Harvard epidemiologist: my colleagues assumed UK coronavirus plan “was satire”
The Guardian is such a rag. Why does it still have readers? Finding academics who will criticise anything this conservative pro-Brexit government does is easy: Johnson could make any announcement at all and within 24 hours the Graun would have found a contemptuous academic to tell their readers why it&#x27;s stupid and bad.<p>People can agree or disagree with the British government&#x27;s logic. Only someone very biased would treat it as inherently absurd.<p>So let&#x27;s look past the headline at what this guy is actually saying.<p>He starts this piece by asserting his authority as an expert. But he isn&#x27;t revealing any new information or critical analysis that would change anyone&#x27;s minds. In fact as you read further down you find he&#x27;s actually agreeing with the government&#x27;s policies.<p>The key points of the article are:<p>• Herd immunity will happen anyway and shouldn&#x27;t be a goal.<p>• A second wave may or may not happen, it shouldn&#x27;t drive policy.<p>• Be like South Korea and close everything for an unspecified period of time.<p>• Close the schools! But keep children away from Nana and Grandpa.<p>The entire article says nothing that hasn&#x27;t been said elsewhere; the only benefit this guy&#x27;s epidemiology experience seems to add is credentialism. 
But there are also major logic problems in the argument.<p>Let&#x27;s start with his last point about children and schools. He obviously realises children shouldn&#x27;t come into contact with grandparents, but fails to apply the common sense knowledge that many parents can&#x27;t stop working to take care of them e.g. because they work in the healthcare system, or logistics, or grocery retail, or pharmaceuticals, or government, etc. So those children will all go to their grandparents, assuming they have some: the one place you don&#x27;t want them to be. This is a point the scientific advisors to the government made in their announcement press conference but he fails to address it. Children need to be kept away from grandparents and in the presence of young, fit, healthy adults. These conditions can be found in schools.<p>He says:<p><i>Second waves are real things, and we have seen them in flu pandemics. This is not a flu pandemic. Flu rules do not apply. There might well be a second wave, I honestly don’t know. But vulnerable people should not be exposed to a virus right now in the service of a hypothetical future.</i><p>The belief a second wave is likely has nothing to do with how flu-like the virus is. Saying flu rules don&#x27;t apply is a non-sequitur. Second wave is a simple observation based on the fact that stopping infected people coming in and out of the country isn&#x27;t possible, nor will it be possible going forward. International travel isn&#x27;t going to remain shut down for long, which means even <i>if</i> the government could somehow wipe out COVID-19 purely via social control policies, it would come back the moment those measures ended and normal life returned. The only way to stop it permanently is if most people are immune so it can&#x27;t spread.<p>Also, just saying &quot;this might or might not happen, who knows&quot; is a poor basis for policy making. This guy is an expert, where&#x27;s the probabilities?<p>He says:<p><i>The UK should not be trying to create herd immunity, that will take care of itself</i><p>But the UK isn&#x27;t &quot;trying&quot; to create herd immunity. What would that involve, actually? Encouraging chicken pox style virus parties? It&#x27;s not doing anything like this.<p>Believing that requires an especially bad-faith reading of a (perhaps poorly phrased) statement by a fellow scientist. The goverment understands that herd immunity is going to happen sooner or later, it&#x27;s the only way to end this, and that&#x27;s why reaching it with as few fatalities as possible is the stated aim.<p>Finally, his recommendations are useless. He just recommends social distancing and shutdowns without any time frames attached. Does he believe people can self isolate and schools can remain shut indefinitely? If not, if he believes these measures don&#x27;t last for long, then there is a question of when the optimal time to deploy them is. And trying to answer that question is how the government arrived at its current policy.<p>I have to say, reading this makes me glad the government has better scientists than this guy advising it. Maybe Dominic Cummings is onto something after all.