Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Covid 2/23/23: Your Best Possible Situation, published by Zvi on February 23, 2023 on LessWrong.

No news is (often) good news.

At old Magic: The Gathering tournaments, judge Tony Parodi would often tell us, ‘if your opponent did not show up, that is your best possible situation.’

Every week, when I set out to write the Covid update, I held out the hope that at some point, perhaps soon, you would never read one of these again. There would be nothing to report. That the reports would no longer help anyone. I could go think about and write about something else.

Today is that day. I had to go see about. well, to start off, the possibility of AI destroying all value in the universe. Not my desired first pick. Once again, I much prefer the worlds where over the next weeks, months and years I get to deep dive into other very different aspects of the world instead.

It is still a joyous day. After three years, the weekly Covid posts are over.

From this point forward, I am no longer going to actively seek out Covid information. I am not going to check my Covid Twitter list.

I will continue to compile what Covid and related information I come still across, although with a much higher bar for inclusion going forward. If it seems worth its own post from time to time, I’ll do that. If not, I won’t. Unless something changes a lot, that will be a lot less common than weekly.

We have normality. Cherish it.

You’ll miss it when it’s gone.

Executive Summary

This will be the last weekly Covid post unless things change radically.

We have normality. I repeat, we have normality.

Anything you still can’t cope with is therefore your own problem.

Let’s run the numbers.

The Numbers

Predictions

Predictions from Last Week: 210k cases (-6%) and 2,625 deaths (-7%).

Results: 210k cases (-6%) and 2,396 deaths (-15%)

Predictions for Next Week: No more formal predictions. Expect continued slow declines in underlying numbers for a while.

Arizona reported 23k cases, which has to be a backlog dump, so I cut them down to a high but plausible 4k. Colorado reported negative deaths, so I changed that to zero.

I entirely forgot about Presidents Day, which makes the case number here unexpectedly high, and largely accounts for the deaths result. Overall slightly disappointing given the holiday.

Deaths

Cases

Physical World Modeling

I was alerted to quite the case of modeling: Metaculus has been successfully working with the Virginia state government to help them make better decisions. They are currently running the Keep Virginia Safe II contest with a $20k prize pool, which where the link goes. I have been informed that such information is actually listed to and used in real decision making, which makes it exciting to consider participating. Perhaps this will even spread to additional jurisdictions. You never know.

Bloom Lab goes over the long term history of pandemics, especially flu, and speculates on what to expect from Covid going forward – most of the thread is from January but seems fitting for the final update. The last note is new, suggesting that Omicron might not actually be less virulent after all, with the difference in outcomes being due to immunity – older adults with no prior infection and no vaccination were found to have similar mortality rates. China would presumably tell us a lot, if we had any data we could rely upon.

Metastudy confirms that yes, Covid infections are protective against future Covid protections even under Omicron.

In Other Covid News

State Senator in Idaho introduces a bill that makes providing or administering any mRNA vaccine a crime. I have learned not to be all that concerned by ‘politician introduces terrible bill,’ almost none of them go anywhere. Still, wow.

A fun note: Bret Stephen says in his column that the conclusions of new study on the efficacy of masks were unambi...