This article describes a radical approach to (not) managing the COVID epidemic in India. It misrepresents my views worse than almost any article I have ever been quoted in. We talked for 1/2 an hour and my quote is wildly unrepresentative of what I said bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
I suspect (though I am unsure) that it misrepresents the views of Ramanan Laxminarayan @CDDEP . Since the journalist Ari Altstedter can't be bothered to present the story clearly I will explain what I thought Ramanan had proposed, which I said very clearly to him and what I said.
The writer from @business sent me a slide deck of Ramanan's talk. I was unsure what point it was trying to make, but after several reads I took it to make the following claims: 1) India's current lockdown is not sustainable and will kill many through economic damage.
2) Keeping the strict lockdown on and then lifting will delay a horrific epidemic without shrinking it appreciably. 1) seems reasonable (I'm not an expert in economics or India) and 2) is consistent with what we know about epidemics.
Therefore the slide deck seemed to argue 3) better than intense lockdown now, followed by nothing, is a milder social distancing, plus shielding the at-risk, which will flatten the curve somewhat but let the epidemic go through the population because it's inadequate for R<1
If those truly are the choices, Ramanan is correct that mild, sustained social distancing is superior to a lot followed by none. As @CT_Bergstrom has pointed out, even better would be mild distancing combined with a very intense intervention to slow transmission at the peak
Here is a link to Carl's thread
I am not sure if I understood Ramanan's point from his slide deck, but if I understood it, I agree with the narrow statement: intense temporary social distancing is worse than sustained mild social distancing, even if the former temporarily gets R<1 and the latter allows R>1
Perhaps almost anyone would agree with that. The Bloomberg story instead says that Ramanan advocates a herd immunity strategy (maybe he does, not sure) and that I think the main problem with it is that maybe herd immunity is not that great. That is a problem.
But the bigger problem is that a herd immunity strategy will cost many lives. W/o question India should slow transmission as much as possible and protect the vulnerable. How to balance COVID damage with the damage of physical distancing is an awful tradeoff each country faces.
But after trying earnestly to understand the issues while talking to the reporter, I feel ambushed by being quoted with a technical objection to the strategy. I wonder how others quoted in the story feel. Lesson learned: amateur journalist on the loose.
