More good news on the vaccine front: the approach from Oxford looks to be highly effective and is cheaper and easier to store than the two mRNA-based vaccines announced last week. The Oxford vaccine requires mere refrigeration, not a deep freeze, which should make it available pretty much anywhere in the world.

Tim Carmody with an incredibly thoughtful piece about two diametrically opposed approaches to dealing with the pandemic, as a third wave rises higher still and the winter holidays approach.

Sarah Zhang has a great piece in The Atlantic about the two vaccines announced this week:

Both vaccines, from Moderna and from Pfizer’s collaboration with the smaller German company BioNTech, package slightly modified spike-protein mRNA inside a tiny protective bubble of fat. Human cells take up this bubble and simply follow the directions to make spike protein. The cells then display these spike proteins, presenting them as strange baubles to the immune system. Recognizing these viral proteins as foreign, the immune system begins building an arsenal to prepare for the moment a virus bearing this spike protein appears.

It’s truly amazing that almost exactly a year since the virus was first diagnosed, and only nine months after the DNA of COVID-19 was sequenced, we have a viable vaccine. Two actually! Not only that, no one was quite sure the mRNA approach would even work — this is cutting edge science based on years of research, but it is an entirely new approach. What a testament to human ingenuity!

A compelling, if equally depressing, piece by Nathan Tankus looking at the dire straits of the economy as we head into winter with a third COVID-19 wave in full bloom and no sign of help on the horizon from a distracted and gridlocked Congress. Perhaps this is why Mitch McConnell is trying to sabotage the Fed as a Democratic president takes over? [via Lawrence Wilkinson’s excellent Roughly Daily]

I honestly never understood the reflexive QR code hate, especially among U.S. techies. The earliest days had the standard adoption issues, but once scanning got baked into the default camera app on iOS and Android, those pretty much went away. When I’ve traveled outside of the U.S. and payed for train tickets or meals via QR code, the experience has always been simple and straightforward.

Nothing like a pandemic to make us rethink our priors.

The wonderful Zeynep Tufekci¹ continues to sharpen our understanding about what’s actually happening with the virus, this time with a very clear and lucid piece about why all distribution is not equal. It’s looking like COVID-19 spreads non-uniformly via “overdispersion”:

There are COVID-19 incidents in which a single person likely infected 80 percent or more of the people in the room in just a few hours. But, at other times, COVID-19 can be surprisingly much less contagious. Overdispersion and super-spreading of this virus are found in research across the globe. A growing number of studies estimate that a majority of infected people may not infect a single other person. A recent paper found that in Hong Kong, which had extensive testing and contact tracing, about 19 percent of cases were responsible for 80 percent of transmission, while 69 percent of cases did not infect another person. This finding is not rare: Multiple studies from the beginning have suggested that as few as 10 to 20 percent of infected people may be responsible for as much as 80 to 90 percent of transmission, and that many people barely transmit it.

The entire piece is worth pouring another cup of tea to dig into. The analogy of Jeff Bezos walking into a bar and suddenly the average net worth of the bar is over a billion dollars is stark, as is the comparison to deterministic infections like influenza. Our global response systems aren’t prepared to fight “stochastic disease patterns” that behave seemingly at random rather than in linear and predictable patterns.

Or “the mean is not the message”.