Covid-19: What you need to know today

What does the deal with of a water pump need to do with a counter to the Great Barrington Declaration, which has struck a chord with the Trump White House?

Dispatch 183 on October 15 referred to the Great Barrington Declaration. The operative a part of this declaration is: “The most compassionate approach that balances the risks and benefits of reaching herd immunity is to allow those who are at minimal risk of death to live their lives normally to build up immunity to the virus through natural infection, while better protecting those who are at highest risk. We call this Focused Protection.”

In impact, the declaration , named after Great Barrington, Massachusetts, the place it was drafted on October four on the American Institute of Economic Research — a libertarian think-tank that doesn’t actually consider within the local weather disaster — advocates herd immunity as the best way out of the pandemic. It was authored by Dr Sunetra Gupta, an Indian-origin epidemiologist at Oxford University; Dr Jay Bhattacharya, additionally of Indian-origin, and a professor of drugs at Stanford; and Martin Kulldorf, a professor of drugs at Harvard. There’s no denying the educational credentials of the authors. And the declaration has its share of supporters; amongst others, Dr Scott Atlas, considered one of President Trump’s advisers, has supported the declaration. Atlas is Bhattacharya’s colleague at Stanford, and was within the information lately for claiming that masks usually are not efficient within the struggle towards Covid in a tweet that pointed to an article by the American Institute of Economic Research that claimed this. Atlas subsequently walked again on his place, and over the weekend, Twitter eliminated his authentic tweet.

In response to the Great Barrington Declaration, one other group of consultants revealed the John Snow Memorandum in The Lancet on October 14.

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This memorandum reinforces lots of the truths we’ve got come to learn about Covid-19 (and which common readers of this column and newspaper will likely be accustomed to): that “Sars-CoV-2 spreads through contact… and longer-range transmission via aerosols, especially in conditions where ventilation is poor”; that it spreads quickly throughout communities; that the fatality fee of Covid-19 is increased than that of different flus; that there’s such a factor as lengthy Covid; that “it is unclear how long protective immunity lasts”; and, most significantly, that the “transmission of the virus can be mitigated through physical distancing, use of face coverings, hand and respiratory hygiene, and by avoiding crowds and poorly ventilated spaces”.

The memorandum additionally advocates the test-trace-isolate method that many international locations, together with India, have adopted of their struggle towards Covid-19.

The authors communicate of the hazards of any method that pushes for herd immunity, stating that that is “unsupported by scientific evidence”, that “uncontrolled transmission in younger people risks significant morbidity and mortality across the whole population” and {that a} rash of infections might “overwhelm the ability of health care systems to provide acute and routine care”.

The John Snow Memorandum is known as after a 19th century Englishman thought of the founder of contemporary epidemiology. Urban legend has it that Snow curtailed a pointy outbreak of cholera in part of London by figuring out and eradicating the deal with of a water pump in Soho, though, like most city legends, the reason is extra nuanced. Snow’s contribution to epidemiology is definitely way more important — he performed among the many first identified double-blind research (when investigating the cholera outbreak, which he believed got here from water provided by a utility). In his seminal e book On The Mode of Communication of Cholera (1855), Snow spoke of how he was capable of conduct his research on an enormous pattern which was fully random (“three hundred thousand people of both sexes, of every age and occupation, and of every rank and station, from gentlefolks down to the very poor, were divided into two groups without their choice, and, in most cases, without their knowledge”) with one group getting water he suspected was unclean (as a result of the businesses supplying it sourced it from the Thames and didn’t deal with it). Even immediately, the so-called randomised double-blind research is a valued method in epidemiology, and such research the place one of many two teams is given a placebo kind the premise of human medical trials.

Jon or John, I’ve at all times been on the facet of the Snows.