Imitating China on a policy that every single health policy guideline had explicitly warned against.
~ Nick Hudson, Co-Founder and Public Face of Panda, on Lockdown
Nick articulates public health concepts with skill, from virus evolution and variant emergence, to seasonality, geographical differences, immunity, vaccines, complex systems and human factors. In this recent interview with Dan Astin, Is The South African Variant More Serious, he states “I’m not an epidemiologist. I’ve assembled a team of experts. I talk to them all the time. And collectively, we try to form explanations at different levels of resolution“.
Eloquent, good humoured and informative, this interview is a worthy way to spend an hour. For anyone without the inclination to sit through the whole interview, the last five minutes are particularly revealing.
There is no relationship between lockdown policy or capacity and Covid-19 mortality rates across locations. Many nations with stringent lockdown policies have had worse mortality than those who did not lockdown, or who only did so marginally. This is explained by basic public health principles related to what influences virus transmission and disease patterns: population factors such as demography and immunity; environmental factors such as climate; and human interventions such as precise targeted protection compared to sweeping restrictions. Those who endorse harsh sanctions across non-vulnerable populations instead of established public health evidence should reconsider hypotheses such as “lockdown is a terrible thing that we have to do”. No we don’t.
alicespringstomind 