Tag Archives: pandemic

East Asian people may have genetic defenses against Covid-19

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It’s somewhat taboo to suggest that ethnic groups might be genetically superior or inferior to others, but when it comes to susceptibility or resistance to specific diseases, we should be willing to acknowledge this possibility. Most countries in Asia seemed to manage the Covid emergency much better than most western countries. I thought from the beginning that much better health and quarantine systems at airports must be a big factor. Somewhat privacy-invasive contact tracing measures and a willingness to restrict movement seem to be other significant differences between west and east, and you can see these even in Australia and New Zealand which are still largely ethnically European (although I say lots of Asian faces on trips on Sydney). But even given that, it always seemed like there might be some genetic or lifestyle factors to explain the order-of-magnitude differences.

Studies have shown that more people in Asia have a defense enzyme called APOBEC3A that attacks RNA viruses, including the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19, when compared to people in Europe and Africa…

Some people may wonder if the self-extinction of the delta variant in Japan was caused by something special in the genetic make-up of Japanese people, but Inoue disagrees.

“I don’t think so,” he said. “People in East Asia, such as Koreans, are ethnically the same as Japanese. But I don’t know why this observation was made in Japan.”

Japan Times

The “self-extinction”, by the way, is the idea that once isolated from external influxes and exposed to a largely resistant population, the virus may have acquired mutations that have doomed it.

I understand why it is politically and culturally hard to do contact tracing and quarantine in the U.S., and nearly impossible to physically restrict movement. I still don’t understand why we can’t implement effective screening and quarantine procedures at our international airports when we have had a year and a half of emergency conditions now to get that done.

the anti-vax movement…of 1796

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This is a great article from Open Culture – even if I hadn’t read it (I did), the pictures alone made me laugh out loud. However, beyond the laughs, the interesting and educational part was the description of how each and every new vaccine that comes out causes some fear and resistance, and this has been going on since vaccines were invented. Smallpox was a horrible disease, and the first vaccine was derived from a related virus that afflicts cows. People at the time were concerned that the vaccine would make them grow horns and start mooing. The early vaccine technology was in fact riskier than what we have now, although much less risky than the diseases they were vaccinating against, which is the whole point. The only silver lining is that once a vaccine has been out for a few decades to a couple centuries at most, we all seem to just accept it as the new normal and move on to complaining about the next one that comes out. Almost everyone screaming about the (incredibly effective, low-risk in absolute terms, and absolutely negligible risk relative to the disease it is preventing) Covid-19 vaccine is going to have been inoculated for polio, measles, tetanus, and many other diseases as a child. We don’t appreciate the suffering these vaccines have prevented (at least in developed countries) because we have not suffered ourselves or lost people we care about to these diseases in living memory.

those wild, wacky Covid-19 data points

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I have noticed for awhile that the CDC’s Covid-19 data doesn’t agree with other sources, which don’t agree with each other. Looking at my home city (and County) of Philadelphia, the CDC’s numbers have been consistently higher for many months. This matters because government agencies, employers (including mine), and individuals are basing decisions on these numbers, often the CDC numbers.

Let’s look at today’s numbers for Philadelphia. I’ll look just at “confirmed cases” because that seems to be the most readily available and frequently updated by all sources, although really I think we should be focused more on deaths at this point, because deaths (although morbid) gives you some information on cases and vaccination/immunity combined. In other words, if cases are high but deaths are low, you would have an annoyance but not a major problem. Nonetheless, let’s look at those cases for Philadelphia today! I’m writing this on Sunday, November 21, 2021. I’m using the links from my coronavirus tracker post.

  • CDC: 111.55 / 100,000 population / 7 days (data from November 13-19)
  • Pennsylvania state health department: 86.4 / 100,000 population / 7 days (data from November 12-18)
  • Covid Act Now: 116.2 / 100,000 population / 7 days (data from November 20 which they describe as a 7 day average provided by the New York Times)

There are a number of things that could explain differences in the numbers. First, the time periods the data represent varying slightly by source. Second, whether the data represent the date the test was done, the test was reported, or the estimated date of infection. Generally I think what is reported is the date the test was done. This is hard data of a sort, but it introduces a time lag as numerous and scattered labs report their data. The data you are looking at might not yet represent all the data available on a given day, and it might be corrected retroactively, meaning if you check what today’s number was a week from now, you might see a different number from today. Finally, when reporting data for a location like a county, it may be important whether they are reporting all tests done in that county or matching tests to the home addresses (or employer addresses?) of the individuals tested. Philadelphia, for example, has a huge health care industry with a lot of commuters not just from surrounding counties in Pennsylvania but parts of New Jersey and Delaware. (States were never the right entities to track this pandemic, it should obviously be done by entities covering metro areas.)

