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Philippe Lemoine Profile picture
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26 Nov, 5 tweets, 2 min read
Lmao, I told you this was going to happen, but they aren't going to say that B.1.1.529 has a R0 of 45 so hopefully people will stop making those ridiculous claims now. cspicenter.org/blog/waronscie… Image
In this case, incidence was so low when this new lineage started to expand that it could easily just be a founder effect (though genomic data suggests it's more than that), so inferring the transmissibility advantage from the transmission advantage is even more risky than usual.
Moreover, this analysis suggests that a lot of this transmission advantage might reflect immune evasion rather than a transmissibility advantage, but as I argued before even without that population structure alone could be doing a lot of work here.
Anyway, if this variant is really more transmissible and/or better at evading existing immunity, it will be everywhere eventually and there is nothing we can do about it.
At some point we're going to have to accept that new variants are going to keep emerging, that some of them are going to be more transmissible or virulent, but c'est la vie as we say in France and we must go back to normal and stop caring about it or this is never going to end 🤷‍♂️

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Philippe Lemoine Profile picture
28 Nov
It's pretty insane that, with a paltry TFR of 1.8, France is nevertheless ahead of any other developed nation with the exception of Israel. I hadn't realized that it had fallen so much in the US, which used to be another developed country where it was holding up decently.
Along with France and the US, Ireland and the Nordics used to be another exception, but it looks as though it's slipping over there as well. It's also going down in France, but more slowly.
By the way, many people think that France's relatively high TFR is due to immigration, but this is not true. Other countries with lots of immigrants are losing ground much faster and, if you disaggregate, you see that immigrants only increase France's TFR by about 0.1 point.
Read 7 tweets
Philippe Lemoine Profile picture
27 Nov
I wrote this last winter and, not only does the basic argument still applies (it's impossible to know exactly what effect restrictions have but it's not huge and they are not worth it), but now that most people are vaccinated it applies even more 🤷‍♂️ cspicenter.org/blog/waronscie…
By the way, I know that the impact of restrictions on well-being is subjective, but as I explain in the post, it doesn't mean that you can't know that they don't pass a cost-benefit test, because you can show that, *even if you make ridiculously generous assumptions about how
much they affect transmission*, the upper bound on how large the impact of restrictions on well-being can be before they no longer pass a cost-benefit test is so small that nobody can seriously deny their actual impact on well-being is higher.
Read 5 tweets
Philippe Lemoine Profile picture
27 Nov
I expect that existing immunity will continue to protect well against severe disease with Omicron, but I’m not going to start accepting claims made by public health officials without any data just because they validate my priors, so let’s just wait a little before celebrating.
If you’re wondering why I expect that immunity will continue to protect well against severe disease, you should read this post, where I argued that new variants were going to keep emerging but that they wouldn’t take us back to square one. cspicenter.org/blog/waronscie…
The good news is that, if Omicron really is more transmissible than Delta (which it may be, though of course it’s not 6 times more transmissible), we should know very soon whether I was right. Unless I was actually wrong, in which case this is the bad news 😅
Read 6 tweets
Philippe Lemoine Profile picture
25 Nov
Do we have good studies on the IFR of SARS-CoV-2 for people who are fully vaccinated? Preferably age-specific estimates.
I think the ONS in the UK is probably in the best position to do that, since I don't think anybody else does random surveillance of SARS-CoV-2 positivity on a regular basis, but I don't know if they have published any age-specific IFR estimates by vaccination status.
Since I have no doubt that vaccination reduces the probability of infection conditional on exposure, the IFR will understate the benefits of vaccination, but the probability of death conditional on infection is still interesting in my opinion.
Read 4 tweets
Philippe Lemoine Profile picture
25 Nov
C'est incroyable et profondément déprimant que, après plus d'un an et demi de pandémie, la HAS puisse encore écrire des choses pareilles sans craindre le ridicule. À juste titre d'ailleurs puisque les journalistes reprennent ça sans sourciller.
Je n'attends pas des journalistes qu'ils comprennent comment ces modèles fonctionnent, même si ce n'est pas très compliqué, mais à défaut de comprendre pourquoi ils sont pourris ils pourraient au moins remarquer que jusqu'à présent ils se sont systématiquement plantés.
Mais au lieu de ça ils répètent servilement des affirmations complètement absurdes parce qu'elles sortent de sacro-saints "modèles" auxquels ils ne comprennent rien.
Read 7 tweets
Philippe Lemoine Profile picture
25 Nov
Le pire c'est que je suis sûr que, si un couvre-feu ou un confinement était déclaré, ce serait beaucoup plus que ça parce qu'avec la propagande non-stop les gens considèrent systématiquement que si le gouvernement fait quelque chose c'est qu'il n'y a pas d'autre choix.
Alors qu'évidemment qu'il y a un autre choix, ne rien faire du tout, ce qui ne changera pas grand chose sur le déroulement de l'épidémie (même si manifestement les cognoscenti ne l'ont toujours pas compris), mais qui fera une différence énorme sur le bien-être de la population.
Les gens n'arrivent pas à concevoir que nous sommes gouvernés par des demeurés qui gèrent la crise en improvisant au fil de l'eau. Du coup ils concluent soit que les restrictions doivent être justifiées soit qu'elles font partie d'un plan machiavélique.
Read 9 tweets

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