Day 580: Long, Long, Long COVID

The rationalists are out in force on the controversial topic of Long COVID. Scott Alexander summarized the definitional chaos overnight, and Zvi summarized the meta impact on the COVIDosphere (as it were) today.

While Zvi continues to disbelieve in long COVID as anything more than just another long flu, and notes that a society-wide epidemic of depression and other mental illness is hiding (in plain sight) in the long COVID control group data. Scott, on the other hand, gives it too much credit by calling it a long Spanish Flu, though he agrees there's probably little to no long COVID in children. He also mentions that, otrangely, vaccination does not reduce the rate of long COVID in the infected.

PlagueBlog sides with Zvi; the only thing we need to fear is the fear of long COVID itself:

I agree with Scott’s view here that our worries about Long Covid strongly imply the need for more worry about Long Disease in general, and also Long Everything. The previous Aceso Under Glass post emphasized this point, that there’s lots of such risks in the background all the time, and this isn’t an especially big one.

More to the point, Long Covid Prevention has clearly reached crisis levels and really is a big deal, and seems more severe than Long Covid, and a huge percent of the population has this problem, so we need to do what it takes to stop this deadly syndrome in its tracks.

Massachusetts cases were up about a quarter of a percentage point again today.

Day 579 Retrospective: The Week That Dare Not Speak Its Name

It's been a summer of snarky remarks about orgies at Market Basket here at PlagueBlog Headquarters, but reading about Bear Week at Less Wrong reminded us that we have not properly blogged about the Provincetown delta scare that never was. It's perhaps too obvious here in Massachusetts what's going on in Provincetown all summer, but to the CDC a few non-fatal cases of delta during Bear Week has become an excuse to doubt the vaccine and send the nation back under the mask.

Bear Week was cancelled last year and (allegedly) toned down this year, but the bears still got an early start to it over the Fourth of July weekend and continued to party during the official dates of July 10th through the 18th. The CDC study's outbreak dates were July 6th through 25th, and their patient population was 85% male, or in other words, sick bears.

Believe it or not, the CDC's total failure to account for what we in the epidemiology field abbreviate MSM was not the only problem with the Provincetown study, nor was the other MSM's (mainstream media's) failure to report that it was Bear Week. Zvi at Less Wrong goes into more detail about the flawed report here and here.

From the second link, we must include Zvi's unrelated summary of our new social media COVID Stasi censors:

It’s about the new definition of misinformation, which as far as I can tell is information used to lead to a conclusion we don’t like.

Massachusetts cases were up a quarter of a percentage point again yesterday (Day 579).