Keeping up with the Virus, 11-28

Zvi: we're f'ed; Megan McArdle advises against lockdowns; also experts recommended by Emily Oster and Noah Smith

Zvi Mowshowitz writes,

Once there are hundreds of detected cases, it is already far too late to successfully contain the new variant. By the time we have enough information to react to a new variant, there will already be hundreds of detected cases. We lose. Good day, sir.

He does point out that any policy steps that give us more time will be helpful. So although travel restrictions are not a good long-term solution, they might have some short-term benefit.

Megan McArdle writes,

We need home testing kits so cheap and plentiful that everyone has piles of them everywhere. Heck, give them away in boxes of cereal. That means the FDA should approve tests even if they’re a little less accurate. If that’s not enough to make test kits ubiquitous, the U.S. government should stand up something like an Operation Warp Speed for testing.

Emily Oster points to Katelyn Jetelina, who writes

if we need another vaccine, we can do this incredibly quickly. Thanks to the new biotechnology, mRNA vaccines are really easy to alter. Once the minor change is made, only 2 dozen people need to enroll in a trial to make sure the updated vaccine works. Then it can be distributed to arms. Because the change is small, an updated vaccine doesn’t need Phase III trials and/or regularity approval. So, this whole process should take a max of 6 weeks.

Noah Smith interviews Eric Topol. Noah’s summary includes

Far more effective than variant-specific boosters would be a universal “supervaccine” that works against all possible variants of Covid. Several labs, including Topol’s, have candidates for such a supervaccine.

In a longer post, Noah writes,

we should ditch the travel bans; at best they’re simply theater, and at worst they could give us a false sense of security. Even worse, banning travel from countries that find new variants simply punishes countries with good variant surveillance!

Against this, the Zvi points out that if the new variant spreads as rapidly as feared, we can cope with it much better if we push the curve back a few weeks.