A fascinating paper from Neil Ferguson et al of Imperial College, UK, estimates the true global incidences & effects of social distancing and school closures.

And good news: Victoria (4.7%) & NSW (4.0%) are down to % increases with a 4 in front. And it’s STILL too early to see the effects of the near-full lockdowns including a 2-day old 2-person gathering rule.

True mortality rate

Ferguson’s paper still has a lot of uncertainty in it. But the typical central figures are that Italy (10%) & Spain (15%) have a sizeable likely fraction of the population infected! Unlikely to be enough to have much herd-immunity affect (about 60% required for full herd immunity) but at the extreme end of the confidence limits Spain is approaching it (40%).

Taking into account the fact that infection is highest amongst . . young women due to higher socialization & travelling statistics and that there will still likely be significantly more deaths in Spain and Italy due to time delays of deaths vs cases, the true mortality rate is likely to be around 1% (consistent with the lower end of previous estimates due to prior underestimation of infection cases vs deaths). We’re still not sure of course.

This still means that UNCHECKED, COVID-19 would result in around 150K Australian deaths including 10,000 young people and 30,000 middle-aged people.

It’s equal to 75 Flu seasons. Although it may only be 10x more deadly, we have no prior immunity or vaccines for it. So it’s NOT ‘like the Flu’.

75 Flu seasons!

That’s what you say to people who say it’s ‘like the Flu’. It’s like the Flu if you consider 75 a number ‘near 1’. Yeah, like no-one.

That would be a tragedy of course. In America it would be 2 million deaths. And 400K in the UK.

But the ‘unchecked’ scenario, which equals herd immunity, is only twice as bad as what will happen if we ONLY ‘flatten the curve’ to keep the hospitals under control.

Eradication. NOT just ‘flatten the curve’.

With our closed borders we need to ERADICATE the virus and release vaccines early upon safety trials.

That means maintaining strong isolation rules. Just flattening the curve is almost just giving up.

Early release of vaccines

We should do this in the well-justified hope of the early arrival of vaccines.

You wouldn’t believe early release of vaccines was possible if you just read the mainstream reports of ’18 months’ as if we are not in a global pandemic and it was business as usual.

Expect to see discussion of early release of vaccines in the next month or two. It might be too late because the trials are being designed now around ‘business as usual’. Nobody here is talking this way despite a very clear biomedical analysis by a US policy maker calling for this. I do fear a ‘business as usual’ approach but hopefully I’m just paranoid.

Let people decide if they want to take a vaccine that’s safe (takes only 2-4 months) but might not work given that the next one might.

In that case — the only sane option – we could have vaccines in months so we can restart our lives and our economies without horrific loss of life.

School closures

In Ferguson et al‘s paper school closures contribute 40% of the contribution to flattening the curve. It is important because kids are very efficient asymptomatic spreaders.

Closing schools was a good move.

We must keep the schools closed or at least open them only for parents who can’t keep their kids at home.