17. November 2020 · Categories: Politics

It is highly disconcerting to see the corona numbers rising again among almost the entire Western world, even though our understanding of it has much improved. I see a few areas where the successes of the Pacific Rim are not copied, and so a lot of unneeded harm is done:

Aerosol transmission is still denied as important, even among some leading public figures. The details can be found in this FAQ. With aerosols, not only is social distancing important, but we need to put additional emphasis on ventilation, and on mask wearing. Indoor spaces where we have high incidence rates or longer stay times should be avoided. Avoid meeting people indoors. At home, it means that wearing masks and keeping distance when you have guests will not compensate for sharing a badly ventilated room for several hours. And if you want to have a larger gathering, you need to realize that it can only be safe if everyone is virus free. So guests need to isolate for two weeks beforehand, and should for a week afterwards as well, to prevent a possible infection from spreading wide.

Contact tracing is failing badly. We need to accept that we cannot do contact tracing without keeping detailed records, and we need to accept that contact tracing is privacy invasive, and that the solution is to punish people abusing that information, and to effectively control access to it, not to anonymize the data so early that it becomes ineffective. We need to keep records where and when people are in indoor spaces, or other gatherings. This can be done with QR codes, and keeping a history on your phone that is only shared when you are infected. We also need to accept that transmission is a lot via super spreading, and that there are quite a lot of asymptomatic spreaders. Thus we will be much more successful if we not only trace the people potentially infected by our case, but also figure out where our case got infected. A super spreader might be asymptomatic, but at least one of the infected should show symptoms, and so allow us to find them. And lastly we need to be aware of our tracing capacity, and keep cases low enough to prevent it to be overwhelmed. This includes having around 200 spare tests per identified case to quickly test identified contacts.

Testing and Tracing turnaround times must be kept below 2 days. We need to test our case, contact the contacts, and have them tested as well within this time to be able to isolate effectively before you become infectious.

Elimination would have been overall a lot cheaper than the half measures taken in Europe and the US. You are comparing three weeks with no output to a year with 15% output reduction and permanent stress. It would have been best to announce an October lockdown already in June, lasting for three weeks, with time to prepare. And the lockdown then so stringent to eliminate all cases.

Compliance is the large issue with lockdowns, there are always some who believe that they can bend the rules. But I believe it is much more an issue with an unending, year long, lockdown lite to keep numbers just in check. For a mere three weeks, with enough time to prepare, compliance is a much better sell.