It’s Not Too Late to Go on Offense Against the Coronavirus
Um, the author is relying on three things, none of which seem reliable:<p>* that anything China claims is true, so far they&#x27;ve been lying constantly, we know this.<p>* that we will be able to accurately contact trace. This is problematic because its easy to tell who I have had contact with. But it&#x27;s much harder to tell who has used the same door knobs or shopping trollies that I have. It&#x27;s also an exponentially larger number. You can quarantine the 50 people I&#x27;ve touched or spoken to in the last week, you can&#x27;t quarantine the 2000 who went to the supermarket the same day as me. Not without just quarantining everyone anyway, so why bother contact tracing?<p>* that I can be isolated if I am not sick. Imagine if your housemate got the disease, with proof via testing. Now what? You can&#x27;t leave the house for 2 weeks? Good luck surviving off whatever is already in your cupboards, it&#x27;s hard enough to keep people from doing things they shouldn&#x27;t under social isolation, but mass house arrest is unenforceable, at least in the west.<p>Also,the author perpetuates a myth that&#x27;s risen about social isolation. Let&#x27;s clarify: The plan is NOT to keep everyone locked away until the case count actually reaches zero, that will never happen. The plan is to work out how many infected people we can cope with at a time.<p>If you have 25k ventilators, and 5% of patients need ventilation then you know you can have 500k people get the disease simultaneously. That way, the mortality stays at the minimum rate because everyone who needs treatment can get it. Any higher and you have to ration ventilators and the death rate spirals.<p>So we will aim to have a certain number of people get it at a time. If we drop below this number, we will relax social distancing somewhat, maybe reopen schools or permit some use of restaurants in order to INCREASE transmission. But then reverse that when the infected load rises.<p>This is the real reason testing is important. It&#x27;s irrelevant whether you have the disease, it&#x27;s very important to know how many people have it (especially how many people have it now and will need treatment in 1,4,7,14 etc days). Tests should be used for population monitoring not individuals. This was a key error from day one that is still happening today. Whatever your condition, YOU do not need to be tested.<p>Eventually we will develop a herd immunity which will gradually allow more and more openness without increasing transmission rates. Until one day so many people have had it that no measures are needed to keep the rate low enough to deal with. That&#x27;s when we return to normal.<p>There are nuances to how we do this. High risk groups should remain more isolated for longer as they are more likely to die or need ventilation. We need population testing, something governments are stubbornly refusing to do. We don&#x27;t know transmission rates under various levels of lockdown. All this needs to be managed semi-locally, so London might be opening up while Cornwall remains closed.<p>This approach is clearly laid out and was at the beginning of the current measures both academically and generally.<p>This is about control, not eradication, because eradication is not possible. Any attempt at eradication will fail when we&#x27;re unable to find literally every case world wide, we relax quarantine and then suddenly it rockets back in.<p>As soon as the author started talking about eradication, he left the scientific concensus. As soon as he claimed we could return to normal life if we got contact tracing working, he made a claim with no evidence to back it up. Contact tracing is a nice to have, but not important. The important things are healthcare capacity (aka ventilators) and population monitoring.