A quick update on developments in Covid-19, most of which support the thesis outlined on this blog over the past six weeks.
(The notable exception is the lost years to Covid-19 fatality research. Seemingly much higher than I was presuming).
We now know there were indeed probably vastly (i.e. orders of *magnitude*, not low %) more cases of Covid-19 in hotspots than officially being estimated even a few weeks ago, although this data is still very preliminary and uncertain:
https://www.marketwatch.com/…/more-than-21-of-new-york…
We now know there’s a strong chance the virus will slow in summer due to sun/warmth, and may never spread catastrophically in the hot developing world for same reason; always seemed likely but the pushback was (and still is) no sure proof:
https://metro.co.uk/…/us-says-covid-19-lives-just-2…/
More evidence/modelling suggesting the virus could indeed have been spreading in NYC and (I am suggesting) London weeks before being officially recognized:
https://www.nytimes.com/…/coronavirus-early-outbreaks…
It’s still too early to be sure, but signs from Sweden are that ultra-lockdown, with its catastrophic impact on the global economy, is probably an over-reaction. E.g. Sweden is still bad but better than us:
https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1253459552164556802
(I think our first three-week lockdown was prudent in the circumstances but we need to transition to something softer ASAP. Also, you probably have to lockdown *very* early to have a big impact on spread, and then you leave yourself vulnerable to importing future waves. E.g. Early test-and-trace success Singapore is now back to 10,000+ cases).
I’m actually disappointed by what I see as a low % of antibodies in early New York results (21%) that has so shocked the US media for being high. But all told this is a meaningful set of developments.
On the other hand a new research paper very depressingly suggests on average 10 years of life lost to a Covid-19 fatality, which is definitely higher than I would have thought from casually skimming the data in the past weeks:
https://wellcomeopenresearch.org/articles/5-75
One outstanding question for me remains whether full lockdown is a bit of a sideshow once the virus is spreading at scale, and doesn’t much impact the natural history of a local pandemic.
Remember I’m just an interested citizen trying to convert uncertainty into risk as a way of coping with lockdown.
I definitely have my own biases, so please take everything here with a pinch of salt.