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Last month, two scientific groups in the UK offered conflicting advice. In one open letter, Prof Gupta and her colleagues argued that suppressing the virus was "unfeasible", while the other, headed by Prof Trish Greenhalgh, also at Oxford, said it was not practical to cut off an entire cohort of vulnerable people from open society.
William Hanage, a professor of epidemiology at Harvard, said the declaration seemed to be attacking the idea of mass, ongoing lockdowns, a proposal that nobody was suggesting. "After pointing out, correctly, the indirect damage caused by the pandemic, they respond that the answer is to increase the direct damage caused by it," he said.
Work by Hanage and others suggests Covid becomes more lethal than flu for people in their mid-30s and climbs exponentially from there, meaning that swathes of the population would need protecting. "Stating that you can keep the virus out of places by testing at a time when the White House has an apparently ongoing outbreak should illustrate how likely that is," he said.
Another concern, he added, was that an uncontrolled outbreak among young and healthy people could leave many with long-term medical issues, including the "long Covid" disorders that have already affected young people.
In a Twitter thread responding to the declaration, Gregg Gonsalves, an epidemiologist at Yale University, said shutdowns and other interventions were necessary to reduce rates of infection. With nearly half of the population having some underlying health risk for Covid-19, he said herd immunity strategies were about "culling the herd of the sick and disabled. It's grotesque."
Comment: Does anyone actually care at this point what celebrities think about anything?
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