Ebola:

There may be a new case in Guinea? Again, the WHO reports are lagging about a week, but around the internet there are suggestions that there is a suspected case under observation in a treatment center in Guinea. I have no idea how reliable that is, and right now the case is merely suspected anyways. We’ll keep an eye on it. No news in the DRC. They are still looking for nearly 40 known contacts of previous cases this outbreak who were lost to follow up.

Coronavirus:

–Mixed bag around the world right now. India is in a clear new wave right now. Most of Europe has leveled off amidst new lockdowns and social distancing protocols. Brazil is leveling off but neighboring Argentina has new cases climbing.

–In the US, cases are level to slight trend down overall. Your local results vary considerably though. 6 states are responsible for over 40% of new cases in the last week or two. No, Indiana is not among them, despite the Final Four (and Indiana is only average for vaccination status among the states, before you ask). New York, New Jersey and Ohio are popping, and Michigan in particular has a really solid spike. The UK variant, in particular, is now the dominant strain among new cases across the US.

–Also before you ask, no, Texas is NOT one of the 6 states driving new cases. California (high restriction level) and Texas (basically no restriction level) have exceptionally low rates. Worth mentioning Texas is also below US average in terms of % of population vaccinated (although no single state is a huge outlier). Florida, despite all the headlines about YOLOs on Spring Break and Miami curfews is also NOT one of the 6 states driving new cases, and remains pretty flat to down in terms of new cases.

–So what to make of all of this? Well, you’ll remember, this regional variance is not unexpected. We have discussed several times that as herd immunity grows, there will be local heterogeneity in immunity levels. Or put the way we did at the time, COVID rates will start to vary more at the state and county level, with local flare ups here and there. Despite the level off, hospitalization and death rates continue to fall. These are correlating most closely with vaccination, as you would expect.

–In terms of the vaccination race, the US has fully vaccinated 18% of the population. This will grow by 0.333% to 1% per day from here on in, as daily vaccinations run between 1-3 million (on par with annual flu vaccinations). The US has ~30 million documented cases of COVID. So you are somewhere between 25-28% of the total population that has either had the vaccine OR got COVID already, depending on how much overlap you want to give for vaccination AND had COVID already. Then add in a percentage, however generous you feel, for cases of COVID that were never tested and thus not reported (generally very mild or asymptomatic cases). So my best guess is that we are still on pace with the “UFC back of the envelope calculation” and hovering around 40-50% of the population.

–If the US can average 0.5% of the population vaccinated per day, you will add an additional 42% of the population vaccinated by July 1. At that point, you will be between 60-70% herd immunity just on vaccination alone. So I remain confident that the US, at least, is on pace for “largely medically controlled” by July.

–For a LOT of the rest of the world, that will be a slower process. The UK leads the way in Europe at ~8% of the population. The rich and “tax haven associated” countries are still leading the world in % vaccinated. Closer to the US, Canada remains stuck at about 2%. Same for Mexico.

–In terms of variant vaccine breakthrough potential, we are still watching South Africa’s numbers. They are low and falling, which remains a very positive indication that the variant they identified will be relatively limited in its reinfection ability (even though it may have some).

Michigan published a pretty solid data set this past week. We’ll get to how that was covered in just a second. The main takeaways are this:

• There have 1.8 million people fully vaccinated in Michigan to date. For the period the data covered, ~1.7 million had been fully vaccinated in Michigan.
• 246 fully vaccinated people (at least 2 shots of those vaccines requiring two shots) in Michigan got COVID and 3 have died of it.
• Two of those deaths were patients over 65 and all 3 had just barely their second dose.  This gives you about 1% mortality overall -among those 246 infected patients-, which is consistent with COVID in general. And most of those had the major known risk factors (age, especially).
• If we assume that only 1 in 10 of those people have been exposed to the virus since vaccination (which is almost certainly a low ball estimate even before Michigan’s current new case activity), that leaves us with 170,000 estimated virus exposures in Michigan over that period.
• Thus, the virus beat the vaccine about 0.1% of the time at best. Recall our estimate for the South Africa variant, still the most worrisome variant for reinfection, was about 0.4%. The mortality rate among those exposed to the virus, even with this low ball estimate, is vanishingly small–3/170,000.
• Vaccines are working, y’all. This is overall good news.

–Now, you might not know that depending on who you read. The coverage of the Michigan data was very interesting. The day it dropped, about half of the news headlines read only “246 vaccinated patients in Michigan got COVID, with 3 deaths.” The other half of headlines read “Of 1.7 million vaccinated patients in Michigan, only 246 got COVID.”

