Could this article contain a germ (ha!) of good news?
It tells us Covid-19 becomes highly infectious before symptoms appear - perhaps even as high as 55% of infections being acquired from someone who didn't have symptoms yet - which is bad news for contact tracing strategies...
It tells us Covid-19 becomes highly infectious before symptoms appear - perhaps even as high as 55% of infections being acquired from someone who didn't have symptoms yet - which is bad news for contact tracing strategies...
… but could it be good news for lockdown strategies? That is: it implies the disease passes through the population like a narrow, high wave, so that at any one time there is a small number of contagious victims infecting others at a fast rate for a short period, rather than...
… a large number infecting others at a slow rate for a long period. This should mean that lockdowns can be shorter - and perhaps more locally focused - than perhaps we have assumed.
Perhaps a testing regime based upon daily tests on statistically significant samples to...
Perhaps a testing regime based upon daily tests on statistically significant samples to...
… flag up early warnings so that individual cities or regions can have short sharp lockdowns - but also can re-open as soon as possible?
My point is with a short infectious period / high infection rate virus, fast, hard lockdown could produce surprisingly quick drop-off?
My point is with a short infectious period / high infection rate virus, fast, hard lockdown could produce surprisingly quick drop-off?
There may be a cross-over from Engineering (my field 😀) here...
Control systems for mechanisms that have a long delay between a corrective action and a resulting change often use a technique called P.I.D to prevent over-steer or oscillation.
Control systems for mechanisms that have a long delay between a corrective action and a resulting change often use a technique called P.I.D to prevent over-steer or oscillation.
(PID Explainer: say you are trying to control temperature by adding heat, you don't just measure the temperature and add more heat the cooler the object is; you also look at the temperature curve over time and use it's steepness and the area under the curve too )
Anyway...
Anyway...
Maybe this technique could be applied to the infection rate / lockdown control system to minimise the impact of lockdowns while keeeping us safe?
