Covid-δ is twice ancestral Covid-19]

So, rate of infection/hospital/death is only half the equation, so to speak. The unvaccinated will be decimated by Covid-ο. Good on them.

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

You do remember the surge/wave/tsunami of Covid-ε?? You don't?? Neither do I. But that doesn't mean it wasn't predicted.

After an initial increase, its frequency rapidly dropped from February 2021 as it was being outcompeted by the more transmissible Alpha variant. In April, Epsilon remained relatively frequent in parts of northern California, but it had virtually disappeared from the south of the state and had never been able to establish a foothold elsewhere; only 3.2% of all cases in the United States were Epsilon, whereas by then more than two-thirds were Alpha.

(And, naturally, Covid-α went the way of all flesh (Michigan notably excepted) once Covid-δ got into the act.)

But, of course, some cried Wolf! about Covid-ε earlier

Dr. Chiu also noted that the variant was involved in a number of outbreaks where large numbers of people got infected. "There are worrisome signs that this variant may be highly transmissible," he said.

Still, I'm among those who find that Covid-ο will put a beatdown on the anti-vaxxers. Good for them. Oh, and yet another one has been buried by it. Good for him.

Cold Covid - part the ninth

Regular visitor may well recall the mention here, a number of times, that case count, while important, what matters in terms of 'bending the curve' (the goal that brought masks, distancing, and hand sanitizing) is tracking hospitalizations. The goal is to keep hospitals viable. Just today (dead trees version) we get an op-ed piece making just that point. Referring to the NYT state pages, hospitalizations have tracked cases nearly exactly in the cold states this fall. But this is Covid-δ. The notion is that Covid-ο, being milder (so far, and we hope) and more home testing, may well be undercounted at the case level; mild/asymps either never test or do so at home. Makes sense. IOW, don't get cocky if the USofA doesn't record the two to three day doubling that's been going on in the UK. It's early days, as the saying goes, on this side of The Pond. And on The Other Side of The Pond, they take testing seriously.

One hopes that Covid-ο does to Covid-δ what that did to Covid-β. If Constant Power^© holds true, we're on the way to Covid-XX being not much different from seasonal flu. But, keep in mind that Covid-XX is a coronavirus, just like about half of the source of the common cold, mutating like a pole dancer in a $2 strip club. While Covid-β fell to Covid-δ, there's not a shred of guarantee that the next virulent strain will be closely (enough) followed by a hyper-transmissible and milder strain. What we can be reasonably sure of: should a β-like (or worse) variant emerge, it's nearly guaranteed to be localized both in time and space; the lesson of SARS and MERS. And that space is nearly guaranteed to be Stupid States that don't vaccinate. Win-win.

Cold Covid - part the eighth

A paper in "Nature", dated yesterday offers this support for Constant Power^©

Trevor Bedford, an evolutionary biologist at the Fred Hutchinson, says the virus must balance its ability to replicate to high levels in people's airways with the need to keep them healthy enough to infect new hosts. "The virus doesn't want to put someone in bed and make them sick enough that they're not encountering a number of other people"

Or die fast. Of course. SARS and MERS made that mistake. As if they could have figured it out.

On the other hand, is this:

"There's this assumption that something more transmissible becomes less virulent. I don't think that's the position we should take," says Balloux. Variants including Alpha, Beta and Delta have been linked to heightened rates of hospitalization and death — potentially because they grow to such high levels in people's airways. The assertion that viruses evolve to become milder "is a bit of a myth", says Rambaut. "The reality is far more complex."
[my emphasis]

Yet, it's clear from the graphs in the report that Delta, through its transmissibility, dominated both Covid-α and Covid-β and has been less virulent, at least in the USofA to date.

If you read up the Michigan page (which had the greatest Alpha peak) of the NYT Covid data, it's unequivocal that Covid-α deaths (trailing the case peak by weeks as always) trailed ancestral Covid-19 by about half (127 vs. 70 7-day average peak). Hospitalizations, certainly, followed cases above ancestral Covid-19 (proportionately) by a tad; that's to be expected. Yet, the claimed greater transmissibility would lead one to believe that both cases and hospitalizations would be even greater. There's nothing in the data to support the notion that Covid-α was/is more virulent. Recall that Covid-α happened before widespread vaccination.

