LW Coronavirus Agenda Update 4/​6

[Elizabeth]

Three weeks ago I announced the LessWrong Coronavirus Agenda, an attempt to increase knowledge by coordinating research between LW participants. This post is an update on that. If you want to skip to action items, check out the last section.

Last Week’s Spotlight Questions

What are the costs, benefits, and logistics of opening up new vaccine facilities?

I learned several things about vaccine facilities thanks to answers from micpie and ChristianKI. We also achieved the hidden goal of Bill Gates doing exactly what David Manheim suggested and building facilities for the 7 top vaccine candidates, which is the best result for any of these questions so far if you don’t look too closely at causality.

Economics Questions

• What happens in a recession anyway?

• How will this recession differ from the last two?

• What will happen to supply chains in the era of COVID-19?

We made incremental progress on these but there’s a lot of ground to cover. Top comments:

• Examination of mechanization of the produce supply chain

• Discussion on the feasibility of moving away from JIT supply chains.

• Alex Schnell on the right metrics to use for this recession.

• Effect of recessions on fertility

• Effect of recessions on suicide rate

Changes To The Agenda

“What are the costs, benefits, and logistics of opening up new vaccine facilities?” is being retired from the spotlight on account of “picked up by billionaire.”

Added question “What is the impact of varying initial viral load of COVID-19?”

This Week’s Spotlight Questions

Economics Questions

Having failed to solve all of economics, we’ll continue those questions into next week.

• What happens in a recession anyway?

• How will this recession differ from the last two?

• What will happen to supply chains in the era of COVID-19?

What is the impact of varying initial viral load of COVID-19?

The hypothesis that lower initial viral load leads to better outcomes, and might be worth pursuing deliberately, is a central assumption is Zvi’s post Taking Initial Viral Load Seriously. Is it true?

[ChristianKl]

We also achieved the hidden goal of Bill Gates doing exactly what David Manheim suggested and building facilities for the 7 top vaccine candidates, which is the best result for any of these questions so far if you don’t look too closely at causality.

This leaves two questions:

A) How do we speed up vaccine approval, given that the supply is taken care of?

B) What do we want to do with the surplus factories?

Let’s start with A. If we want faster vaccine approval, we can have it, if we do our clinical trials faster. If we reduce our safety expectations for our clinical trials we can start human trials sooner. CureVac could likely start their trial much sooner if European regulators wouldn’t advice them to wait. Furthermore, we could decrease the trial duration by infecting patients in the trial with the virus.

As far as B goes, we might want to do more vaccination in general. Giving out more BCG vaccines might be a good idea for general health benefits. We should check whether other vaccines have similar positive effects.