Delta is the fourth wave of covid, and amazingly the US policy response is even more irresolute than the first time around. Our government is like a child, sent next door to get a cup of sugar, who gets as far as the front stoop and then wanders off following a puppy.
The policy response is now focused on the most medically ineffective but most politically symbolic step, mask mandates. All all-night disco in Provincetown turns in to a superspreader event so… we make school kids wear masks in outdoor summer camps? Masks are several decimal places less effective than vaccines, and less effective than “social distance” in the first place.* Go to that all night disco, unvaccinated, but wear a mask? Please.
If we’re going to do NPI (non pharmaceutical interventions), policy other than vaccines, the level of policy and public discussion has tragically regressed since last summer. Last summer, remember, we were all talking about testing. Alex Tabarrok and Paul Romer were superb on how fast tests can reduce the reproduction rate, even with just voluntary isolation following tests. Other countries had competent test and tracing regimes. Have we built that in a year? No. (Are we ready to test and trace the next bug? Double no.)
What happened to the paper-strip tests you could buy for $2.00 at Walgreen’s, get instant results, and maybe decide it’s a bad idea to go to the all night dance party? Interest faded in November. (Last I looked, the sellers and FDA were still insisting on prescriptions and an app sign up, so it cost $50 and insurance “paid for” it.) What happened to detailed local data? Did anyone ever get it through the FDA’s and CDCs thick skulls that even imperfect but cheap and fast tests can be used to slow spread of disease?
Last summer, we were talking about super-spreader events, and the idea that you don’t have to have disastrous lockdowns of everything but maybe packed all-night disco parties are a bad idea? (Reopen smart, I wrote at the time, for example here) Today, silence. Masks. Nice big symbolic masks. Period.
And then we indulge another round of America’s favorite pastime, answers in search of a question. Delta is spreading, so… extend the renter eviction moratorium.
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In the talk “pandemic of the unvaccinated,” I hear, basically, resignation. We offered you vaccines. If you won’t take them, fine, we’re done. We’re back really to what quite a few people argued for and were pilloried for in March 2020. Let it sweep through, get to herd immunity, it peters out, bury the dead and go on with life.
The good news. A reproduction rate of 6 means Delta will spread really fast, peak really fast, and decline fast. The bad news: a lot of people will needlessly get sick and quite a few will die. The economy will slow down as people voluntarily pull back. Evolution got one more step ahead of bureaucratic bungling. A variant that transmits even more easily through vaccinated people can’t be far behind.
It did not have to happen. The vaccine was in hand, the lines were done, anyone could walk in and get the vaccine. All we had left to do was get pretty much everyone vaccinated before the new variant hit, and it would have been pretty much over. Something like $5 trillion dollars of extra debt, the economy closed for a year, thousands dead, thousands unemployed, huge pain and now we lose sight of the ball when all we had to do was pay a little attention, get some small incentives going for everyone to get vaccinated. (Aaron Stupple suggested, just pay people $1,000 to get vaccinated. 100 million people times $1,000 is $100 billion. Couch change in what the pandemic has cost us, or the upcoming $3.5 trillion “infrastructure” bill. That’s not much more than rail and transit subsidies alone.)
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Of the many things we don’t know, just how much masks help or don’t help is one of them. You think with $42 billion dollars one could find out. Of the studies I have read and seen cited, I see a guesstimate of 20% reduction in reproduction rate. So if Delta has R0=6, masks might reduce that to 4.8. Even if a vaccine is only 50% effective in stopping transmission, then R0 among the vaccinated is 0.25.
Masks do much more to stop you from giving it to someone else than to protect you. Cloth masks are close to useless. Well-fitting N95 masks work much better in both directions. Neither comes close to vaccination. Wearing cloth masks outdoors, far from other people, in the wind, as is the fashion in Palo Alto, is just part and parcel of the pointless virtue-signaling so prominent here. If you do go to that crowded all-night disco, wearing an N95 mask might be a good idea. Of course if you’re even thinking about wearing a mask, you’re not going in the first place, which is why the whole mask-mandate business is a bit silly.