If all the sources were using similar data but using slightly different time periods or calculation methods, I would expect some differences but I would expect the differences to be random. The state health department numbers are consistently lower, however. I am hoping that might be because they are doing a better job of matching tests to home addresses.

James Galbraith on inflation

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Here is what James Galbraith (an economist at the University of Texas, whose name is always given with the middle initial of K, but I find that a bit pompous) says is causing inflation:

  • high oil prices (“oil” being shorthand for gasoline, fuel oil, and natural gas) driven by pandemic recovery and cut-backs in shale oil/gas production. A short-term solution is to sell from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to stabilize prices. He says shale production will pick up driven by market forces now that prices are high.
  • commodity speculation. Solution is regulation.
  • military spending. This is a good point – he says we are spending $700 billion per year on “weapons and defense”, and I suspect this number would be over a trillion per year if you consider all defense, intelligence, security and nuclear weapons spending as a whole, which is scatter across the government beyond the Department of Defense. Something that irritates me – why do we talk about the infrastructure investment and social spending bills Congress is considering as totals over a decade or more, which leads to a sticker shock effect, but defense spending on an annual basis, if we talk about it all? I AM GOING TO SPEND OVER ONE HUNDRED THOUSAND DOLLARS ON MY HOUSE OVER THE NEXT DECADE!!! But my monthly payment is something I can (just barely, not particularly comfortably) afford on my income, and that is how I think and plan my life and family finances. Democrats seem to think the big numbers have a kind of positive shock value showing that they are doing big, bold things. But Republicans just incoherently scream SPENDING!!! and INFLATION!!! and that communication strategy seems to be winning. (My 30-year fixed rate monthly mortgage payment is going to seem less spectacular, by the way, in a world where a bag of groceries costs $100 or more, which seems to be where we are headed. My wife and I are relying on a lot of prepared food and takeout these days, because I am working full time to maintain our private health insurance and other benefits, and we are raising small children in the richest country in the world without a childcare program. Also, our dishwasher is broken and due to the supposed labor shortage, the repair has been postponed several times even though the part is available. We are grateful that we are healthy and well-nourished and have a roof over our heads and realize many people are in much worse situations…)
  • supply chain bottlenecks, including clogged ports. These will work themselves out, although it seems to be a painfully slow process.

He says raising interest rates alone would not be a good solution to any of these problems. He says it is important for wage increases to go to low-paid workers. That certainly seems fair and just, although I am not sure how that is a solution to the problems above.

Did productivity triple during the pandemic?

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I’m hearing claims that “productivity tripled during the pandemic”, and maybe this is the computer and internet and mobile chickens finally coming home to roost and deliver on the promises made way back in the 1990s. Maybe there is some truth to this, but it seems much more likely that the denominator contracted suddenly (hours worked) than that the numerator suddenly expanded.

Here’s one graph I have seen referenced.

What could be going on here? Well I don’t know, you should consult the experts. But of course I can speculate:

  • Lower-productivity (economic output measured in dollars per hour worked, not in the worker’s sense of satisfaction, sanity, or self-worth) jobs suddenly disappeared, and higher-productivity ones (reverse caveats above) were left, so average productivity went up.
  • I’ve heard it suggested tat workers who still had jobs suddenly had no commuting time, so they worked some extra hours, and got more done but didn’t necessarily report the extra hours worked to their employers. I might buy this as a marginal, short-lived effect. Maybe a few young go-getters did this, but certainly not us middle-aged parents who suddenly had small children bouncing off the walls 24-7.
  • I will buy the idea that workers were more productivity with the new software (Microsoft Teams, Zoom, etc.) than they would have been in the same situation with software and communication options available a few years ago. I’m not sure I buy into the idea that they were more productive at home with these tools than they would have been in the office.
  • Maybe there was a sort of mania of productivity for the work-from-home set at the start of the pandemic, for 2-3 months or so. Then it crashed back to earth, which you can sort of infer from the limited number of data points here.

