This meme in the media is the real negligence. This is the biggest blurred distinction they've used to sensationalize headlines. It's like digging up a graveyard and using it as proof that humans can survive for 300 years underground.
I'm quite happy to be over cautious until there's better evidence. It's fairly simple to change my behaviour and with a relatively low cost compared to the risk related to uncertainty over ease of transmission.
I'm not talking about whether to stay indoors or not. I'm talking about the precautions one should take in public spaces. I still need to go shopping but whilst there I'm going to assume all surfaces are potentially contaminated.
Likewise groceries, parcels and deliveries either go into quarantine for 2 or 3 days or they are washed.
Do you believe the point of isolation is to stop the spread or slow the spread? If the point is to slow the spread but ultimately for everyone to be exposed, wouldn’t it make sense to do that as quickly as possible without overrunning hospitals?
At this point new hospital admissions are significantly down from their peak. If the point is to slow the spread but acknowledging that it cannot be eliminated, we’ve in fact over-corrected.
The further you get the cases down, the slower the spread when things open back up, especially if it gives you time to ramp up other mitigations like PPE and test production during the lockdown to bring the R0 value down significantly.
The unmitigated doubling time is approximately 3 days. So for every halving in the overall prevalence you buy yourself 3 days of unmitigated growth in a population with no immunity.
On the testing and PPE front, again I wonder if this is just a feel good notion or if there’s even napkin math to show what scale of PPE and testing is theoretically being deployed and what impact that may have on R0.
But returning to the core point, how long until COVID has runs its course, and at what cost? Can we admit that herd immunity must be reached? As Dr. Birx repeatedly asks, are we at the tip of the iceberg or 25/50/75% of the way through?
No one wants to think about it because I guess it would make an uncomfortable choice obvious. Better to just self-flagellate so we can feel like we’re doing something.
