My earlier comment was too optimistic—that only considered plan A (suppress then release with test-trace and enough distancing to keep R sustainably below 1) and plan B (keep imposing the lockdowns if cases grow too high). It’s now clear that plan B (if we kept yo-yoing in and out of lockdown) is not obviously worse than plan C (the strongest mitigation we can manage and waiting for partial herd immunity), since partial herd immunity means ‘only’ 20% infection can make a difference. So we may well end up with plan C as the best option if plan A fails. Note that none of these scenarios look like a true unmitigated or weakly mitigated epidemic of the sort being considered on LW in early March.
The comments about governments literally having no plan beyond the next week, so you can’t even meaningfully say whether they’re trying for A,B or C seem much more apt for the US Federal government than most other places—not that anywhere in Europe or the state level has been great, but we have seen resources and thought put into post-lockdown measures.
My earlier comment was too optimistic—that only considered plan A (suppress then release with test-trace and enough distancing to keep R sustainably below 1) and plan B (keep imposing the lockdowns if cases grow too high). It’s now clear that plan B (if we kept yo-yoing in and out of lockdown) is not obviously worse than plan C (the strongest mitigation we can manage and waiting for partial herd immunity), since partial herd immunity means ‘only’ 20% infection can make a difference. So we may well end up with plan C as the best option if plan A fails. Note that none of these scenarios look like a true unmitigated or weakly mitigated epidemic of the sort being considered on LW in early March.
The comments about governments literally having no plan beyond the next week, so you can’t even meaningfully say whether they’re trying for A,B or C seem much more apt for the US Federal government than most other places—not that anywhere in Europe or the state level has been great, but we have seen resources and thought put into post-lockdown measures.
For what it’s worth, several of the more reliable models still seem to think plan A could work in EU and the UK—covid19pro shows steady exponential decline through to August.