On “Armchair Epidemiology”

It seems like an Epidemiologist is most likely to be a doctor with some knowledge of statistics. On the contrary, I would have thought that a statistician/operations research person with domain knowledge of medicine would be a lot better suited to study epidemiology.

A lot of the existing models also seem really naïve for something an entire field depends on. Tradeoffs between human life lost due to the disease and effective human lives lost due to economic downturns seem entirely unstudied.

Czechia's actions of forcing people to using masks seems to have worked amazingly well for flattening out the curve. The "science" not seems to support it, and official recommendations are now moving back to recommending masks for all. The popular hypothesis for this, is that it stops nonsymptomatic carriers from being spreaders.

Now this sounds like a fairly obvious thing to realize, and to an extent, existing models should have caught this a lot earlier.

I grew up as a kid with an almost religious belief in Science. Over time, I have come to realize that a lot of our sciences are at best empirical and at worst entirely unverifiable. I am a 100% certain, that in a 100 years, we will look at medicine and nutrition of the 2000s, the way we look at humors and blood letting.

The experts are definitely what we need, but not all experts are created equal. It’s like during wwi - it took a while to weed out the useless commanders/generals since the peacetime systems failed to promote based on ability

(Edit: Incidentally, I think we have some great people in Alberta at the moment. Very lucky for us)

This article: https://virologydownunder.com/past-time-to-tell-the-public-i..., plus the rising mortality numbers, spurred me to start warning the medically vulnerable people in my life on Feb 23. I am very grateful to the authors for helping me do the right thing.

At this point, it seems to me that our experts are still letting us down in two important ways:

1. They aren't rebutting this implicit notion that any mortality risk below 1% can be rounded down to zero. As a consequence, the idea that it might be a good idea to let younger, healthy people just go out and get the virus and get immune seems to still have currency, and this is really dangerous. We can't open things back up until we have a credible plan for driving the infection rate toward zero. Leaving aside the risk of life-changing injury, a mortality risk of eg 0.5% applied to eg half of young adults would still be by far the most dangerous thing that happens to most of them this year, and a huge personal tragedy for many of us. Do the math and work out how many people you know would die.

2. Simple, inexpensive measures like widespread masking, handwashing, gloves and eye protection will clearly be important components of any credible plan for driving the infection rate toward zero, unless we get an early vaccine. The experts should be hammering the point that we all need to be fastidious about those things whenever we open back up again.