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Oh WHO, I see propaganda is the priority these days... sad.
PS: I havent not had the time to personally confirm this, it was shared with me. Quick internet search hasnt found anything debunking it, would like to check with the way back machine, but it does fit the pattern so ill leave it for now.
@freemo What is propaganda about this?
Seems like a slightly less accurate framing here, but still good enough for a crayon sketch.
FWIW, prior to this latest pandemic, I've almost exclusively heard of "herd immunity" in the context of vaccination. When it happens naturally, I think people generally talk about "self-limiting epidemics" or something of that nature.
@pganssle It is specifically trying to rewrite the established definition of herd immunity as including natural exposure to one where natural exposure is not related to herd immunity.
They saw scientists, who have long worked with disease proliferation models (such as myself a decade ago or so) talk about how the lockdowns are causing the disease to spread in a much more harmful fashion. Even though this is established science the propaganda of the day is that lockdowns are a good thing, not a bad, so they had to rewrite the definition of herd immunity in a way that appears to specifically exclude natural exposure as a component.
Its quite complex, and also depends on a few extrapolations we still arent 100% certain about, so we cant say for sure if that is the case, but it is one reasonable interpretation.
I worked on disease proliferation models for the government years back and it can be rather counter intuitive, so I'll try to explain, however that counter-intuitive nature is also what is doing us in as there is pressure ont he government to appeal to the uneducated publics "common sense" rather than what the science tells us (or at least suggests is a possible and valid interpretation).
So there are a few things that determine if a quarantine will be helpful or not. But as a general rule understand that once a virus is in the wild in the general case, as in, for most viruses, quarantining will only reduce the case count while its actively being practiced, and once the quantining lets up you will, typically, see a much higher follow up surge that reaches the same overall infection rate. In other words in the general case long term quarantines at best will result in the same number infected if the quarantining eventually stops.
With that said some disease profiles will cause **more** harm by quarantining than the baseline, rather than the same. There are too factors that COVID seems likely to have (again there is some debate) that would make quarantining cause more overall death than not. 1) The immunity seems to not be perpetual, the length of time you are immune depends on the severity of the infection 2) immunity is not a boolean condition, that is, you can have limited immunity that will cause you to get get the disease but less severely.
What all of this means is simple, during a quarantine exposure to the disease is very limited. Fewer people get the disease over a period of time, so anyone who had the disease, particularly those with light exposure wind up loosing that immunity. thus by quarantining and then later going out and exposing yourself you stand a much greater chance of getting sick and dying. However if the quarantine never happened while the initial cases would be significant (and we will get to how to handle that in a minute) after the initial wave you start to see partial immunities play out where the lethality is much smaller.
So what you get with quarantining every time there is a spike is an exaggerated cyclic death toll. Lots of people get sick, few people had any previous exposure protecting them, so tons of people die. Before immunity based attenuation becomes significant you quarantine, the protections people developed fade while in quarantine basically resetting the immunity condition and when its let up you have another severe spike and lots of deaths. With less aggressive quarantining you will significant case counts still, but now the mortality rate will shoot down to minimal levels as a much larger portion of people infected will be mild or asymptomatic. So while it wont improve the death count so much it will significantly improve mortality.
Now as to how we should correctly handle quarantining and ensure a minimal death count, well that's largely in line with what health officials were saying in the first month of the outbreak, which was the classic and correct tactic, it wasn't till later as public pressure mounted the tactic changed to the far more lethal repeating quarinties we are seeing now. the original advice, and the correct one, is that quarantine in the initial stages should be employed but in a limited fashion, just enough to flatten the curve as we put it (remember when they said that). That is quarantine should be used just enough to slow the infection rate down to levels where ICU will be near but not over capacity which would be a short term quarantine followed by no quarantine. After the initial surge case count will largely stabilized and will not go away but fatality will continually drop.
Of course that didnt happen. They changed the established guidelines due to public pressure and started enacted countermeasures every time case count tried to reach an equilibrium point and mostly ignored the trend in the mortality rate. In doing so the mortality rate was never able to stabilize in many countries and instead we see cycles of local or mass quarantine or other counter measures and a higher than ideal mortality rate that is unable to reach a minimum.
