This is definitely worth a read: https://www.persuasion.community/p/what-we-got-wrong-and-right-about?fbclid=IwAR0W2jwalxMG4u2DtxsofQjEhnMPpTy-hW8K8VCp1uRbChPEANlXoJmtMlo
Interviewed are the following:
A few highlights, but I suggest just clicking the article:
Interviewed are the following:
Quote:
- Monica Gandhi, a professor of medicine at the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine. Her expertise includes infectious diseases, epidemiology, and biostatistics;
- Vinay Prasad, an associate professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of California San Francisco. He is a hematologist-oncologist;
- Stefan Baral, an associate professor in the Department of Epidemiology at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
A few highlights, but I suggest just clicking the article:
Quote:
Stefan Baral: We teach this in class: An epidemic is when you have more cases than you would otherwise expect. What's going to have to happen is ensuring that we're adjusting our expectations, so that we can make decisions in a thoughtful way. In the U.S. there should be an expectation that there will be increased cases of COVID-19 come this winter. But if we say that we expect the same number of cases that are happening now to be happening in December, and then cases go up, we're going to declare that we're right back in the thick of it. I worry that yo-yo-based approaches are going to be very difficult for people, and would suggest we update our expectations with a focus on actual health outcomes, and not just test results.
Quote:
SB: We applied a uniform intervention strategy to something that was disproportionately affecting particular communities. We locked down society, but transmission doesn't happen at the level of society: It happens at the level of households and workplaces. And we didn't really do a lot in those places, so a lot of the workplaces declared "essential" continued, and we didn't provide those people options in terms of their households. For example, we could have made temporary living spaces available, especially for people in multi-generational households.
Quote:
VP: Another great failure is that we didn't learn a lot. We did so many different interventions, but we didn't actually study many of them. For example, there are still questions about how much to wear masks, and under what circumstances. We don't know much more about that than when the pandemic began.
Quote:
I think many people think Zoom is what liberated uswere it not for Zoom, how bad would this pandemic have been? But my counterfactual is different. Zoom allowed a lot of upper-middle-class white-collar people the ability to work and make money and not lose their jobs, and to exclude themselves from society. That fundamentally changed the pandemic. If you went back 15 years ago, and you didn't have Zoom, you would be facing unprecedented layoffs of wealthy, upper-middle-class people.