At the National level, an Alpha peak barely registers in the case and hospitalization graphs, and doesn't register at all in the deaths graph. Delta trails ancestral in all the graphs. So far.

At least in the USofA, Beta barely registered. Referencing the "Nature" graphs, if you look close and squint, you can see a teeny sliver of Beta at about the time of the Alpha peak.

An earlier "Nature" report had this

As the more-transmissible Delta variant spreads, Beta is now fading in many places where it was once dominant, including South Africa and Qatar.

Which is just what one might expect if Darwin and Constant Power^© hold. I will concede that both may fail at the margins; that is, a minuscule increase in virulence may appear in a variant with little-to-no difference in transmissibility compared to ancestors. A significant increase in virulence appears impossible to correlate to a significant increase in transmissibility. You can't infect (well, too much) if you can't move and then you just die. SARS and MERS demonstrated that principle.

As to whether Covid-δ is more virulent? At the national level, the three graphs show that ancestral and Covid-δ have proportionately (compared to case level) the same level of hospitalization and death. What Covid-δ is doing differently, so far (a bit), is demonstrating a double peak. Thank you Red States and Counties. Referencing the Michigan page, the Hot Spot map correlates vewy, vewy closely to the Vaccination map; just inversely. To see at the most granular level currently to hand: pull up the Montana page and note the southeast corner of the state. The third column of counties from the eastern border has Rosebud (I can't make this up!), Big Horn, and Treasure counties. Compare the Hot Spot and Vaccination maps; lo and behold Treasure is a pit of Covid and failing vaccination surrounded by not so much. QED. Of course, Tester voted (or will, depending) against the employer vaccine mandate. I guess even he doesn't mind a few more body bags.

I'll go out on a limb (yet again) and offer that Covid-ο is the best defense against Covid-δ just as it was against Covid-β. Which is not to say that Covid will always mutate to more transmission and less virulence (some whackadoodles have gone that route), but that there is A) a limit to the virulence that a virus can impose before it implodes, B) a significantly more virulent virus must necessarily be more localized as it consumes hosts faster than they can spread the virus, and C) a competition between transmissibility and virulence will go the former, at least on the data.

Cold Covid - part the seventh

Well, that didn't take long. Two reports seen today which lend support to Constant Power^©.

First, is not-behind-paywall piece from STATnews.

The South African Medical Research Council posted a report Saturday of the early experiences at several hospitals in Gauteng Province, where Omicron was first spotted in the country. Strikingly, most hospitalized patients who tested positive for Covid did not need supplemental oxygen. Few developed Covid pneumonia, few required high-level care, and fewer still were admitted to intensive care.

Which, no surprise, comes with

It appears that the Omicron variant may be more transmissible than past variants of the virus, potentially even the highly transmissible Delta variant. But it was only identified within the past couple of weeks and still makes up only a tiny fraction of cases worldwide, so drawing conclusions at this point is a risky business.

Sounds like Constant Power^© to me. But then, I'm biased.

Next is a CNN report along similar lines.

"The large majority of infectious disease specialists think, and have thought for many months, that SARS-CoV-2 is here to stay," said Paul Hunter, professor in medicine at the University of East Anglia in the UK.

"Our grandchildren's grandchildren will still be catching (the virus)," he said. But "Covid, the disease, will become part of our history as the infection morphs into just another cause of the common cold." [my emphasis]

Yet again, Constant Power^©. But then, I'm biased.

Cold Covid - part the sixth

Well, held off on the discussion over/after the turkey day usual bad/non-reporting weekend. The data has started to come in again, and the situation, no real surprise, is that the Cold States, Michigan in particular, return/continue to rise. And 'Cold State' condition moves farther South. (Ohio, not previously mentioned, has reached its previous Covid-Δ high. Welcome to the Club.) Is anyone really surprised? Reporting today is that South African Covid-Ο cases quadrupled in just four days. The Cold States are more amenable to transmission, of course. On the other hand, the Fauci's of this world continue to press that Covid-Δ is the immediate problem. But that's pretty much a distinction without a difference. What mitigates for one, does so for the other. Why there wasn't much, if any, flu last winter.

And, not for nothing, the expanding data indicate that Covid-Ο follows the paradigm of Constant Power^© forcing Virulence and Transmissibility into being inversely correlated. When one increases, the other must decrease. To some extent, Covid-19 is, on its own, diminishing its impact to a bad cold or easy flu; for those vaccinated. Just don't let DeSantis and Abbott take credit for making it so (apologies to Capt. Picard).

