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Insane. Here's the key line, from one of the people in charge of that clown car: "There’s going to be a point, assuming the epidemic flows and grows, as we th
by paultopia 7y ago
Insane. Here's the key line, from one of the people in charge of that clown car:
"There’s going to be a point, assuming the epidemic flows and grows, as we think it probably will do, where you’ll want to cocoon, you’ll want to protect those at-risk groups so that they basically don’t catch the disease and by the time they come out of their cocooning, herd immunity’s been achieved in the rest of the population."[1]
Here's the thing about this: it's plainly moronic. Because this strategy only works if they can identify the point in question. And there's no universe in which a government can identify that point under incomplete information and exponential growth. It's the sort of thing that only a psychologist who has spent too much time hanging out with Cass Sunstein and other believers in the omnipotence of the administrative state could possibly come up with.
[1] Quoting a psychologist in charge of something called the "behavioral insights team" in https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/13/herd-immunity-will-the-uks-coronavirus-strategy-work https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/13/herd-immunity-...
- tonyedgecombe 7y agoBecause this strategy only works if they can identify the point in question. Why wouldn't they, they know the rate of new cases. When it's low enough they lift the quarantine. Out of all the problems this seems the smallest to me.
- paultopia 7y agoThey don't know the rate of new cases. They know the rate of observed new cases. They don't also know the innumerable little connections that are hard to lock down across and within age groups. This is the sort of thing that confounds centralized state policy. Read, among other things, James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State
- tonyedgecombe 7y agoThen start testing people from the population to see who has had it and who is currently infected. This is the sort of thing that confounds centralized state policy. The UK isn't America.