story
We all acknowledge that it is deadly. Because it is. And you are right that this is in all the data. But the narrative is still holistic. We are locking down everyone to try and kill the virus.
Yes, it could work. But so could strict access to most nursing homes. Wouldn't be cheap, but could have even been more effective. Reasoning that we could reach herd immunity style buffer between the populations.
(Note that I flat reject just letting people die. I am not saying to abandon the older at risk crowd. I'm saying take pointed measures to explicitly protect them.)
There is lots of commentary on that strategy if you want to go back and read it. Even if you were gonna do this, you’d have to figure out how to isolate high-risk populations as thoroughly as possible, to the point of locking caretakers in with them and whatnot. If you lock everyone down, you have a lot more latitude to half-ass things as long as you keep R below 1. Isolating high-risk populations and deliberately pursuing herd immunity means operating consistently under the assumption that virtually everyone else will, as opposed to may, be contagious.
Note that I am still proposing an expensive solution. But asking if the barrier between the populations could be setup stronger. Such that the death and hospitalization load would have been what we have had, minus most of the elder population.
Edit: you edited on me. Yes, I am proposing that offering strict access to this crowd could have been done cheaper and more effective than what we have done.
The problem with isolating high risk populations is that you have to go round them all up and temporarily house them in quarantined facilities. And since the elderly are sometimes infamous for their unwillingness to be rounded up and forced to leave their homes, you have to either force them anyway or just abandon them to their fate. And that’s without touching the massive logistics of such an effort. (Not rounding them up would be even harder.)
Honestly, if you were gonna try and do that, I think geographical isolation would be a better option. Compartmentalize your state/region/country into separate zones, block all non-essential travel between zones, regularly test essential travelers, and change the lockdown status of each zone based on local conditions.
What will end up happening is occasional breaches between zones where a zone might go from green to red. But it gets us in a position where most people are mostly unrestricted most of the time. It also makes it possible to eradicate the virus without actually infecting most of the population, which is nice. Logistically you’d, at most, just set up checkpoints on roadways and inside airports and train stations to enforce the travel restrictions.
Over time you could even allow travel between green zones.
It has been disastrous (comparatively). We had a couple of asymptomatic carriers infect some aged care facilities and now nearly 20% of the deaths country wide are from those incidents. And that's with the second best testing regime in the world though March/April (after South Korea).
We'd have been better closing the aged care faculties and moving people in with relatives. That's not very practical, but the COVID deaths would almost certainly have been less.
Then the use of ventilators was shown to be ineffective, so they can re update the models and bring back the original plan.
(See recent articles. In summary none of the patients who are put on ventilators survive.)
That's simply not true. A very high percentage of them die (because you only put very sick people on ventilators), but to suggest that they all die is just absurd.
Biggest problem: determining if someone dies because or despite of ventilators.
There are also millions of people in low risk groups who care for people in nursing homes and other high risk populations. How do you propose keeping them from infecting those they are caring for?
The thread is also predicated on a very high base reproduction number. A high R0 means a very large percentage of the population needs to be immunity before "herd immunity" is a thing (on the order of 80-90%). Even with a very low IFR, that is hundreds of thousands dead.
I'll note some of the first cases in WA included a high school student that had not been traveling. I cannot square that, how contagious this is, and the idea that it wasn't widely in that school.
I think herd immunity is silly at the holistic level. At a cohort level, though, it could work reasonable. Consider, at this point we could start rotations of health workers that have the antibodies.
I have said it before, but I will stress again I am just a random internet poster. Much of why I am posting this is to get challenged on it.
What are you talking about?
That was never the goal in the US.
Of course, the more data we get, the less control we see that it was ever in. Such that right now,I don't think we have a coherent plan.
This is absolutely insane. My ex was telling me today, "well we could have a vaccine in 18 months" and I am so getting sick of this bullshit big-pharma narrative.
Safe vaccines take 5~10 years to develop. A vaccine in <2 years seems like a disaster waiting to happen. Vaccines for SARS1 were very difficult to make and some caused reinfections worse or incomplete protection[0].
We still don't have safe vaccines for HIV or Herpes. I feel like people talking about vaccines in 18 months are being totally unrealistic and irresponsible.
