Yes, I’ve noted elsewhere that treatment options might make increased spread more likely, - and it’s unclear that this will be net positive in fact, because as you say, decision-makers will muddle through, and use the existence of treatment as an excuse not to limit spread enough, potentially increasing total deaths despite partially effective treatment.
But your claim that we want to ” just allow the virus to go through the population as quickly as possible ” seems wrong. Imagine (very generously,) that the available treatments reduce the percentage of critical cases by 80%. That means that health care systems can stay under capacity with a flatten strategy, but not with your suggested strategy. For “as quickly as possible” to make sense, we’d need a 95% effective treatment—which is implausible to the point of impossibility with the types of drugs currently being considered.
If the drugs save 80% of critically ill people from dying, then even if the remaining 20% overload the hospital system it might still be worth not trying to flatten the curve, just to avoid the economic damage from the lockdowns.
One would have to do a detailed analysis, but right now I seem to be getting the impression that the drugs actually aren’t that good.
Anyway I still stand behind the point that there is likely to be a strategy bifurcation where it’s best to either go pretty all-in on containment or go pretty all-in on herd immunity/deliberate infection, depending on just how bad it would be.
A 0.1% chance of death is worth about 1-3 months of lockdown, but age-weighting of deaths towards older people and lockdown damage skews this.
Without any change in the numbers I definitely still support containment.
Yes, I’ve noted elsewhere that treatment options might make increased spread more likely, - and it’s unclear that this will be net positive in fact, because as you say, decision-makers will muddle through, and use the existence of treatment as an excuse not to limit spread enough, potentially increasing total deaths despite partially effective treatment.
But your claim that we want to ” just allow the virus to go through the population as quickly as possible ” seems wrong. Imagine (very generously,) that the available treatments reduce the percentage of critical cases by 80%. That means that health care systems can stay under capacity with a flatten strategy, but not with your suggested strategy. For “as quickly as possible” to make sense, we’d need a 95% effective treatment—which is implausible to the point of impossibility with the types of drugs currently being considered.
If the drugs save 80% of critically ill people from dying, then even if the remaining 20% overload the hospital system it might still be worth not trying to flatten the curve, just to avoid the economic damage from the lockdowns.
One would have to do a detailed analysis, but right now I seem to be getting the impression that the drugs actually aren’t that good.
Anyway I still stand behind the point that there is likely to be a strategy bifurcation where it’s best to either go pretty all-in on containment or go pretty all-in on herd immunity/deliberate infection, depending on just how bad it would be.
A 0.1% chance of death is worth about 1-3 months of lockdown, but age-weighting of deaths towards older people and lockdown damage skews this.
Without any change in the numbers I definitely still support containment.