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Here is a discussion on Channel 4 on the approach taken by the UK government.

Debating are:

- John Edmunds: a professor in the Centre for Mathematical Modelling of Infectious Diseases, London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine

- Tomas Pueyo: his modelling of the pandemic has gone viral on the web: https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-act-today-or-peop...

During the debate, Pueyo throws up his hands in horror at what the professor says. Listening to them both, I honestly don't know who is right. You may think a level-headed response is the right approach rather than an emotional one. But there is something cold, clinical and unemotional about the UK's strategy to tackle this pandemic.

And can you "nudge" people to adopt certain behaviours in one country when the rest of the world is doing the opposite to what you advocate?

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Wow, Tomas Pueyo is a self proclaimed „growth hacker“ with no experience in epidemiology. I would prefer to have people weigh in on the issue that actually have more than two weeks experience in this. Everyone can have good ideas but giving people like Pueyo a platform for their self marketing must be an insult for all real experts that work on these issues.

With statements like "the markets are up", and the hyperbole of "so we're saying 'we want to kill 200,000 people'" and "killing everybody", which even the anchor has to reign him in on, Mr Pueyo seems like such a douchebag. he comes of as incredibly unlikeable (at least to me). especially compared to Mr Edmunds, who goes through how herd immunity is a good end-game in a measured and calm manner. to which he seems to offer no counterpoint. they even both agree on lowering the peak, just not on how to do that/when to do it.

edit: it seems reasonable to me to suggest not impose quarantine measures too early, to not drag those measures on for longer than necessary - that just makes it more likely people will disobey it. indeed, because a vaccine is so far off, herd immunity seems like the only plan for now.

Funny thing about this is that they don't disagree on herd immunity. They argue over optimal rate and tradeoffs (where/when measures slider should be moved).

In this rare case Pueyo credentials don't matter much as he pretty much echoes open letter from scientific community coming from Italy.

What is not mentioned is that buying a bit of time also increases a chance for many people to get treatment that is yet to be discovered/approved.

absolutely, although it's a balancing act. there's also a mental health component to isolation/quarantine, and how do you measure that? it's a tough and complex call in any case, and i'm glad i don't have to make the call.

It's so crazy seeing him pop up like this. I used to work with Tomas on viral facebook apps like Astrology and Birthday Cards. Obviously working on viral apps is not the same as epidemiology and growth hacking.

He was quite a character to work with, and I'm not sure how to put this .. on the one hand his doc seems more or less correct and it's good that he was able to present things in a way that drove action, but on the other hand like you allude to one shouldn't necessarily believe things about epidemiology just because he's saying it.

On Facebook I saw Paul Buchheit sharing Tomas Pueyo's medium post. I was stunned that PB would share models created by someone who clearly has so little knowledge of epidemiology.

I was unable to comment and call Paul out on this, due to Paul Buchheit's privacy settings allowing only his Facebook friends to comment, not any arbitrary Facebook followers. It's very frustrating to not have an outlet to comment on and critique what is clear misinformation.

Well, they are both in agreement that we need to reach herd immunity at minimal cost. They also agree to keep the rate of new infections below NHS's capacity to handle.

They disagree on:

- adherence to lockdown measures over a longer time

- actual rate of spreading the disease

I agree with John Edmunds on these two points, however I am frankly disappointed a third approach is absent from the debate which is to lockdown aggressively now and deliberately infect healthy-age adults to achieve herd-immunity in the healthiest (most active) population.

These types of organized "corona parties" if you will could be medically supervised and coordinated with the NHS's ability. In that case you have controlled (accelerated) spread with 0 viral coefficient and uncontrolled general population spread with a viral coefficient.

That said, it would only be ethical if the government believes it could manage the capacity of the NHS. I think more realistically it's a foregone conclusion that the country health systems will be overrun and that drastic lockdown measures only make sense for a few weeks to make sure herd immunity comes at effectively half the cost in human lives.

If they don't believe they can manage the NHS capacity then the UK governments' policy is by all means the most human and economically effective way to manage it

> These types of organized "corona parties"

What if we gave a corona party and nobody came? Seriously, I don't think forcing people to be infected is ethical in any way whatsoever, unless you are a truly brutal trolley-pushing utilitarian, and very confident that your strategy will work....

Your parent wasn’t advocating for forced infection. It’s my understanding that pox parties were a fairly common way to manage the spread of chicken pox.