So no, the data are interesting but I am going to say the singularity did not occur last year. I think there may have been a bump in average productivity per (remaining) worker when some workers just disappeared from the economy, which is not a net positive, and I think there may have been a short-term mania among work-from-home professionals that is now feeding into our widespread burnout situation a year and a half or so down the line, and that is not a long-term positive. I do think the rapid/non-voluntary adoption of new software and communication tools on a massive scale probably gave a bump to technological progress, which might pay longer-term dividends.

The pandemic also gave a sudden boost to biotechnology, which may ultimately end disease as we know it, create unimaginably horrible weapons that kill us all, or both.

gain-of-function research

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According to Vanity Fair, a lab in New York collaborated with the Wuhan Institute of Virology to “enhance a bat coronavirus to become potentially more infectious to humans”. I personally don’t care about the “lab leak hypothesis” at this point. It is clear that this type of research is common now and probably happening all over the world. It needs to be tightly monitored and controlled or we may be in for a bleak future.

“Disease X”

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Are you worried that nobody is prepared for the next big pandemic? Have no fear, there is a group preparing to “advise the WHO on developing a framework to define comprehensive studies” about that. And after that, the WHO is going to be “developing policies and enhancing preparedness” about it. I am sure this will not take very long!

It seems like the UN and the WHO should be the organization to lead this effort globally, and creating new bodies in parallel would be redundant and counter-productive. But the UN approach did not seem to work very well this last time around. There are also the intertwined risks of natural pandemics, biological warfare and biological terrorism that need to be dealt with, and the WHO does not seem to be the agency to deal with these as existential threats. It seems to be more about representing the world’s under-represented people and countries at the table where these things are discussed.

In the U.S., our existing agencies (CDC, customs, FEMA, etc.) did not deal with this threat effectively. Again, nobody wants to just make new redundant agencies, and nobody wants to just turn the thing over to the military industrial complex. But it seems like we need to do something. Maybe this is why Obama created the “white house office of pandemic whatever” to try to coordinate or at least understand all this. Not a new parallel agency, but a new layer of oversight or at least a watchdog. The government grows this way, and the new growth may be healthy, but we never prune out the dead underbrush.

June 2021 in Review

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Most frightening and/or depressing story: For every 2 people who died of Covid-19 in the U.S. about 1 additional person died of indirect effects, such as our lack of a functioning health care system and safe streets compared to virtually all our peer countries.

Most hopeful story: Masks, ventilation, and filtration work pretty well to prevent Covid transmission in schools. We should learn something from this and start designing much healthier schools and offices going forward. Design good ventilation and filtration into all buildings with lots of people in them. We will be healthier all the time and readier for the next pandemic. Then masks can be slapped on as a last layer of defense. Enough with the plexiglass, it’s just stupid and it’s time for it to go.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: The big U.S. government UFO report was a dud. But what’s interesting about it is that we have all quietly seemed to have accepted that something is going on, even if we have no idea what it is, and this is new.

one more Covid-19 dashboard

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In the U.S., it feels like we are done with Covid. At least, for those of us who are vaccinated adults. For those of us with children, life is still not back to normal because even as we are being told we can return to the office, we can’t actually do that because the children are still home. And the world is clearly not done with Covid-19, as vaccination is proceeding slowly in many countries outside North America and Europe.

Anyway, here is one more simulation dashboard that shows an ensemble of simulations going forward up to four weeks. This might be useful to see if there are blips on the horizon when (if?) the kids really are allowed to go back to school in the fall. Here’s an article describing the site in MIT technology review.

and vaccinated people don’t spread the virus…much

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The confusion among the public continues. Basically, vaccinated people have a 10% or so chance of getting infected Covid-19 if they are exposed to it. If they are infected, they won’t get seriously ill but they might be able to spread it to un-vaccinated people who might then get seriously ill. If you multiply the probabilities, the odds of getting infected by a vaccinated person and then getting seriously ill are low, and the odds that a given person we are exposed to will be vaccinated is getting higher all the time, so the risk is getting lower all the time. Vaccinated people are being asked to wear masks to help that risk drop as quickly as possible. BUT half the population is hearing “the government is sugar-coating the science” and the other half of the population is hearing “vaccinated people are likely to spread the virus”. Neither of these messages is accurate in my view – I’m hearing the risk is low and getting lower, and we all need to get vaccinated to get the risk as low as possible (which will not be zero, but we can all move on to worrying about other diseases such as antibiotic-resistant syphilis).