I think this document contains the essential strategy for quickly bringing covid-19 under control. I’ll call it “Containment and Eradication”:
1. Close national borders
2. Reduce R0 below 1 using a thorough lock-down, social distancing, testing, contact tracing and hygiene
3. Once the outbreak is quite small and testing capacity is decent, aim to drive the number of infected individuals as close to 0 as possible
4. Test aggressively and wait a couple of weeks
5. Gradually return people to mostly-normal life, but with large gatherings cancelled for the foreseeable future due to the possibility of super-spreader events, and international travel mostly cancelled.
6. Keep borders fully closed to until we have a vaccine, or at least impose long quarantine periods on travelers.
Approaches to covid-19 that involve getting a large number of people infected to build herd immunity and minimize the damage along the way are far inferior to this. The Ferguson et al analysis showed us just how messy that would get, but I think it was probably an underestimate of the expected disutility of these “mitigation” approaches, as its estimates of the infection fertility rates didn’t take into account the effect of health systems being overwhelmed. Furthermore, attempts to “flatten the curve” impose both economic and human costs for an extended period.
This is the most encouraging thing I have read about covid-19 in a long time. I believe that “Containment and Eradication” is the way forward and that this should be signal boosted.
An review of Ferguson et al’s paper by Nassim Taleb has come out: https://necsi.edu/review-of-ferguson-et-al-impact-of-non-pharmaceutical-interventions
I think this document contains the essential strategy for quickly bringing covid-19 under control. I’ll call it “Containment and Eradication”:
1. Close national borders
2. Reduce R0 below 1 using a thorough lock-down, social distancing, testing, contact tracing and hygiene
3. Once the outbreak is quite small and testing capacity is decent, aim to drive the number of infected individuals as close to 0 as possible
4. Test aggressively and wait a couple of weeks
5. Gradually return people to mostly-normal life, but with large gatherings cancelled for the foreseeable future due to the possibility of super-spreader events, and international travel mostly cancelled.
6. Keep borders fully closed to until we have a vaccine, or at least impose long quarantine periods on travelers.
Approaches to covid-19 that involve getting a large number of people infected to build herd immunity and minimize the damage along the way are far inferior to this. The Ferguson et al analysis showed us just how messy that would get, but I think it was probably an underestimate of the expected disutility of these “mitigation” approaches, as its estimates of the infection fertility rates didn’t take into account the effect of health systems being overwhelmed. Furthermore, attempts to “flatten the curve” impose both economic and human costs for an extended period.
This is the most encouraging thing I have read about covid-19 in a long time. I believe that “Containment and Eradication” is the way forward and that this should be signal boosted.