Misc

Miscellaneous is often where the gems are.

Misc

Lockdown

  • A really excellent post from FT Alphaville trying to understand the lockdown.
  • They point to analysis by Sir David Spiegelhalter, former president of the Royal Statistical Society and co-chair of the Society’s Covid-19 task force.
  • He produced the pictured chart.
  • “The pattern shows Covid deaths increase exponentially with age … this follows the pattern of normal risk. Whatever risks you’ve got, this just seems to exaggerate them — pump them up and pack a year’s worth of risk into a few weeks. Covid deaths are a fixed proportion of the people dying . ..”
  • Two extra points added to this are those exposed to excessive viral loads (healthcare workers) and the 10s of thousands of unnecessary deaths from less emergency care.
  • Moving away from the numbers – the moral discussion at the end is the most interesting part.
Misc

Covid Vaccine

  • A really brilliant article on the state of Covid vaccine development.
  • It gives a great overview and introduction into vaccines in general.
  • There are 115 vaccines in development (78 currently active).
  • There is a vast range of vaccine types (as the diagram shows). The article explains what all these types are.
  • “We are only going to find out, in the end, by dosing people. Lots of people. With therapies targeting the immune system, there is in the end no other way to know, because of the complexities of the human immune response and its wide variation in the human population .. some of the steps are going to have to be done on a scale never before attempted … there are going to have to be some shortcuts.“
  • There is one thing that can’t be skipped – how long immunity lasts. This question can only be answered with time.
  • On safety – “Now you see the exact bind that vaccine development has always been in, because the whole point is to treat millions, even billions of people who are not currently sick, to protect them against disease while not doing more harm along the way by setting off the body’s fiercest and most alarming biological responses.“
  • On manufacturing – “My guess is that scale-up and manufacturing could well be the biggest chance for the timelines mentioned earlier to blow up“.
  • There is a willingness to pre-fund manufacturing, across all these varied types of technology, before efficacy is established by Bill Gates and others.
Misc

Interesting ideas

  • This is a great list of interesting ideas, from a wide range of fields, to understand how the world works.
  • Some examples.
  • Principle of Least Effort: When seeking information, effort declines as soon as the minimum acceptable result is reached.
  • The 90-9-1 Rule: In social media networks, 90% of users just read content, 9% of users contribute a little content, and 1% of users contribute almost all the content. Gives a false impression of what ideas are popular or “average.”
  • Bizarreness Effect: Crazy things are easier to remember than common things, providing a distorted sense of “normal.”
  • Second Half of the Chessboard: Put one grain of rice on the first chessboard square, two on the next, four on the next, then eight, then sixteen, etc, doubling the amount of rice on each square. When you’ve covered half the chessboard’s squares you’re dealing with an amount of rice that can fit in your lap; in the second half you quickly get to a pile that will consume an entire city. That’s how compounding works: slowly, then ferociously.
Misc

Covid Drug Development

  • Clinicaltrials.gov counts 104 active studies in the US.
  • There is also SOLIDARITY, a WHO megatrial announced on Friday.
  • Drugs in Clinical Trials:
  • Chloroquine (Plaquenil) – 70 year old treatment for malaria repurposed. Only small open label trials done so far (here, here and here) show encouraging early results.
  • Siltuximab, Sarilumab and Tocilizumab – all IL-6 inhibitors (for anti-inflammatory conditions) repurposed and being clinically tested.
  • Remdesivir – previously tested for other viruses including Ebola. Two phase III studies initiated.
  • Ritonavir/lopinavir – HIV medication repurposed. Although initial trial failed.
  • Drugs in Pre-Clinical Development:
  • Regeneron – are using their novel antibody discovery technology to find a cocktail of antibodies.
  • TAK-888 – a hyperimmune globulin that has previously shown benefit in severe acute viral respiratory infections.
  • RNAi – Alnylam are using siRNA technology pre-clinic to find a candidate.
  • WP1122 – Moleculin Biotech are testing a glucose decoy prodrug.
  • Vaccines:
  • 39 in development, 12-18 months away, full list here.
Misc

Viruses & Bats

  • Fascinating article about why viruses, like the current Corona virus outbreak, tend to come from bats.
  • Why Bats? They are mammals, so sufficiently close to us, not domesticated, and live in huge flocks
  • Bracken Cave, in Texas, is home to roughly 20 million breeding Mexican free-tailed bats, similar to the (human) population of the Mexico City urban area. In places there are 500 bat pups per square foot on the wall. To a virus that represents a tasty buffet.
Misc

Creative Idea Generation

  • This is an interesting list from Rory Sutherland’s new book.
  • The concept is how one should let go of logic in order to generate brilliant ideas.
  • An interesting exercise is to think how these ideas can help in investing.
  • “Being logical makes you predictable, and your competitors will know what you’re going to do before you do. This is because using logic will very likely land you in the same place as everyone else, and sharing a market space with competitors this way creates a race to the bottom. Instead, figure out the logic model of your competitor, find where their use of it is too narrow and exploit this.“
  • h/t The Browser.
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