If you take some extreme assumptions; everyone will catch this, and you can infect in a totally controlled way where only the ones you wanted to infect were infected, you could definitely argue that controlled infection was the best course of action.

Pox parties are forced infection. Children do not choose to go or understand what is being done to them. Their parents exert power over them to make it happen.

You can argue about the morality of it, but the analogy with adults voluntarily getting infected is false.

> there is something cold, clinical and unemotional about the UK's strategy to tackle this pandemic

I don't see that this is a criticism. This kind of decision-making should be based on expertise, not emotion.

It seems unlikely that they're unconcerned with the harm done. Minimising harm is the entire point of responding to the pandemic, after all.

> you can't "nudge" people to adopt certain behaviours in one country when the rest of the world is doing the opposite to what you advocate.

You've not shown that the nudge-based approach will be ineffective.

Harm to what? The populace, or the bank balances of the cabinet?

I agree that misaligned wealth-incentives for politicians can be a serious issue, but I'm not convinced it's likely to apply here.

Unlike many political issues, this one threatens the nation's leaders personally, and the cabinet presumably has a far higher average age (and therefore vulnerability) than the general population.

As we've already seen with Iran, the people at the top aren't safe from infection.

I'm going to go with the guy who was awarded an OBE for his work in infectious disease control: https://www.lshtm.ac.uk/newsevents/news/2016/leading_infecti...

OBE is a political honour, not a scientific one.

Got the Politit honour for all the scientific work. It's yet another accolade for their recognized expertise.

I'm not sure following honors/awards is always the safest path, but your answer doesn't make sense to me at all: he was awarded for infectious disease control "particularly the Ebola crisis response in West Africa", which sounds to me like valuable experience, and solid ground to claim some knowledge.

Thanks for putting some more meat on your appeal to authority. Seems a little bit more reasonable, but I have little faith in UK institutions in 2020.

The more explicit reason to view him as credible is his body of work. The award was ostensibly given in recognition of that work, so to cite the award in support of his credibility is pretty much the same thing as citing the work, just with an appeal to authority thrown in. Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, an appeal to authority is as valid as the authority you’re appealing to.

My gripe was that OC made an appeal solely on the OBE rather than his body of work. Such awards should be viewed with suspicion as they can be awarded on the basis of saying the convenient thing as much as the right thing.

I said he was awarded the OBE because of his work in this area, not that an OBE is solely a reason to trust his opinion. He is far more qualified than the growth hacker / marketing guy who has zero expertise in this area as far as I can tell.

Well you probably should have cited a more credible award so

I’ll take the guy who has dedicated a significant amount of his life to being an expert in the relevant area.

>for his work in infectious disease control

That's almost a BBC level of "debate". An expert, plus some dude who disagrees and makes good television. Could they not find an actual qualified person with a different opinion instead of a "SV Tech Executive"?

Reminds me of a stand-up routine by Dara O'Briain, "for the sake of balance, we must now turn to Barry who believes the sky is a carpet painted by God".

Obviously an exaggeration in this case - but here one guy is a recognized epidemiologist and the other is a SV tech guy.

A more cynical question: can a PM win the next elections or politically survive the next weeks if a lot of people die and he just shrugged his shoulders, when the rest of the world did their best to keep people alive, successfully or not? I bet he'll have to change course pretty soon.

And that’s the real calculus here: how will this be perceived after the dust settles? If the population doesn’t think their leaders did enough, there’s risk of reprisals. If the government does the wrong thing but people think it was right, everything is fine. But if the govt did the right thing and people think it was wrong, correctly or incorrectly, there may be reprisals.

Irrelevant. All that matters is the editorials and vox pops in the months immediately prior to an election. Voters don’t remember where they left their keys, never mind last year - and if the current U.K. gov have shown anything, it is that they can and will win every election until the end of time - they’ve presided over a decade of unmitigated disaster, and their approval just keeps growing.

No, we’ll be talking about how Jeremy Corbyn singlehandedly introduced covid to the U.K. It won’t be “true”, but that is... irrelevant.

Yes, if the Tory press back them up. Brexit has shown that the narrative can be spun in their favor.

The impacts of Brexit are relatively abstract; COVID-19 is piles of dead bodies and 1 in 20 families losing a grandparent. Spinning that positively is mighty challenging.

a lot more than 1 in 20, potentially.