If you read only the headlines, the first one would be worrisome, because the important context of the denominator is completely missing. The second would be much more reassuring, by putting the 246 in the correct context of the large number of vaccines given, showing that COVID breakthrough is possible, but scratch off ticket lottery level chance of happening.

Here’s the other interesting part though. Each half that divide was using almost the exact same headline. Wording changes, if any, were very minor. You can find multiple articles, on multiple outlets, that all start with that “Of 1.7 million…” in particular.

–That looks an awful lot like “A/B” testing in advertising. You have seen A/B ads, because you have been on the internet–you may just not know it. Those ads that crop up either in banners, or ads within text, or as you scroll social media can, and almost invariably are, run as campaigns with a couple variations of them. They’ll change the word, or the image just a bit, but they’ll all be shown the same number of times to the same demographic of people. Then they merely track who clicks through or pauses longer (“interactions”) for each variant. If version A does better than version B, they’ll start to run version A more often for that demographic to get the most people in that demographic to do what they want (i.e. buy the product).

Here’s a good explanation of A/B testing and some examples.

–Cool story, bro–right? Well, here’s the important thing about this. If I were your search engine, and you go to check the day’s COVID news, and I -know- you are someone who has been relatively cautious about the virus (and I -do-, because I have your social media posts, interactions, follows and search history), I’m more likely to return or rank higher the story WITHOUT the 1.7 million vaccinated context. It’s the one that is MOST LIKELY to tell you what you already believe–the virus is dangerous and we need to remain cautious. You’re more likely to interact with that, and I’m probably getting paid ONLY when you interact with a news story by clicking or at least pausing long enough.

On the other hand, if you are someone who is less cautious about the virus, I, your search engine, will probably return or rank higher the stories that started with “Of 1.7 million…” Again, it confirms your worldview, and confirmation bias is a real and difficult thing for you to avoid. I, on the other hand, can absolutely exploit your confirmation bias and feed you only the news you want to see!

–That both sets of stories landed on headlines with only MINOR variations of each other suggests only a couple possibilities. 1) There are only a few, possibly as few as 2, actual authors of these stories–and these are just copied and edited a bit by various news outlets. So maybe Reuters wrote one, and AP the other, and wherever your news source of choice gets its wire reports ran with one or the other. 2) By the time you saw them, even the headlines had been through A/B testing, and converged on the forms that were most likely to capture attention. Maximized for either those very cautious, or those much less cautious, about the virus.

–This is not the only example of this you can find, and this apparent A/B split in news coverage is common across more topics than just coronavirus.

–So here’s the think piece this week. If the paid professional mainstream media sources are this schizophrenic, but always seems to err on the side with the greatest -emotional- reaction for you, ask yourself…

…what subjects do you think they get -right- in terms of clear reporting, with relevant facts, in their context–no matter what your predisposition to the subject might be?

–Do you still think you are getting adequately informed on -any- important subject? Know what’s going on in the world?

–If we are wielding the social media banhammer on those “misrepresenting” facts on the pandemic, how long until the mainstream media in general gets blocked?

–Makes you wonder cui bono that they have not when you get such clearly divergent clusters of identical reporting.

–Lastly, you have probably seen some reporting on the “double mutant” or double variant strain. The long story short is that it has two mutations in the spike protein present individually in various other strains of “increased concern”–much as if sharks were combined with tornadoes to form a so-called “sharknado.” It was first identified in Mumbai, India and became 15-20% of cases in a fairly recent local surge there. There are cases identified already in the US. There will probably be more. No one knows what the mutations will do when present at the same time. There is no evidence right now of increased severity of illness, nor if its ability to get past vaccines is any better than the variants that have only one or the other of the spike protein mutations. Again, the most likely result is that this version, too, is more contagious but only as or even less severe. Vaccine effects are who the hell knows at this point. We’ll keep an eye on it. We may keep the “Sharknado variant” name for this one, since it seems cooler. We’ll have to see…

–Your chances of catching Ebola this week are equivalent to that viral Tik Tok video claiming to be from the future, man showing empty beaches, shopping malls, and cities in 2027 and suggesting humanity is extinct by 2027 is real given that footprints are clearly visible in the sands, the malls, while empty, have new appearing merchandise stocked in good order and the lights all still work to get the shot in the video, and the cars in the cities are all parked in orderly fashion and clean. Extinction either didn’t happen, or -just- happened in that video–you decide which. All we’re going to say is that to our close study of “Plandemic”, Ebola is still the only form of life known to alter space and time, and it was only able to go into the past, not the future : )

–Your chances of catching coronavirus this week are equivalent to the chances you can totally screenshot that Ebola prediction above and absolutely dunk on me in 2027 when it turns out the video was true and we’re all dead. That will, indeed, be my bad.

<Paladin>