What Would a Focused Protection Strategy Have Looked Like?
We’re publishing a new piece by Dr Noah Carl today, this time one looking at ‘Focused Protection’, the strategy recommended in the Great Barrington Declaration. Noah thinks it would have resulted in fewer deaths than locking everybody down. Here’s an extract:
At any point during the pandemic, deciding which measures to implement represents a trade-off between their effects on the epidemic’s trajectory and their effects on society at large. Measures that substantially reduce cases or deaths, while having only a small impact on society, are worth putting in place. By contrast, those that barely reduce cases or deaths, while having a large impact on society, are best avoided. Mounting evidence indicates that measures like stay-at-home orders and closures of non-essential businesses are of the latter kind; they have large costs and relatively small benefits. In just the past week, two new studies casting doubt on the efficacy of lockdowns have been published. Vincent Chin and colleagues analysed data from 14 European countries, and found that “lockdown had no consistent impact”. Likewise, Christopher Berry and colleagues examined shelter-in-place orders in the United States, but did “not find detectable effects of these policies on disease spread or deaths”.
However, this is not to say there aren’t any restrictions worth implementing. One measure whose efficacy is supported by a number of studies, and which makes sense intuitively, is restricting large gatherings. For example, Vincent Chin and colleagues found in one of their analyses that “the simple banning of public events was beneficial”. Nicolas Banholzer and colleagues have reported a similar finding. In an unpublished study, they compared the impact of different non-pharmaceutical interventions, and found that “event bans were most effective… whereas stay-at-home orders and work bans were least effective”. Another measure that makes a great deal of sense is telling symptomatic individuals to self-isolate at home.
Worth reading in full.
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You could argue and I would, that large events should have only shutdown for a few weeks. Combining this with a simple screening for healthcare workers and then actually using the Nightingale hospitals with some additional volunteer staff, should have been all that was required.
Indoor events, not outdoor. That is another psy-op.
I read a piece last week about the Cheltenham Festival which got a lot of stick at the time for carrying on just prior to Lockdown 1. because ‘obviously all those people crowded together infected each other’.
It suggested that few people would have cross infected during the festival itself because, as bozo himself acknowledges, the Covid gets blown away by the wind.
But many racegoers would subsequently have gone gone home on public transport and/or spent the evening in crowded pubs, restaurants and hotels thus potentially infecting their friends, other guests and staff at these venues.
This seems to me entirely plausible, in hindsight, though it might not have affected morbidity in the long run.
you can’t get infected in the morning and then infect other people that night …
Might have been infected previously.
Plus, it’s a four day festival with packed bars in the town and on course before and after. Not knocking it (had my biggest win there) but to present racing as purely outdoors is wrong. On a cold, windy day at York there’s often only fifty or so studying pre-parade, the other 20,000 are nice and cosy in the enclosed stands.
To be fair, as a regular racegoer, a substantial percentage never leave the (indoor) bars at all. In recent years racing has become a drinking opportunity with added entertainment.
Not a racegoer so thanks for the information.
The bollocks can be stacked and re-stacked – but in the end, all that needed to be done was to follow the pre-2020 strategies, with a clear emphasis on short-term quarantine for the symptomatic.
Simple.
Greater use of the army should’ve been considered. While they may not have been able to provide specialist nursing care in residential homes they could’ve provided a lot of basic care and would’ve lived in isolation for several months if ordered to do so, whereas civilian staff may not be able to due to child care/family comitments etc. Those staff that couldn’t isolate for long periods of time could’ve been given paid leave while those that could isolate would be paid extra to live in sealed camps with army personel.
It needs stressing that any focused protection for people in the community, especially the provision of hotel rooms would’ve been voluntary to avoid accusations of locking up the elderly. For example people in multi generational households could’ve been offered a room in a hotel knowing that it would reduce their chances of dying, but mean they couldn’t meet with family members. Knowing the costs and benefits of taking up the offer people would then be free to make a choice, and they wouldn’t be locked up as they could return home anytime they wished but doing so would mean they couldn’t make use of the hotel again.
One comment – and not specific to this article. I wish the current trend for always prefacing the disease of Covid-19 with the adjective ‘deadly’ would cease. Yes, it can be deadly as we have witnessed but the use of this descriptor seems to imply that it is deadly more often than not and this just isn’t true. In the majority of people it is not deadly. After all flu can be deadly, a cold can be deadly in a very frail, elderly person, cancer can certainly be deadly but we never describe these illness as deadly flu or deadly cancer. It seems to me to be part of the psychological weaponry that has been used, so effectively sadly, to keep people fearful. I have noticed that even those who should not fall into this trap are using this phrase and I think it’s time they stopped.
“Another measure that makes a great deal of sense is telling symptomatic individuals to self-isolate at home.”
Given the fact that so-called ‘asymptomatic transmission’ has never been proven, surely the simple message of telling the unwell to stay at home should have been done from the start, rather than forcing all of us to mask up.
Given the Diamond Princess evidence, there would have been so few actually affected by the Virus in comparison with the blanket withdrawal of health care for 95% of the population: “Diamond Princess cruise ship provided a perfect petri dish experiment with the infection. The relevant bit from the Wikipedia entry is: During a cruise that began on 20 January 2020, positive cases of COVID-19 linked to the COVID-19 pandemic were confirmed on the ship in February 2020. 712 people out of 3,711 became infected (567 out of 2,666 passengers and 145 out of 1,045 crew), and 14 people, all of them passengers, died. At the time, the ship accounted for over half the reported cases of SARS-CoV-2 outside of mainland China. So out of 3,711 people only 712 became infected (a 19% infection rate among a population in close proximity with each other and sharing the same dining rooms, air conditioning etc.) and of those infected, 14 died for a death rate among those infected of 1.966%. Bear in mind that the passengers were likely elderly (to afford such a cruise) likely to have pre existing conditions (high blood pressure, diabetes, heart and circulatory conditions and other age related factors… Read more »