One of my bored-in-quarantine activities is mocking Facebook friends for their faith in various Utopian government-run schemes for winning the war against the evil coronavirus. Most of these schemes require a perfectly efficient government, the elimination of the Constitutional rights of healthy young people, and a perfectly compliant population (including the 22 million undocumented).
Usually they respond by defriending me, because the only thing more offensive than someone who doesn’t hate Donald Trump is a Holocough Denier. Occasionally, however, they’ll ask “What would you do, then?”
My first response is “I’m sure that ‘Do nothing’ would be a better plan than what U.S. state and federal governments have done.” Then I will disclose my favorite plan, which is to pair eldercare facilities with hotels so that all of the workers in a nursing home, for example, could move into the associated hotel as soon as a plague was declared, receiving battle pay for their 24/7 quarantine. In non-plague times the hotel could receive regular guests. Presumably there wouldn’t be too many left by the time the plague was upon us, so there would be hardly any non-staff guests to kick out. Any worker that didn’t want to suffer through the quarantine could leave, forfeiting the battle pay and, at least for the duration of the plague, the job at the nursing home.
The advantage of the above scheme is that nursing homes could be much better protected than they are now and have been during coronapanic. Currently, workers come and go every day, with no possibility of testing for the virus itself, and get a basic forehead temperature check when they report for work. A single asymptomatic infected worker could easily wipe out an entire nursing home. A second advantage is that it would be safe to run the rest of the society, including schools, for anyone under age 60 and in reasonably good health.
Plague-proof the U.S. with nursing home and hotel pairings?
Also see “‘We could open up again and forget the whole thing’”
Epidemiologist Knut Wittkowski on the deadly consequences of lockdown.
Governments around the world say they are following ‘The Science’ with their draconian measures to stem the spread of the virus. But the science around Covid-19 is bitterly contested. Many experts have serious doubts about the effectiveness of the measures, and argue that our outsized fears of Covid-19 are not justified. Knut Wittkowski is one such expert who has long argued for a change of course. For 20 years, Wittkowski was the head of Biostatistics, Epidemiology, and Research Design at The Rockefeller University’s Center for Clinical and Translational Science. spiked spoke to him to find out more about the pandemic.
spiked: Is Covid-19 dangerous?
Knut Wittkowski: No, unless you have age-related severe comorbidities. So if you are in a nursing home because you cannot live by yourself anymore, then getting infected is dangerous.
We had the other extreme in Switzerland, which was hit pretty hard. There was one child that died. People believed that this child was born in 2011. In fact, it was born in 1911, and that was the only child that died. It was a mere coding error. Somebody with the age 108 was coded as aged eight.
. . .
spiked: How did we get this so wrong?
Wittkowski: Governments did not have an open discussion, including economists, biologists and epidemiologists, to hear different voices. In Britain, it was the voice of one person – Neil Ferguson – who has a history of coming up with projections that are a bit odd. The government did not convene a meeting with people who have different ideas, different projections, to discuss his projection. If it had done that, it could have seen where the fundamental flaw was in the so-called models used by Neil Ferguson. His paper was published eventually, in medRxiv. The assumption was that one per cent of all people who became infected would die. There is no justification anywhere for that.
Let us say the epidemic runs with a basic reproduction rate of around two. Eventually 80 per cent of the population will be immune, because they have been infected at some point in time. Eighty per cent of the British population would be something like 50million. One per cent of them dying is 500,000. That is where Ferguson’s number came from.
But we knew from the very beginning that neither in Wuhan nor in South Korea did one per cent of all people infected die. South Korea has 60million people. It is about the same size as the UK. How many deaths were in South Korea? Did they shut down? No. The South Korean government was extremely proud to have resisted pressure to drop the very basic concepts of democracy.
The epidemic in South Korea was over by March, the number of cases was down by 13 March. In Wuhan they also did not shut down the economy. Wuhan had restricted travel out of the city. They stopped train services and blocked the roads. They did not restrict anything social within the city until very late. We have seen, then, in Wuhan and South Korea, if you do not do anything, the epidemic is over in three weeks.
Knowing that the epidemic would be over in three weeks, and the number of people dying would be minor, just like a normal flu, the governments started shutting down in mid-March. Why? Because somebody pulled it out of his head that one per cent of all infected would die. One could argue that maybe one per cent of all cases would die. But one per cent of all people infected does not make any sense. And we had that evidence by mid-March.