2021 Prognostication

Paul Pal from Real Vision released his 2021 prognosis into Youtube. Definitely worth the 34 minutes. Real v predicted jobs numbers were off by 350% meaning the government got it wrong by 4.5x. It was 1st week Jan so likely the liquidation has started in small business. I read the NEJM article on the Pfizer vax, 95% effective with 2 doses spaced @ 3 weeks at reducing deaths. Doesn’t say a damn thing about reducing morbidity. I read an article out of Wuhan that claimed 75% of virus survivors have some kind of ongoing morbidity. Another article out of Europe claiming viral immunity is reduced in 52% of people recovered from infection 6 mos post infection. I heard Biden admin was considering ordering 1 dose instead of 2 in order to jab twice as many with half as much. I have no idea if that’s true but I also have no idea what happens to efficacy with a 1 jab solution. I read an article where a hospital CEO was preparing for a surge of deaths because of inadequate infrastructure to support the sick. This doesn’t sound like happy days are here again by summer to me.

Japan, Europe, US, and China still face a demographic economic disaster as my generation retires. Retirement by definition is deflationary. Money printer go brrrrr won’t cause retirees to spend money. If anything it will cause them to save money. Money printing is asymptotically tachyphilactic. I’ve read studies that it takes a 1.5 to 2 x increase over the previous brrrrr to get an effect. In places like Iran Egypt Africa and India the population is young and not adverse to families which is fertile ground to create a middle class and middle class stimulates economic growth and commerce. There is a reason when you call some tech company customer service is in India. You may hate the experience but the guy who picks up the phone gets relatively well paid and he/she will buy a couch or car with that dough.

Many are predicting a bad second half. The drumbeat is loud enough further investing at this time gives me pause. The volatility of Apple Google Amazon IBM VIX are all up double digits reminiscent of early 2020. The greed index is at 70% so fear is the next most likely cycle move. The higher greed goes the more likely fear follows. Commodities are exhibiting volatility decreases

BTC is down 2.71% for the day, but up 11.3% for the week and 89% for the month. ETH down 1.78 for the day, up 3.7% for the week and 93% for the month.

Let’s see what Mr. Pal says:

9 Replies to “2021 Prognostication”

  1. Do you know (or even suspect) if there is any relationship between the severity of the bout of [C-19] illness and the extent of any ongoing morbidity?
    I ask because I too have read Pfizer and Oxford papers and both do comment on how severely ill people got if they were in the
    group of vaccinated folks who did contract C-19.

    To my eyes, the Oxford trial looks to have been run (perhaps unintentionally) more like a scientific experiment than the Pfizer trial. Hence there is, apparently, data available from the Oxford trial about the effect of increasing the vaccine spacing. I understand that this data shows – for that vaccine with that sample – it increases the efficacy.

    1. I think C-19 is an RNA virus and as such doesn’t follow the immunologic rules of a DNA virus. I think the vaccines are a huge human trial with fat tail outcomes, meaning the bell curve instead of looking like a bell looks like a pie pan. I think there are at least 2 escaped mutations one from Africa and one from Brazil that they are predicting will not be covered by the vaccine. If you look at rt.live only 11 states are red BUT inauguration day was the deadliest day ever. I think we are totally missing morbidity. In England 1 in 3 of recovered covid was back in the hospital with some ailment within 5 months and 1 in 8 were dead from that morbidity. In AZ hundreds of healthy kids are hospitalized with covid. I don’t think anybody has the first clue WTF is really going on with any kind of real Macro level of understanding and so everybody just gloms onto some point like masks and thinks that point is most significant when in fact it may be only minor. People want short quick bite sized easy answers to a complex multidimensional problem with a multi year course of evolution and therapy that is more gee whiz than tried and true. In the mean time everyone wants to get rich. We have a completely dysfunctional politic right now and a president that is determined to look like he is “doing something” when what we actually need is to come together figure out the right thing and do that. We don’t need narrative and we most certainly don’t need media sensationalism.

      Vaccine spacing? Who knows The NEJM article said 95% effective at death reduction at 2 30 mcg shots separated by 3 weeks. That’s pretty effective. It didn’t say anything about disease elimination. Maybe it just kicks you from the dead bucket to the dead in 5 months bucket. Maybe it stops your death but you remain infective to your family. I’m eligible, my wife is not. The permutations are endless. I think whatever the case this is going to take years to resolve and the ripples will take decades to be felt.

  2. Thanks for the reply.
    Pie pan would not be good – what evidence do you see for this?
    Agree folks want it quick and easy – and, of course, it may not turn out like that. When I was a kid I was taught/shown that you had to work at/for things – this just does not seem to be the case anymore. Ho hum, I must be getting old when I write a sentence like that!
    Like a lot of things in life the situation will all look a lot clearer in the rear view mirror. However, and until then, I agree that there is a lot of uncertainty and unknowns.

    1. The shape of the curve changes as probabilities become more random. the middle gets flat and the tails get fat so you may think you are predicting something but your predicting Brownian motion

  3. I get the maths – but what evidence do you see for this?
    For example, as the vaccines are rolled out in ever larger numbers (cf the clinical trials) what artefacts should/could emerge?

    1. An example is African and Brazilian strain allows re-infection due to viral escape making the vax obsolete. Another example is rapid multiple mutations with greater infectivity which means virus infects before vax can reach a significant immunity. Kids in AZ are sick and hospitalized meaning the virus now is more virulent in children likely a different strain. Pediatric resources are far less available than adult resources. The Gaussian curve presumes a fairly non turbulent distribution around a mean. A turbulent distribution looses it’s predictability and becomes second order.

  4. So, primarily impacts due to changes in the disease because of mutations.
    Very tricky to design anything [not just vaccines] to be effective long term against an evolving requirement.
    Only [vaccine] analogy I can think of right now is annual flu jabs – but such an approach ultimately limits the rate of change that is manageable.
    As an aside, software developers may have something to offer.

    Thanks.

    1. It’s actually a change in boundary constraints This is the velocity profile of laminar flow This is the velocity profile of turbulent flow Notice laminar flow is linear and forms a Gaussian distribution. The vectors at the edges are slower because a controlling opposing force is the boundary the outside vector rubs against. The central vectors are faster because they have less friction. In the second notice the little eye just before chaos. This is like the eye of a hurricane. Flow is rotational not linear. The opposing force that kept things laminar is exhausted. The some cloud is a 3 dimensional second order explosion aka the energy function is governed by exponential dynamics. If you consider what I said treating a stable virus with a stable vaccine has a Gaussian outcome. The well defined “rules” keep the velocity in orderly fashion. The rules keep the vectors highly correlated with each other and the direction is predictable. The circle is when the rules no longer have high correlation. The rules become hard to distinguish from noise and so things become much less predictable. The second order is chaos. Correlation is random which means predictability is zero in the worst case. Notice how quickly things go from very predictable to chaos. The gas column didn’t change the controlling envelope surrounding the gas column changed it’s interaction with the column. It’s easy to drive your car in a strait line because the friction on the tires is predictable. Less easy to drive in a straight line on glare ice. Your car starts to spin. Impossible to drive when the car is spinning on 2 axis

  5. An interesting/thought provoking analogy – I am familiar with fluid dynamics.

    I guess time will tell what the rate of change / level of chaos really is!

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