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Saturday, August 08, 2020

Covid: Winning Strategy

I'm gonna summarize the important conclusion from my last few Covid-related posts:

Lockdowns are almost certainly a net loss (by magnitudes we may not appreciate for a while yet). The winning strategy (better than Sweden's) would be this:

Track the death rate, and when it's clearly peaked (which means the R value has gone below 1, with some margin of error considering delay from infection to death), do a big media blitz encouraging everyone to do their damndest to not get covid for the next two weeks, because once R is under 1, if you stomp it out it won't come back. (But if you don't, it will slowly smolder away and roughly double the deaths or more.)

And people could plan ahead for these two weeks, knowing they'll come at some point. And I think people could get behind something with a known time limit like that, and with a clear benefit.

Of course, any significant seasonal effects, as well as shifts in voluntary mediations, could semi-foil this, but it's a strategy than can be used again for a second wave.

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