How should we determine when there’s adequate supply? I imagine calling pharmacies and asking “if, hypothetically, I got Covid, would everyone in my household be able to get Paxlovid?” would work very well.
I would guess that having that many courses of Paxlovid “in the system” would be about an order of magnitude too low for true non-scarcity. (See: how many vaccine doses needed to be in the system before you could assume that there was going to be adequate supply anywhere you might try to look?)
I think I was unclear. I meant that if you did correctly estimate the number of cases, you’d need mamy times that many courses of medicine “in the system” to make sure that no one worried about running out in their part of the system, so that no one started hoarding where they were. I estimated that about ten times as many cases as you natively needed would about do it.
If our standard is non-scarcity for prophylactic prescription for close contacts, then 10x the expected number of close contacts in your “part of the system”...
(To be clear, this is just a statement about hoarding/availability dynamics, not about when “things should go back to normal”.)
On the other hand, it could be handy to use your more stringent definition of non-scarcity whenever I need a reason not to do something. If you feel like scribbling some calculations to back I
that up, I’ll be forever in your debt
How should we determine when there’s adequate supply? I imagine calling pharmacies and asking “if, hypothetically, I got Covid, would everyone in my household be able to get Paxlovid?” would work very well.
How about number of cases times average household size?
I would guess that having that many courses of Paxlovid “in the system” would be about an order of magnitude too low for true non-scarcity. (See: how many vaccine doses needed to be in the system before you could assume that there was going to be adequate supply anywhere you might try to look?)
We could use this heuristic to estimate “true” prevalence:
https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009374
I think I was unclear. I meant that if you did correctly estimate the number of cases, you’d need mamy times that many courses of medicine “in the system” to make sure that no one worried about running out in their part of the system, so that no one started hoarding where they were. I estimated that about ten times as many cases as you natively needed would about do it.
If our standard is non-scarcity for prophylactic prescription for close contacts, then 10x the expected number of close contacts in your “part of the system”...
(To be clear, this is just a statement about hoarding/availability dynamics, not about when “things should go back to normal”.)
On the other hand, it could be handy to use your more stringent definition of non-scarcity whenever I need a reason not to do something. If you feel like scribbling some calculations to back I that up, I’ll be forever in your debt
So I guess my task is to adjust my definition of non-scarcity “for me”? I don’t want set the bar too high for myself!
Alternatively this could be more of a Potter Stewart situation—I’ll know it when I see it.