How will we know when and how to exit from the lockdown strategy? I think we need to conduct experiments.
I know this is a pipe dream. The only experiment we will ever see will be “Lift the lockdown and see what happens.”
But I would suggest that we recruit young, healthy people who are uninfected and have never had the virus as experimental subjects for the following experiments. Note that I would be willing to see the one child of mine who qualifies as healthy to participate as an experimental subject, because I think that these experiments would be safe. Note that for these experiments the “infected person” is either asymptomatic or has only very mild symptoms.
1. The doorknob effect. Have the infected person open a door, and have the experimental subjects follow at one-minute intervals and open that same door. Quarantine the experimental subjects for two weeks and meanwhile test them for the virus.
2. The classroom with masks and scarves. Have the infected person sit in a classroom with one hundred experimental subjects. Everyone, including the infected person (whose identity is known only to the investigator, not to the experimental subjects), wears a face covering of some sort. Try this experiment with the infected person having different types of face coverings. Quarantine and test.
3. The virus-in-the-air experiment. Have a person known to have the disease in mild form walk through a hallway. Have experimental subjects follow at one-minute intervals. Repeat this experiment with a different combinations of face covering. One version would have nobody wear face covering. Another version would have both the infected person and the experimental subjects wear face covering. etc. Quarantine and test.
These sorts of experiments would provide a better scientific basis for making decisions regarding modifying or lifting the lockdowns.
Speaking of masks, made in the USA Miakomo respirators are available now.
(I have no connection to the company, I posted a link to your “Scarves now, masks later” post and @miakomo gave it a like & follow)
https://miakomo.com/
People are taking this “the young are safe” notion too far. I personally know two young people who were hit very hard by Covid. Not dead, but damn close. And no way to know how long lung function could be impaired.
If the alternative to experiments were keeping anyone from ever getting sick then experiments would be cruel. But the alternative to the experiments I am suggesting will be experiments that are uninformed and uninformative. The young are not safe in any scenario but they are safer for these experiments than the elderly
The proposals here seem far better than nothing. But some of what I have read suggests that the amount of viral stuff taken in makes a difference, maybe a huge difference. A huge intake may be fatal; a slight intake may be fought off, leading to a mild case or no illness at all. In the course of a day people usually touch many doorknobs and may pass through many halls and sit in more than one room.
How many doorknobs does a typical person touch in a day, hundreds? Thousands per week, perhaps dozens of which have done residual virus on them? The fact that every last one of us is not sick yet means if doorknobs are a source of contagion (they almost certainly are to some extent of course) the probability of being infected by using a contaminated doorknob once is maybe on the order of 1 out of several thousand. The false positive rates for tests after exposure and the false negative rate for people tested pre-exposure will dominate the effect of the exposure itself in this experiment. This means you’re going to need a massive sample size, perhaps tens of thousands of people touching a contaminated doorknob to separate the signal from the noise.
This is a big problem with isolating transmission probability for indivisible mechanisms, it’s why epidemiologists still constantly use vague, composite parameters like R0. Most of the ways you catch the disease almost certainly have a negligible probability of transmission, but because we expose ourselves to them hundreds or thousands of times per day, and that’s why it spreads, but studying any one mechanism is going to be difficult.
Perhaps a way we could assess an exposure like walking by someone on the street would be to get everyone in a community to agree to have their locations tracked via their phones and then see if there’s a relationship between how many people one is in close contact with and rate of infection. It wouldn’t be too difficult to track hundreds of thousands of phones and how often they’re near each other; the main issue there would be getting everyone in a city to consent to this.
I agree with point about experimentation. In addition to your ideas:
What about, instead of lifting school restrictions fairly ad hoc by geography, like China is doing now, there is careful experimentation?
For example, instead of Massachusetts saying “Okay, all 5000 schools back to normal” on the same day (whenver that is), what if we open 100 (carefully testing as we go), and pairing with an unopened 100 (with students tested while still at home)?
“How many doorknobs does a typical person touch in a day, hundreds?”–Mark Z.
Are you, perchance, a deliveryman? Building super?
He works at Acme Doorknob Inc.
If people were paid to participate in ASK’s experiments, and aware of possibilities, and screened for health (I suggest favoring youth, no underlying illnesses, and good lung capacity)…then, why not, especially under the circumstances.
1,100 crewman of the Diamond Princess and not one died. Almost all certainly exposed as they lived and bunked and ate in common quarters.
Hey, driving an Uber has risks.
I wonder if it is necessary to do experiments on how many people acquire the virus. The sample sizes would have to be gigantic given the large random element in contagion. (Almost certainly part of the huge variation in infection/death rates between regions is just chance.) Of course experiments like this are worthwhile and should be done, but I think we can get a lot of information from actually measuring the amount of germs. How many germs does an infected person leave on a doorknob? With ten infected people you can do hundreds of measurements in a single day, without exposing anyone to infection. How many germs does an uninfected person get from a doorknob? Again, you can do controlled experiments (depositing measured amounts of contagion on various doorknobs) and do hundreds of experimental measurements in a single day without endangering anybody. (Just remind the volunteers to wash their hands.) How do the germs travel through the air? This can be measured. Direct data on how conduct impacts infections is obviously awesome but given that we know a whole lot about viruses and even a whole lot about coronaviruses I don’t think such data are essential to getting a good idea of where various kinds of everyday activities fall on the danger scale. Direct measurements of amounts of contagion could be a good substitute requiring vastly smaller resources.
The publicly known/ gov’t/ Trump based US testing remains weak. There is more other country testing, and might be more non-public US testing.
It’s really silly that there are so many college students, & grads, with college loans, that would be happy to get “paid” by loan reduction, for being in some tests.
Treatment is more important for saving life now, but testing is crucial for providing a reason to end the lockdown for “normal” / not “at risk” folk, who can go back to work.
Maybe with masks.
Everybody, including Trump and all news folk, should be wearing masks in public and in all meetings. For a couple of weeks, to stop the spread. Like many other countries, including Slovakia.