Apparently someone has done a statistical analyisis indicating that widespread quarantines are precisely the wrong way to go. Denninger mentions it here, but I don’t see a link to the study itself. Maybe Lord Bios could give his opinion.
Then there’s this from a Bayesian analysis including retrospective lookback at 1918/19. It concludes that all you do by restricting low-risk individuals is spreading out the rate of death and the total number of deaths actually increases. Why? Because the time a high-risk individual has exposed to the potential of getting the bug goes up and if he or she gets it, the odds of it ending badly are what they are, and suppressing low-risk people means the more-severe strains become dominant.
If the virus is spread freely, the mild and asymptomatic strains, with the least viral load, will naturally be spread most widely and become far more prevalent than the more severe strains. Unless, that is, the severe strains are hot-housed in hospitals, whilst the low-risk (young), uninfected part of the population is restrained from getting immune to the mild form by being sent home from school, university or work (Wave 1). Historically, such interventions generate a far worse Wave 2 once the interventions are relaxed, because the second time around, the severe strain is dominant.
3 replies on “For the Coronashphere Lounge”
Or perhaps instead, our older generation deserve better, like my parents – around 80 years old – and we buy them time so that medicines and such can be researched and discovered that give them a better chance of survival – such as the promising hydroxychloroquine, and longer term a vaccine.
I don’t think the idea is just to let the old and vulnerable die. You protect them from infection but not the people who are very likely to recover without major problems. Otherwise you delay the development of herd immunity and ultimately wind up with a second wave of even deadlier strains and the most vulnerable are at even higher risk. If hydroxychloroquine or some other treatment is effective and quickly available that would short circuit this logic I think.
Incidentally, my mother is also in her 80’s and I’m at high risk too.
How on Earth do you establish if someone is likely to recover without problems, when you’ve got stories like this guy, 43, in the prime of life and “never got sick” but ended up in the ICU? It is heinous crime upon crime that people suffer and die because of the actions of the venal chinese commies, and to my eye, all the more reason to be prudent.