Power Factor

At some point in your education, it's likely you were exposed to calculus, either Lite or High Test. At the very least, you were introduced to the derivative and the integral (usually, the indefinite version). The real world interpretation and analytic derivation of the derivative (for simple algebraic formulas, at least; no functions embedded) is grasped without much angst. The first derivative of a curve is just the tangent at any point, is just the rate of change of the curve at that point, and is commonly referenced to acceleration. The analytic derivation of such for simple algebraic equations is pretty straightforward; just 'reduce' the power of each constituent serially, and tada, you're done.

The integral tends to be harder to grasp intuitively. The common reference is to 'the area under the curve', but the calculation gets a bit hoary. Not as straightforward as the derivative. That's when you see dy/dx and such with that loopy thingee ∫. But 'area under the curve' can be interpreted as just some multiplication of two values; that is, after all, what a simple area is.

It's also what power is. In electrical terms: Power = Voltage X Current. Some, but not many, scientists and pundits have applied that reasoning to Covid, and I find that a shame, because I find it to be helpful in understanding what's been going on for nigh on to two years. Something that's clear from the history of SARS-Cov-X is that the virus (and I'd wager, all viruses) actually are Darwinian, even though some have offered that a virus isn't even 'alive' in the conventional sense. But Darwinism doesn't care whether the actors on the stage act with forethought or not. Darwinism only says that those who adapt best to the environment prosper. And the adaptation(s) are not determined by forethought, necessarily.

Many of the science and pundit communities have reminded us that while viruses mutate more or less constantly, those changes are random in nature. They ain't no brain in there to make decisions. On the whole, mutations have no impact. Some, occasionally, do change the impact of a virus.

My cogitation on the question of mutations is thus. The Power of a virus is fixed at inception and that the expression of that Power is simply Virulence times Transmission; in other words, if a mutation increases one of those values, the other must of necessity diminish to meet the Power value of the virus. Power in this sense is just some abstract notion not a specific value of specific units, at least so far as I know now. Perhaps some virologist somewhere has already codified this, but I'm not aware of such. And there's ample evidence of this (quasi?) relationship from the history of SARS-CoV-X viruses. Both SARS-CoV-1 and MERS were quickly lethal and barely transmissible. Covid-Β was more lethal than Covid-19 or variants, and it was submerged by Covid-Δ by the latter's superior transmissiblity. Power was maintained. I don't expect a SARS-ish version of Covid-19 to emerge and flourish. Covid-Β didn't, and that makes Darwinian sense: a virus that eliminates hosts too fast enduces herd immunity (by killing efficiently) in the local area.

Oddly enough, in some sense, is that labs like Wuhan (and our Black Ops counterparts) could be on a simple mission: devise viruses with high virulence and high transmissibility, IOW higher Power than any we've encountered from Nature. Whether Darwin permits that to happen is an interesting question. I suspect it's a fool's errand, both in the MAD Cold War point of view and straightforward math of it all.

Of course, if it should happen that a variant emerges that increases the virulence of Covid and maintains or increases transmissibility, thereby increasing Power, then this has all been a pipe dream. But I don't think so. We also already know that coronaviruses exist for the common cold; not virulent (unless you were a Pre-Columbian resident of the Western Hemisphere, of course) and highly transmissible.

The implication from a policy standpoint is to do what was done from the start: take the necessary steps to prevent the healthcare infrastructure, which is by definition local, from being overwhelmed. I expect that Covid-Ο will be found to be less virulent, given that the information is that it is more transmissible. Power must be maintained. Covid may well, over some years, devolve into another type of common cold coronavirus. I sure can't wait for that. While it made no sense two years ago, the Right Wingnut governors laissez-faire may not be as bonkers now. It all depends on Covid-Δ cresting over (don't know yet, as the turkey day non-reporting is starting to straggle in and the Cold States just might be continuing up), and whether Covid-Ο replaces it as Covid-Δ did to Covid-Β. Whichever way the situation works out, Covid-19 remains a pandemic among the unvaccinated. The question remains whether the Right Wingnuts will be the only ones paying a price for stupidity and arrogance. Yet another Right Wingnut Christian vaccine denier died.