[ExI] mit covid study

[Henry Rivera]

Lockdowns try to limit contagion by limiting contact in many cases to one’s household or pod. If people continue to have contact with people other than that, they are not really locked down. Have we really implemented lock downs as designed? It’s like enforcing mask mandates which we’ve discussed before. Americans appear to be particularly challenged with respect to following public health guidance. 

A NY Times piece today suggests lifting lockdown in India prematurely led to their current surge. My guess is that there are so many variables at play, that it will be hard to discern causality in India’s case or anywhere else. 

“The most plausible explanations — the amount of time people spend outdoors in India, the low levels of obesity, the population’s relative youth and the possibility that previous viruses had created some natural immunity — all seemed to suggest that India was not simply on a delayed Covid timetable. The country, like many of its neighbors, seemed to be escaping the worst of the pandemic.

Scientific research suggesting that about half of adults in major cities had already been infected was consistent with this notion. “It led to the assumption that India had been cheaply, naturally vaccinated,” Dr. Prabhat Jha, an epidemiologist at the University of Toronto, told me.

Government officials acted particularly confident. As Ramanan Laxminarayan, a Princeton University epidemiologist based in New Delhi, told Nature, “There was a public narrative that India had conquered Covid-19.” Some scientists who thought that a new Covid wave remained possible were afraid to contradict the message coming from Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government. Modi has a record of stifling dissent, and Freedom House, the democracy watchdog group, recently said India had become only a “partly free” country that was moving “toward authoritarianism.”

Confident they had beaten Covid, government officials relaxed restrictions on virtually all activities, including weddings, political rallies and religious gatherings. The northern town of Haridwar held one of the world’s biggest gatherings this month, with millions of people celebrating the Hindu festival Kumbh Mela.”

-Henry 

> On Apr 25, 2021, at 11:44 PM, Stathis Papaioannou via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> On Mon, 26 Apr 2021 at 12:24, Adam A. Ford via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>> Lockdowns seemed to have helped in Melbourne Australia. 
> 
> There was a long and strict lockdown in Melbourne last year lasting about four months. At the peak, there were over 700 cases per day. The lockdown ended when the cases per day was down to zero. Since then in Australia states and New Zealand there have been several much shorter lockdowns lasting less than a week if there have been been any community acquired cases: between 1 and 10. This seems to have worked.
> 
>> Adam
>> 
>> On Mon, 26 Apr 2021, 09:49 spike jones via extropy-chat, <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>>  
>>> 
>>> I am suffering from a severe case of confirmation bias.
>>> 
>>>  
>>> 
>>> I fear for poor Dr. Smigrodzki, who is surely feeling confirmation bias even more than I am:
>>> 
>>>  
>>> 
>>> https://www.pnas.org/content/118/17/e2018995118#disp-formula-6
>>> 
>>>  
>>> 
>>> Unless I am reading this wrong (do educate me please) MIT concluded pretty much the same thing I did over a year ago: lockdowns don’t help because people stay indoors where viruses spread best.  Outdoor masking is useless.  Indoors, social distancing is practically useless: viruses hang in the air a long time indoors.
>>> 
>>>  
>>> 
>>> All this explains why the Sturgis bike rally was an apparent sub-spreader, the bike rallies in Florida and the spring break parties didn’t show up in the noise: those events were mostly outdoors where viruses don’t spread easily.
>>> 
>>>  
>>> 
>>> It explains why the lockdowns don’t seem to be helping.  It explains why outdoor mask wearing is pointless.  It is all about air circulation.  It took us over a year to figure out what was right in front of us the whole time.
>>> 
>>>  
>>> 
>>> spike 
>>> 
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> -- 
> Stathis Papaioannou
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