My willingness to pay for a quantification of risks for long covid: $500
Sameerishere
Karma: 358
[Question] How should we adjust microCOVID estimates for omicron, boosters, testing?
Agreed—I’m struggling to figure out how to apply microcovid estimates in the wake of omicron. Without an adjustment for that, it seems like no other improvements would matter. I would be willing to pay $1000 if microcovid were updated to reflect omicron. (Please agree with my post if you have a similar willingness to pay, and agree with JoachimSchipper’s post if you just generally support updates for omicron but don’t have a similar willingness to pay).
(I’m a little confused as to why it’s not clear that this is the best next step for microcovid, and if anyone has suggestions for making ad-hoc adjustments to use microcovid given omicron, would appreciate them!)
Any thoughts on how to adjust this for recent findings that omicron is more susceptible to testing negative in the early stages of infectiousness?
The findings:
Preliminary results from the NIH: https://www.politico.com/news/2021/12/28/fda-antigen-tests-reduced-sensitivity-omicron-526217?fbclid=IwAR22ulLUhteXrFdhFiuYMLa35Ha1BXFNT_z4QlA6f6ql3nSO8tQ2Q7_WfoU
Michael Mina explains this means “ALL tests will falter on day 1” (not that rapid antigen tests are uniquely bad), but I imagine that doesn’t change the fact that rapid tests are less accurate for Omicron?). He notes that UK Gov found no impact on sensitivity for Omicron, but it seems like a lot of tests in the UK recommend throat swabbing, and that could impact accuracy for Omicron for tests like BinaxNOW which are nasal only)
Do folks have any thoughts on how to adjust risk estimates for..
Omicron’s higher infectiousness, but lower severity
Findings that you can still be infectious while testing negative on a rapid antigen test, and that this is a bigger concern with Omicron?
Regarding long COVID: Zvi, does your model above incorporate the following findings (published after your original deep dive in Sept)? (If anyone other than Zvi has thoughts on how these affect the model laid out above, would be curious to hear your thoughts as well.)
9/29/21 NPR article recapping a study from around that time
Affects over 1⁄3 of COVID sufferers, 2x as high as for flu:
“In the study published Tuesday in the journal PLOS Medicine, researchers found that about 36% of those studied still reported COVID-like symptoms three and six months after diagnosis. Most previous studies have estimated lingering post-COVID symptoms in 10% to 30% of patients.
...Although long COVID is poorly defined, the researchers looked at such symptoms as chest/throat pain, abnormal breathing, abdominal symptoms, fatigue, depression, headaches, cognitive dysfunction and muscle pain.
… the new study concludes that the chances of getting COVID-19 symptoms months after the acute stage of the illness was more than twice as high as for influenza.”
Other points to consider:
“The Oxford-led team also found that people who had more severe COVID-19 illness were more likely to get long COVID. Likewise, female and young adult patients also had an elevated risk for the long-term symptoms, but the authors of the study found no difference between white and nonwhite patients.”
11/24/21 Reuters article noting that “COVID-19 vaccines are highly effective in protecting against serious illness, but they do not protect against “long COVID” in people who become infected despite vaccination”
(However, both the article and the study it cites note that vaccines are protective against long COVID to the extent that they prevent infection in the first place.)
And thank you for this post and everything you’ve written throughout the pandemic!
I think I would enjoy and appreciate learning this framework. A bunch of graphs without explanation or examples is, unfortunately, too dry and difficult for me to understand.
Can you elaborate on why these are your criteria?
Can you elaborate on why you see “loud” as the appropriate level? That makes a significant difference in terms of risk level.
For those who are bad at math words like I am and didn’t click through to your link, I want to note that you mean, “they cut risk to 25 percent of the original risk”, not “they reduce risk by 25 percent” :-) (I thought you meant the latter till I clicked through)
This isn’t directly responsive to the question in the post (to which I agree activity approaching light jogging should probably be modeled as higher risk than silence, though I can’t figure out how much).
But you may be interested in the following Facebook group, where Dorry Segev, a COVID researcher and organizer in the Baltimore dance scene, gives updates on best practices in holding dance events to manage risk levels https://www.facebook.com/groups/158671312715141/?ref=share
(It may be worth asking your question there as well!)
I recommend AppBlock for Android—it lets you block specific apps at specific times (including AppBlock itself, so you can’t undo it).
You could use leechblock to do a similar thing on your computer.
Another option could be to use something like appblock for Android and block all non-essential apps always
Thanks folks. Asking for my own benefit as someone who dances fusion and has been attending some (small, masked, vaccinated) indoor events lately. I think microfusion is probably somewhere between silent and normal and regular fusion is probably between normal and loud. (Trying to balance heavier/more frequent breathing with the fact that people are literally speaking, not talking.)
How heavily do you think people breathe while doing the sorts of dancing you describe, and does that impact whether it’s appropriate to model the scenario as “silent”?
Thanks for sharing this! Added it to my post of summary snippets here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jfHZR6Ykmc5DBSLCp/cliffs-notes-how-much-should-fully-vaccinated-people-care
Seems like Pueyo’s conclusion would support a similar level of risk tolerance as Elizabeth’s analysis, would you agree?
This is incredibly helpful, thank you!
Thanks for that reply. I’m realizing that part of the disagreement here is that I was vague and used “mask” to refer to n95s as well. (I’ve edited the post to be less vague in that regard). I agree that it makes sense to wear the most effective PPE someone is willing to, and it’s interesting to hear that you find elastometrics more comfortable.
Would you be willing to share which elastometrics you’ve liked? I started looking at P100s for the first time yesterday, but there is a bit less discussion of them than N95s.
Took a while to reply to this, sorry.
Microcovid.org seems to be using an outdated source, “Howard et al. Evidence Review (version 4 from Oct 2020),
Do you have newer sources that you think render Howard et al obsolete? (That’s my most important question in reply to your comment… I responded to your other arguments for the sake of completeness, but I would personally find it most helpful if you had thoughts on the above (as may others, I’d imagine, as a lot of people are using microcovid.org.)
frankly, it doesn’t matter much anyway since we know that masks (mostly the cloth and surgical kind) couldn’t stop the more contagious variants that caused the winter wave nor could masks stop the UK’s massive surge of Delta infections
I don’t follow how the fact that masks failed to “stop the variants or surge” means they are poor protection, or not worth wearing. Unless the claim is that masks are 100% protective against COVID transmission, they can still substantially reduce risk even if they failed to stop the variants or surge.
If masks were the only PPE available, doing a hail mary by wearing them might be okay, but since vastly better PPE is readily available today, advising people to wear poor protection makes no sense.
I imagine plenty of people (myself included) find it embarrassing, uncomfortable, and inconvenient to wear a PAPR (and to a lesser extent, a P100). It may be worth encouraging people to favor those more protective PPE, but it’s worth making recommendations that people are actually likely to follow. It’s not all-or-nothing.
My willingness to pay for incorporating rapid tests: $100 (relatively low because I think I can just apply this post manually pretty easily). If there is significant variation across available tests then my WTP would rise to $200+.