
We shouldn't be using R0 to measure the rate of Covid-19 transmission - klevertree
https://get21stnight.com/2020/04/27/the-troubles-with-how-the-rate-of-virus-transmission-is-measured/
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trboyden
I actually thought this was a fairly well reasoned post rather than the
expected hit piece we see so much of these days. If you listen to the
politicians and certain medical experts, they keep spouting that testing is
the only way out of this, while ignoring you cannot possibly test 330 million
people frequently enough for testing to do any good (at least every week).
There isn't enough machines, nor qualified people to run them, nor places to
house such a large scale venture.

I do disagree that there is any evidence that isolation or social distancing
has had any impact on the spread. If you compare the graphs of what would have
happened if the government did nothing versus the ones that imposed stay-at-
home, they are virtually the same. There is no evidence of a flattening of the
curve. The flatten the curve theory leaves out the fact that capacity doesn't
stay level and goes down as it is used up. At best you would have mirror-image
curves where capacity goes negative versus the infection rate peaks until
patients pass or recover, freeing up capacity. The curves would be offset
based on time of infection until hospitalization.

It is easy to graph that based on public data, but the media nor medical
experts will show that as it disputes the advice they are giving. Time will
tell of course and the places to watch are CA and FL where people have gone
back to the beaches. If CA and FL spike in the next couple weeks, social
distancing should continue to be kept in place. If not, then it was never an
effective tool to begin with.

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klevertree
Are you saying that social distancing doesn't work to immediately stop the
spread, or that it would never work to stop the spread?

~~~
trboyden
Here is one of the first studies
([https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01248-1](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-01248-1))
on the relationship between lock-down policies and death rates. In the graph
shown in the middle of the article, you can see there is no impact on the
death rate by moderate to severe lock-down policies. All countries experienced
essentially the same rate of death from Covid regardless of lock-down and
social distancing policies. The only outlier is Hong Kong, whose reported
statistics are questionable at best given the level of government oppression
occurring in that state leading up to the Covid crisis.

