Coronamonomania Lives Forever, Part 159

The response to the epidemic in the US caused a lot of pain, and forced a lot of small businesses to close, ending the owner’s dreams.  This study from California finds that early in the epidemic there was an extremely high rate of small businesses closing, while large businesses were unaffected.  The result was far less competitive markets for consumers.  While small business has rebounded somewhat, markets remain more concentrated than they were pre-epidemic.  (SSRN Paper)

The vaccines are not as efficacious as we had hoped or as the trial data made them appear.  That lack of effectiveness is no excuse for making up safety bullshit about the vax.  The common error now is for the anti-vax nuts to make up stuff about all kinds of supposed problems in vaxed persons, while ignoring that most of these people have also been infected at this point.  This study indicates why this tunnel vision is a problem.  It looked at whether vaxed or unvaxed CV-19 patients were more likely to be admitted to the ICU with a pulmonary embolism, or lung blood clot.  The unvaxed patients were much more likely to have the diagnosis.  Kind of hard to blame the vax for that.  (SSRN Paper)

A reader sent me this study on masks which I think I posted on at the time, but it is worth another look.  Because it shows how political science has become.  The authors find that masks are basically worthless at stopping transmission, may make it worse, but then say the solution is we just need better masks.  (Mask Study)

I am a definite skeptic on long CV-19; I think it is mostly made-up.  Looking for confirmation bias, I hit on this study, which finds that only about 13% of people with supposed long CV-19 actually have a symptom consistent with CV-19 disease.  (Lancet Article)

A somewhat puzzling mortality study from Switzerland.  The authors ultimate conclusion is that if you ignore CV-19 deaths, overall mortality in the country was below expectations.  But they get there by assuming that CV-19 deaths were undercounted by about 40%.  That is a bizarre assumption given death attribution methods.  The truth likely is that CV-19 deaths were overcounted, and that there was excess non-CV-19 death.  (Medrxiv Paper)

This paper is interesting because it suggests that key epidemiologic parameters such as the serial interval (time  between symptoms arising in people in a chain of transmission) and the generation intervals (time between actual infection in a chain) can vary over the course of an epidemic.  Which obviously complicates understanding trends.  (Medrxiv Paper)

The dosing schedule for vaccines is important and can impact the immune response.  This study suggests that a longer interval between the initial two doses prompts a better response, but a third dose eliminates those differences.  (Medrxiv Paper)

And this study finds that increasing the second dose interval to 16 weeks significantly increases the B cell response.  (Medrxiv Paper)

One more, a study on the Chinese inactivated virus vaccine, finds that four weeks between doses results in a stronger response than two weeks.  (Medrxiv Paper)

According to this study, those who routinely take low-dose aspirin were at signficantly lower risk of dying from CV-19 than those persons who did not.  (Medrxiv Paper)