Quote (dro94 @ 19 Apr 2020 14:52)
The curves flattening because the most vulnerable are dying first is a bogus argument. In almost all countries, the spatial distribution of covid-19 shows a strong hotspot structure, with some cities or regions being hit badly while other regions are only mildly affected. Meanwhile, vulnerability will obviously be relatively equally distributed - variations in average age, air quality and such are far less pronounced than the differences in the frequency of covid-19 related deaths that we can observe. On top, it has been observed time and time again that a lot of people die once the virus has spread to a particular nursing home, which again shows that protecting the vulnerable populations is possible and recommendable.
Another very contentious point he makes is the claim that the actual fatality rate will end up at around 0.1%. Neither him nor anyone else can know this for certain as of today; and political decision-makers have to include worse scenarios into consideration too. Equally questionable is his claim that 50% of the population have already had the virus. Wherever the corresponding samples were taken and analyzed, the prevalence of antibodies was below 15%, often times below 5%. We've had such studies here in Germany a week ago, similar studies were conducted in Austria and elsewhere.
Simply put, no matter how good of an expert he is in his field, he's still dealing with a ton of uncertainty, and he clearly has no clue about risk management. He's speculating about the most likely scenario according to his expertise, but ignoring the gigantic costs in terms of human life and economic damage that would be incurred if his assessment is wrong. From a risk management point of view, his recommendations are clearly the wrong approach, even if his epidemiological predictions end up having been correct.
The one point where I agree with him is that the Imperial College paper is quite bad, and that an unpublished, unreviewed paper should not have had so much sway.
This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Apr 19 2020 07:22am