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| Dr Elli Murray is an epidemiologist at the Boston University of Public Health Her thread is interesting and informative. Click above to go to it. |
A few random thoughts:
I never realised there were so many epidemiologists in the world. And that’s not counting all the newly minted armchair epidemiologists like me. Zillions.
Some of the actual, real, epidemiologists believe that we could have shut down the virus, eliminated it, right at the beginning, if only we’d had the will. Dr Elli Murray seems to as well, as she starts off her thread with the thought that only because we “fear” other humans did we fail to crush to virus down to Zero Covid.
As an accredited armchair epidemiologist myself (Basil Uni, deferred) I find this counterfactual highly unlikely.
I remember back to the beginning, December ‘20 and January ‘21, when China was busy locking down we had what is now documented China’s suppression of information. At the same time the WHO was running the Chinese line that there was no human-to-human transmission. It failed to declare a “pandemic” until March. In those four months the virus had travelled widely. There are very close relations between Wuhan and northern Italy because of the huge clothing and textile trade, with plane-loads exchanging air every day.
I remember that Italy closed down early and hard. Surprisingly so, I recall at the time. Yet that didn’t stop its spread.
More broadly are we seriously to expect that all the various governments around the world, National and State, could be convinced, in a matter of days or at most weeks, to lock down all travel and instantly institute Testing, Tracing, Isolation and Quarantine protocols to crush the virus, which we are only now, balefully, perfecting? They’re dreamin’.
ADDED: I’ve been listening to the daily pressers on Canberra’s latest outbreak. A city of some 400-odd thousand, slammed down hard at the first case. Cut itself off from the surrounding states. Everyone to stay at home, for months (not weeks), a strict TTIQ protocol, high vaccination rates. Canberra has the whole kit of medical and non medical interventions. Moreover, as a mainly civil service town, they have high compliance. First jab rates are over 90%. Yet even there, they have now admitted they’re going to have cases ongoing. They’ve given up, explicitly, their earlier Zero Covid Policy.
I suggest if you counts do it in Canberra, you’ve Buckley’s of doing it anywhere.
Giving up on ZCP is not defeatism (as some China epidemiologists say). It’s accepting reality.
