First Doses First

Again at Marginal Revolution a vocal, rational, calling out the public health bureaucrats.  

At the risk of venturing into psychoanalysis, it is hard for me to avoid the feeling that a lot of public health experts are very risk-averse and they are used to hiding behind RCT results to minimize the chance of blame. They fear committing sins of commission more than committing sins of omission because of their training, they are fairly conformist, they are used to holding entrenched positions of authority, and subconsciously they identify their status and protected positions with good public health outcomes (a correlation usually but not always true), and so they have self-deceived into pursuing their status and security rather than the actual outcomes. Doing a back of the envelope calculation to support their recommendation against First Doses First would expose that cognitive dissonance and thus it is an uncomfortable activity they shy away from. Instead, they prefer to dip their toes into the water by citing “a single argument” and running away from a full comparison. 

It is downright bizarre to me — and yes scandalous — that a significant percentage of public health experts are not working day and night to produce and circulate such numerical expected value estimates, no matter which side of the debate they may be on. 

How many times have I read Twitter threads where public health experts, at around tweet #11, make the cliched call for transparency in decision-making? If you wish to argue against First Doses First, now it is time to actually provide such transparency. Show your work people, we will gladly listen and change our minds if your arguments are good ones.

Tyler is too polite to call them what he means: cowards.

Too add on this, my family got tested multiple times over the holiday break, including a 60 minute test. We drove up, got tested, drove off with no line and got our results. The only thing that holds us back from doing this more: the cost - $175 for the 1 hour test result per person ($145 for the 2-4 day test). We are hoping insurance will pay for it all. 

How come this isn't just widely available everywhere by now? What happened to testing? What happened to all these poor waiters and waitresses who are out of work? Why are we talking about $1200 free money to everyone -- what we should be doing is hiring rapid drive through testers to pick people's noses with q-tips are run these goddamn 1 hour tests. Can you imagine? We could be practically back to normal without the vaccine with rapid testing, couldn't we? Everyone tests twice a week...

Testing centers should be everywhere like Starbucks and McDonalds. 

Instead, we have one free testing center in LA - Dodger Stadium - that was totally overwhelmed when LA folks needed to get tested as this explosion was happening. 2-4 hour lines. We went one day and drove away. I'm sure thousands others did as well - and hundreds of those people had COVID, I'm sure. 

To what degree has this continued local testing failure in LA contributed to the spread? I think some.