Here is a simple thought experiment to illustrate this point.
Imagine you are given a magic wand which, if you wave it, will reduce COVID transmission by... 1/11
Should you wave it?
It doesn't sound like a hard question. The magic wand only confers benefits, it seems, and no costs. What could be the problem?
Surprisingly, in some situations... 2/11
The reason is that even in the simplest epidemic models, where all individuals are identical, the final size of an epidemic is not monotone with respect to a time-varying pattern... 3/11
Things are even more counter-intuitive in more realistic situations, where populations are highly heterogeneous.
For example, suppose now that you are given two magic wands: 5/11
What we showed in our paper with @ChikinaLab is that in this situation... 6/11
(Please note, however the importance of actually reducing transmission involving older individuals in this scenario.) 7/11
For example, is COVID more deadly in winter?👇
If so, we should be probably be very careful about waving "summer" wands, but we may be likely to wave any "winter"... 8/11
Navigating the counterintuitive consequences of this for COVID response requires gathering and examining evidence, making decisions in the face of imperfect information, and level-headed scientific discussions motivated by a search for the truth,9/
Unfortunately, policy cheerleading still seems to be diving much of the scientific discourse at this point, which is leading us to ignore important questions... 10/11
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