
Covid-19 and the basics of democratic governance - rich_sasha
https://www.nuffieldbioethics.org/news/statement-covid-19-and-the-basics-of-democratic-governance
======
rich_sasha
A very nice summary of the communication and policy failings of the UK
government re Covid-19.

Apart from repeating the necessary mantra of “stay at home”, there is very
little transparency as to the scientific, social or economic backbone to the
government’s decision making.

This essay outlines it nicely and why it is important. Probably applicable to
some other countries too.

~~~
evancox100
Definitely applicable to the US as well

------
glofish
The best summary of how "science" and an epidemiologic modeling is not
governance and the tradeoffs of most governmental actions are seemingly not
even recognized let alone balanced.

------
cm2187
The main grief I have is that the gvt doesn't seem to have a plan, or if it
has, does zero communication on it. Are we still trying to build herd
immunity? Are we trying to freeze everything until a vaccine is available? If
so how long is it acceptable to freeze everything? I don't think this is
specific to the UK but I have the feeling that outside of South Korea and
Sweden, so far the policy responses have been pure short term improvisation.

~~~
chris_va
Here on the west coast the nominal strategy is the traditional one: testing
and contact tracing to get R<1.

In order to do that, you need enough testing capacity for anyone with similar
symptoms (which we finally have), though most of those are other conditions.
You also need to do contact tracing on positives, and test all of those folks.
That's 10-20x the number of true positives, so you can do the math on how many
tests you need.

Large events can seed massive hotspots, so I imagine some limitations on
gatherings and mask requirements will stay in place until either testing is
fully ubiquitous (test everyone), or a vaccine is developed.

~~~
glofish
at what point would you think that no contact tracing is necessary? Should you
track people that are not at risk at all, just because some people are? What
percent of those people should be at risk for this to make sense?

these are the type of issues that the original post talks about, real numbers
that allow you o see what exactly is being traded off for what

how mild should a disease (in general) be for this to not be necessary?

would you advocate contact tracing for the flu? Should we contact trace HIV?

~~~
chris_va
If you get R<1, eventually the disease will die out (see SARS-1). Coronavirus
get deletions, etc. A vaccine will likely be developed (we got lucky, at first
glance, that SARS antigens are fairly stable). All these things take time.

You don't "track" people with contact tracing, you ask positive cases who they
came in contact with and ask those people to get tested.

We could probably "eliminate" influenza with ubiquitous testing (at least for
99.99% of the human race). There just isn't an obvious entity to fund such an
effort. There should be, but there isn't.

Contact tracing is done for HIV.