With an overwhelmed health system and shortage of ventilators, mortality can exceed 5% in the general population. If that happens, everyone will loose a loved one.

That's why italy and Germany are desperately sourcing more ventilators: https://www.ft.com/content/5a2ffc78-6550-11ea-b3f3-fe4680ea6...

I don't personally think politics are playing a major role in these decisions. UK elections are 5 years away, that's a lot of time for them to change the narrative if things don't end well.

The Tory party does not require an election to backst— er, replace its leaders.

In terms of realpolitik, I guess it depends on the extent, the speed and the affected population.

If it's a lot of people over a long time, they'll be out. If it's a lot of people over a short time, it'll come down to who dies, and how much time until the next election. The young and middle-aged, and generally "the productive" people die: they're out. If it's the old and those close to retirement age, it will be, quite literally, a rejuvenation for the country, lots of wealth will be passed down, the pension and health system will be unburdened, the job market might open up for the young, that could lead to a strong economic improvement for plenty of people.

The personal economic situation is very important, but you'll need some time between the event and the election. If aunt Mary just died last week, you're maybe not going to vote for the guy in office that is responsible for the policies. If aunt Mary died three years ago, your finances have significantly improved, you've inherited a house and your future looks bright, why experiment with a new leadership?

Won't all the Brits be banned from entering all the countries in the world for very very long if they have such a big change of carrying the virus?

If you get it, you're only highly infectious for 7 days, and infectious for 30-60 days. After that, you might have antibodies for (some variants of) the virus, but you won't have the actual virus.

where did you get the 30-60 days from? is that also true if you are asymptomatic?

> But there is something cold, clinical and unemotional about the UK's strategy to tackle this pandemic.

Boris Johnson's chief SPAD recently (this year) employed a known eugenicist, and that person only resigned after considerable public consternation.

> Listening to them both, I honestly don't know who is right.

Well, I suppose we'll find out.

There is no “UK strategy”, just like the number of cases in the US is much higher than the stats say but there are no tests for ordinary people.

The “UK strategy” is “let old people die”.

That “strategy” will be scrapped in the next day or two. Because it’s dumb.

It’s like some “theoretical” thing that ignores what’s actually happening and what has happened before.

Everyone is going to be Italy. Unless they’re China or South Korea and get it under control.

China was Italy before Italy was Italy. 400M people locked down. But they showed it works.

Told you all:

https://www.buzzfeed.com/alexwickham/coronavirus-uk-strategy...

> But there is something cold, clinical and unemotional about the UK's strategy to tackle this pandemic.

You say that as though that’s a good thing. The coldest, most rational view is that the virus will eliminate the weak and elderly, and therefore be of benefit to society.

Given that the current U.K. government have enthusiastically spoken about eugenics, this is essentially the mindset you’re supporting.

So. Would you really still say that cold, clinical, and unemotional is the best way for us to act?

Look at chart 7 of Pueyos article. He uses this chart to underpin his argument that the lockdown in Wuhan is the way to approach controlling the virus. But note, on that chart it shows that testing only became available to the Chinese authorities 9 days before the lockdown. In all other outbreaks (even the US one) there has been widespread testing - it's just not reasonable to make inferences from that situation to any of the others.

Pueyo doesn't understand the data, worse he has made no effort to understand the data (like actually reading the chart for a start). He's just a lad messing round with numbers.

> In all other outbreaks (even the US one) there has been widespread testing

Can you back up that claim? From what I've read, the opposite seemed to be the case, especially in the USA.

Until late Feb, it was mainly CDC, but in March many more states came into the picture:

https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/test...

Depending on one's view of 'widespread' testing, we have currently about 20K tested, and around 2.4K positively diagnosed.

I think it's about 19K "SPECIMEN" tested, not people. Maybe 8K people tested as of today, but only <1K people tested until about a week ago.

So, yes, I think claiming the US had widespread testing is stretching the truth beyond BS level.

But in China for the equivalent stage of the outbreak there was zero testing. Because there were no tests. The data cannot be compared.

The UK has tested 37,746 times so far. [1]

Italy is 80k +

The testing incidence is going to change the infection confirmation number. The testing protocol will change the confirmation number. The type of testing will change the number (I believe that there are several types of test with a different confusion matrix).

[1] https://www.gov.uk/guidance/coronavirus-covid-19-information...

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