Calling for rapid and sustained reduction in SARS-CoV-2 infections
thelancet.comThese are incredibly general statements. Obviously we'd all love it if our infection numbers were lower, so what? If achieving low infection rates would be simple we'd all be doing it, it's just that it's not.
I feel there's also some weird fallacy in this, the authors say infection numbers need to stay low in order to make contact-tracing work. That's what we did all summer, but then all of the sudden, infection rates exploded. Which, to me, sounds like contact-tracing alone doesn't really solve our problem here it's not this magic bullet that once you reach a certain threshold you're good to go. The other thing being masks. I've personally seen very strong adherence to mask-wearing in public throughout Europe in summer and autumn - again that, too, did not prevent this wave from happening. One cannot help but wonder how much those masks really help (especially the cloth types, proper ones probably help better).
I feel many virologists and epidemiologists are trapped in this spring 2020 way of thinking, they focus on masks and lockdowns - instead we need to start focusing more on super-spreader events, centralised quarantines, intelligent mass-antigen testing, technology-facilitated tracing, and active protection of the vulnerable with proper face-masks (Germany distributed them just this week...) and mass-screening.
We've also completely thrown over board many of our learnings from the aids epidemic - you won't defeat aids by banning sex. It just won't work... It's incredibly difficult, expensive and probably impossible in the long-run to control and ban these aspects of human life, just like banning small human gatherings is - we're social beings after all. The only way is public education that builds up individual responsibility (start using condoms, etc.)
When you lack resources, you're much better off taking an extreme approach early on to stop the spread and then following up with the points you mentioned to contain future outbreaks.
Contact tracing only works if you have enough people to do it. We've had four? contact incidents in my family so far, two that have lead to mandatory quarantines. We were only contacted once by local authorities, after an infection spread shut down most of my son's day care center. We were contacted days after everyone already knew what had happened and started to self quarantine, and, honestly, had it not happened at a day care, we likely wouldn't have been contacted at all.
Mandatory masks also aren't guaranteed to be effective. We had several people where I work get infected, even though they were (from what is being said), following appropriate measures.
How effective are the apps for contact tracing?
Getting people to use them is work but there should be a huge savings in human effort.
From a quick look at what's been published so far, they appear to be very effective if they have a high enough adoption rate and if people self quarantine after contact.
This is ancedotal, but the benefit of having a live person, working in an official capacity, doing the contact tracing, is that it gives definitive weight to the decision to quarantine and get tested.
The “fallacy” is the notion patently obvious to some; that people care about lives that are probabilistically lost that can be saved by artificial interventions.
People don’t care! They rather die in the hands of gods. Unbelievable but probably that’s the case.
yes, humans are traditionally bad at estimating opportunity costs of actions (or lack of actions)
How, in the new normal, do we ensure that reasoned posts like this and the recent one from the San Mateo Health Officer, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25341289 gain the prominence they deserve so we can avoid hyperbole and hysteria and take sensible steps to solve this type of problem?
Perhaps, software developers, being the reasonable and reasoning people we are need to think long and hard about whether contributing to the destructive patterns in social interaction that we currently experience is the correct course of action and instead consider our long term stature as a profession.
Having said that, it is my fervent wish that the main stream media becomes a permanent casualty of the pandemic. It really serves no useful purpose anymore.
This isn't likely to happen.
What they're calling for between the lines is a coordinated hard lockdown along the lines of what happened in China and, to a lesser extent, in several EU countries in March-May.
Actual lockdowns, where you force all social and non essential economic activity to stop (e.g., where people are forced to stay at home unless if they have explicit approval to leave) are effective, but they're deeply unpopular and - what many EU countries failed to do - have to be reimplemented at a local or regional level whenever there is any sign of reoccurrence.
They also require a level of coordination, preparedness, and public trust within and across states that just isn't there.
Instead, you're likely going to see a continuation of varying light to slightly more restrictive mitigation measures until the general population starts getting vaccinated.