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Which doctor

• akolbe 4y ago
  Nice double-entendre. Kudos.
• Manuel_D 4y ago
  I'm guessing this guy: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Bhattacharya https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Bhattacharya The scary thing is, he's essentially been proven right: China is facing a big issue where the rest of the world has herd immunity, but it's still resorting to draconian lockdowns. Bhattacharya was never a COVID denier, nor antivax, his main point was that isolation should have been targeted at the most vulnerable rather than applied nationwide.
  • alexvoda 4y ago
    > his main point was that isolation should have been targeted at the most vulnerable rather than applied nationwide. And you do not notice what the problems are with that solution compared to using lockdowns to keep spread under control until countermeasures (vaccines) are available?
    • Manuel_D 4y ago
      COVID's risk is not even remotely even across age. The overwhelming majority of the people who would potentially die from an infection are the elderly. His plan called for intense lockdown for elderly people and those with significant comorbidities. The overwhelming majority who are not at risk - vaccine or not - do not need to isolate.
      • fnordpiglet 4y ago
        You don’t consider other negative long term outcomes like long COVID to be a broad concern?
        • Manuel_D 4y ago
          Even with nearly two years of lockdowns it's estimated that over 70% of the population has gotten COVID at least once. Bhattacharya's whole point is that once it became clear that the virus was going to become endemic, lockdowns are just delaying infection and not preventing them. Thus the same number of long covid cases would have happened.
        • Akronymus 4y ago
          I assume less of a concern than the mental/developmental problems that came about because of 2 years of lockdowns.
      • tmpz22 4y ago
        What about overloading of hospital systems? Wasn't a major point of the lockdown that these systems were at a breaking point and any increase in patients risked catastrophe in certain places?
        • Manuel_D 4y ago
          People who weren't elderly or didn't have significant co-morbidities rarely ended up in the hospital for COVID. Thus the "flatten the curve" argument doesn't make sense for that population. This is the basis of Bhattacharya's thesis: focus the isolation efforts on the elderly people who actually end up in hospitals when they get infected, not just blindly applying lockdowns across all of society.
  • lern_too_spel 4y ago
    He was proven wrong. He assumed that the elderly and those with weak immune systems could be isolated from society by pretending that they all lived in nursing homes. Upon being told that almost all of them either work or live with people who do work, he simply ignored it. Many of those people would have died under his plan instead of surviving until vaccine availability, at which time, society could safely fully reopen, as the Dutch first demonstrated.
    • Manuel_D 4y ago
      His plan was never executed, you don't know what would have happened if the government set up isolation centers and took strong efforts to get elderly into them. The society-wide isolation orders were widely ignored precisely because most people knew they weren't at risk. An isolation plan targeted at those at risk may have been taken a lot more seriously.
      • fnordpiglet 4y ago
        Technically isolation is for the infected and quarantine is for the healthy. I think quarantine orders were largely followed in major cities where the risks of a run away outbreak was worse. The goal was only secondarily to reduce deaths but primarily to protect the acute medical care system from collapse under a major outbreak. “Flatten the curve” didn’t mean end the local epidemics but to reduce the rate of infection to make the rate of people needing acute medical care lower than the rate the hospital systems able to service patients. Except for a few cases we succeeded. Death is a much more exciting metric to count, but it was never our objective in the public health response. Death was mitigated with the vaccine, and secondarily by the public health orders. (Note outside of China I don’t think there has been any actual lockdown or quarantines despite people abusing that word. Advice to stay home and business closure is not a lockdown. A lockdown means you’re forcibly restricted.) Also - asking people to wear a mask caused hysterical backlash. Can you imagine if we had set up concentration camps for the elderly?
        • Manuel_D 4y ago
          The elderly actually have a strong survival incentive to limit exposure, unlike the bulk of the population. For instance, take the 8% non-vaccination rate among the elderly versus the 32% among non-elderly [1]. Bhattacharya's main point is that "Flatten the curve" is really "widen the curve". Reasonable to do for the at-risk population that are likely to get hospitalized and could create a shortage of hospital resources if they were infected all at once. Not so much for the vast majority of people, and especially not reasonable for children who were at minimal risk. Again, people talk about the need to reduce the load on medical without considering the fact that most non-elderly people who got covid didn't end up in the hospital. > Note outside of China I don’t think there has been any actual lockdown or quarantines despite people abusing that word. Advice to stay home and business closure is not a lockdown. A lockdown means you’re forcibly restricted. This is untrue, in much of Canada and the UK people were forbidden by law to go outside without good reason. 1. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html