We shouldn't be using R0 to measure the rate of Covid-19 transmission | Hacker News Reader

We shouldn't be using R0 to measure the rate of Covid-19 transmission

get21stnight.com

1 pointklevertree4 comments

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.

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

There is a lack of evidence to support either assumption. There is anecdotal evidence that suggest it might work and plenty of examples where it was not done and there was no significant increase in Covid infections/hospitalizations (Sweden).

Here is one of the first studies (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.

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