38 Comments

With regards to the data, all i've literally said is you've made a conditional statement and we haven't really had any scenario to draw empirical data with which to test whether your idea actually works the way you're putting it forward.

It's assumption lies on the idea that we'd need to do this because the virus would circumvent any herd immunity by constantly mutating (which doesn't happen in most corona virus cases even with a high mutation rate).

That the mortality rate is going to be low enough to incentivise doctors to volunteer to early expose themselves without killing a large percentage who will die regardless of how much care they recieve (which we do anyway already with regards to volunteer patients of a significantly low enough volume to not risk them i.e. we're talking maybe 10 test cases or so rather than 100s.)

It just seems like the assumptions you're making rest on idealistic scenarios that we've yet to demonstrate as pragmatic in real life.

Along with the ethical considerations that have yet to be addressed.

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You know full well that I have presented data. You claim important data is missing. I can't prove that wrong obviously, it is others who would have to prove that right.

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I'm saying you're assuming that data exists that shows your scenario would be the most likely to succeed. The onus is not on me to demonstrate that i'm afraid.

You're creating a model where the conditions are such that the outcome yeilds better results than that of the current isolation model.

It's a model similiar to that of John Stuart Mill and his thought experiment of harvesting people's organs against their will to save lives of others. The greater good is served at the cost of people's individual happiness.

Unfortunately medical ethics doesn't work that way. We don't force doctors to be deliberately exposed just because the numbers add up better, anymore than we ask them to kill people without their consent to save more lives.

And you've left out the key point that we try to rely on a vaccine being produced sooner rather than later, and maximise PPE policy to keep infection rates lower than 4%, to avoid having to deliberately kill 4% of your medical staff just to aquire herd immunity amongst hospitals. Would your model still be viable if the mortality rate were 50% like ebola? Would you still deliberately kill 50% of medical staff just to aquire early immunity in that case? This is what I mean by cherry picking a given scenario that suits the outcome.

So what I'M claiming is that you've yet to showcase your argument as being sound enough to consider as the most effecient one, and then you have to address the actual ethical implications of imposing it.

If you could address those issues in more depth I would be more sympathatic to your position being a viable one.

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You seem to claim I'm selecting favorable data, so please show us the data I'm missing.

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The issue might be if even 2-4% of all young healthy people die, do you still want to actively expose yourself to that?

Most of the deaths will not be from lack of care, but simply the inability of your immune system to fight the virus without vaccine.

A vaccine is also what the author hasn't addressed here. A vaccine could be applied to everyone and wipe out the need to flatten the infection curve outright.

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This issue negates the issue of people infected within the medical system.

A corona virus becomes infectious long before symptoms spring to light, so infecting staff deliberately would require them to not be at work for fear they'd spread it around a hospital to all unsuspecting patients.

Now you have the issue of how do you take out a large proportion of medical staff JUST to infect them with the knowledge they are at risk of dying (say 4 out of every 100 will die regardless of care) vs preventing those staff from catching it in the first place through proper PPE.

Any one of those staff could catch a small level of corona, but due to the PPE would in turn be reduced further of spreading it on.

It falls down really to an issue of ratios, which is a purely empirical question. How many medical staff do you need to take out of circulation for 2 weeks at a time, and how would you treat them in isolation whilst an outbreak takes hold in the country at large in order to bring the immunity down to zero so you could have staff operating without risk to other staff and patients?

You'd still need to provide them with PPE to prevent spreading it between staff and patients.

Whilst I see the logic of the position, I don't really think we have any evidence to suggest it would actually work, compared to standard PPE, which would allow a smaller number of staff get infected over time, which in turn would prevent the number of staff dying from the statistically reduced chance of infection.

4% of your staff dying from the outset, along with all the morale and anxiety defecits associated with that compared to increasing PPE policy to reduce the overall staff infection over time to below 4%. Which would seem more manageable.

It would also seem more utilitarian to place the least likely to die out of the medical staff in the highest risk of infection areas to reduce staff deaths rather than wholesale play russian roulette with the staff you have.

It just seems like you're cherry picking your statistical outcomes that favour your hypothesis and not looking at the variety of likely outcomes. i.e. assuming you'll always roll a 6 on every dice roll because it suits your model best.

Also most importantly. In the UK at least, the response has been to massively increase the avaialability of temporary treatment centres such as the Excel centre converted entirely into a hospital in 9 days. The UK's PPE however has left a lot to be desired, but we are trying to assess what is possible not what's been enacted terribly due to poor response.

And they do run limited deliberate infections to study the demographics and antibody production. It's part of the process of developing a vaccine, which is also the KEY factor in determining how quickly you can end the cycle by cutting the head off the hydra.

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That seems like the most bizarre strawman response to what is a relative mild constructive criticism.

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Glad to see someone else is pondering this. For a young, very healthy person, the reasonable question could well be "If I'm going to get it anyway, why not get it over with?" Deliberate exposure followed by absolute quarantine and first rate self care. Medical resources would be unlikely to be needed. If enough people did it, they could grow into the needed immune work force. BTW, I'm not volunteering. I'm a 61 year old asthmatic. (No, I don't smoke.) And I'm worth saving. But I understand the impatience with waiting out the flattened curve.

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No of course they aren't to blame, but I would have preferred they didn't get shot!

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Cases in China:

Feb 18...75,184Feb 19...75,700.....(+0.6%)Feb 20...76,677.....(+1.3%)Feb 21...77,673.....(+1.2%)Feb 22...78,651.....(+1.3%)Feb 23...79,205.....( +0.7%)Feb 24...80,087.....(+1.1% )Feb 25...80,828.....(+0.9%)Feb 26...81,829.....(+1.2%)Feb 27...83,112.....(+1.6%)Feb 28...84,624.....(+1.8%)Feb 29...86,613.....(+2.8%)Mar 1.....88,590....(+2.3%)

Deaths:

Jan 29... 170....... 29% increase over the previous dayFeb 1..... 304....... 17%Feb 4..... 492....... 13%Feb 13... 1,383.... 10%Feb 16... 1,775..... 6%Feb 23....2,618......6%Feb 25....2,763......2%Feb 29...2,979.......2%Mar 1.....3,069.......3%

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How do you feel about the assassinations of MLK or Lincoln; are they in part to blame because they could have presented their positions in ways to generate less backlash?

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I feel like you could have framed these arguments differently and generated less backlash. Maybe if you had coded them up in some simple simulations and presented it as “WOW this simple model has some surprising results!” In that frame, the reader is kind of standing side by side with you looking AT the argument. As it was written, I suspect it felt more like the reader was oriented face to face with the author and it has a more confrontational when the argument is coming from the author’s mouth.

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wiki has cases:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wi...

then I found this:

https://www.worldometers.in...

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Thanks for the summary info. What is the source, and can you provide an update?

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If you are omniscient, you already know the best policy, if not, you are just shooting in the dark. We do know it will spread fastest when not known and there is no containment or treatment. We don't know how communicable or how these will change that or how effective these might be. We don't know how it is spread, the effectiveness of preventative measures in themselves or the thoroughness of their adoption. We don't know its seasonality, its mutability, or the susceptibility of various populations. We don't know the life of its immunity or whether that may spread resistance without the disease. There may be a better approach, but it would be a shear guess at this point.

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