LessWrong 2.0 Reader

I think how we relate to this mostly comes down to the properties of the variants, current and future, and whether we trust people to be able to resume tracking microcovids/wearing masks/being cautious again, if it turns out they need to.

I took the CDC strain prevalence data and organized them into a spreadsheet. Note that all of the prevalence-percentages are as of a sample collection period ending March 27, so to get the current prevalence, you have to extrapolate from growth rates. Strain P.1 (informally known as the "Brazil strain") stands out; this strain made headlines for spreading through a population that had previously had a 75% attack rate, and it has a 2.5x growth rate between the last pair of two-week intervals sampled. Naively extrapolating based on this growth rate, the prevalence in the US will have grown from 1.4% to ~10%, and it will be the dominant strain in less than a month. It is also reported to be more severe.

I have been checking ~daily for data on vaccine effectiveness on this strain. So far there is lab data on this, but no human trial data.

The way these things usually work is, mutation reduces vaccine effectiveness, but only partially. Being fully vaccinated, I think I'm pretty fine with acting normally given the existence of P.1 for now (though I still wear my Versaflo when I visit indoor retail).

What most concerns me is not so much the current variants, as the next ones. Roughly speaking, my model is: The rate of mutation is roughly proportional to the worldwide rate of infections, and the strength and type of selection depends on the vaccines that people had. The worldwide prevalence of COVID is currently very high, and there are a lot of vaccinated and unvaccinated people in close contact with each other. So we're currently selecting fairly hard for vaccine evasion, but have only started doing so recently. So if vaccine-resistant strains are coming, they will probably come soon. I think we will probably notice reasonably quickly; there's a lot of sequencing happening, especially in the US.

We also have the recent experience of B.1.351 (the South Africa variant) mostly evading the AstraZeneca vaccine, at least for mild-to-moderate cases. There's reason to think the mRNA vaccines produce a stronger immune response, which might make them harder to evolve around, and that boosters against future variants will be coming.

Some of the variants have evolved increased severity, but none are reported to have evolved decreased severity. I suspect that there might be a common mechanism, where if the spike protein evolves to be able to enter cells more effectively, this increases both transmissibility and severity together. I'd be interested in someone with more knowledge about virology commenting on this.

Overall, I think fully-vaccinated people in the US currently should not be cowering in their homes, but that it would be a potentially large mistake to disengage and stop paying attention to COVID. The current situation is analogous to one where a snowstorm has just ended, the roads are partially salted, and we're discussing whether people still need seatbelts. And... yes, obviously? A lot of people went overboard, but the low-hanging fruit of disease prevention is obviously still worth it, and was worth it before the pandemic started. People should still wear masks in public, ventilate their spaces, take vitamin D, and check the news from time to time.

I think what Zvi is saying is that we could have helped but won't be able to do much because we made poor choices. Those poor choices are our responsibility.

Sometimes I read these posts and feel like I am standing on an island of sanity among a sea of insane people. That 88% support of Johnson & Johnson vaccine pause just seems totally nuts.

If you're looking for something useful to do, call your senators and congresspeople and ask them to send our Astra Zeneca doses to hard hit parts of India.

But most people's miles are in Uber/Lyft

This is interesting to me, as every time I've looked at Uber/Lyft prices in my area it has seemed a bit high for it to be my go-to option. Can you link me to a good discussion regarding why this is the typical Rationalist choice? (I've read a lot of the sequences, etc. but really don't spend hardly any time on the blog itself)

I posted my answer a bit late but this was a ton of fun!

On India

it is entirely our responsibility for not accelerating vaccine production in time to help them 

India is the world's biggest vaccine producer, and the cornerstone of the Gavi plan to supply Covid vaccines to poor countries. And when this second wave became evident, I believe they quickly started redirecting their national Covid vaccine production for domestic use. I am not sure what the exact cause of the Indian second wave is, but I don't think you can blame it on America, unless you think it was America's responsibility to foresee and preempt all problems worldwide in beating the pandemic. 

This is a perfect example of the AWS Batch API 'leaking' into your code. The whole point of a compute resource pool is that you don't have to think about how many jobs you create.
 

This is true. We're using AWS Batch because it's the best tool we could find for other jobs that actually do need hundreds/thousands of spot instances, and this particular job goes in the middle of those. If most of our jobs looked like this one, using Batch wouldn't make sense.

You get language-level validation either way. The assert statements are superfluous in that sense. What they do add is in effect check_dataset_params(), whose logic probably doesn't belong in this file.

You're right. In the explicit example, it makes more sense to have that sort of logic at the call site. 

How did you arrive at 12 weeks?

I listen to podcasts while doing chores, and often feel like I'm learning something but end up unable to remember anything. So, experiment: I'm going to try writing brief summaries after the fact. I'm going to skip anything where that doesn't feel appropriate, e.g. fiction. By default, nothing here is fact checked, either against reality or against the episode itself.

Planet Money #796 (23 Sep 2017): The Basic Income Experiment

This is a 99% Invisible episode on UBI.

UBI is an idea supported by some on both left and right. Finland is currently trying an experiment. In fact, Finland is currently experimenting with experimentation itself: they set up a whole gov department whose purpose is to help run experiments, and enacted some law or something to avoid these experiments falling foul of the constitution. (Because you have to treat people equally, and having an intervention and a control group isn't doing that.)

Finland's problem: high unemployment, and disincentivizing work. You can collect unemployment for 2+ years after your last job, and you can't earn anything on the side. The person they "hired" to do recording in Finland for this episode worked for free, because otherwise he would have lost benefits.

So they're experimenting with UBI. About 2000 unemployed people given unconditional money each month instead of unemployment. It's a bit less money, but now they can do part-time work without an income cliff. Interview with one of those people: she's now looking for part-time work, but hasn't found it yet.

Problems with study: 2000 people is small, only looks at currently unemployed people (can't see if it makes employed people more likely to stop working).

Person running study thinks UBI will fail.

America almost had something like this under Nixon. But people started looking at the data before it was fully in. There were hints of bad effects, including increased divorce rates (scandalous at the time but Roman wants to make sure you know he thinks it's fine). Don't remember what else. When the data was fully in the effects were smaller than they first seemed/had been rumored, but damage was done.

I did confirm that my slot would be available for someone else, although I can't guarantee that the slot was filled.

I have relaxed my own precautions to some extent after the first shot.  I'm not too worried about being barred from anything based on anyone else's policies--the limiting factors are more likely to be my own caution, local prevalence, and whether someone else's onerous policies (general, not specific to my vaccination status) make an activity not worth doing anyway.

Do you have a reference for the comparison of first-shot Pfizer vs. J&J?