OPINION: Governments are easing lockdowns despite the lack of any vaccine or treatment for the coronavirus. That is because they cannot admit that herd immunity — with its massive death toll — is the objective.
LONDON — The COVID-19 pandemic is the first major global crisis in human history to be treated as a mathematical problem, with governments regarding policy as the solution to a set of differential equations.
No experiment possible But you can’t deliberately insert a virus into a human population to test its effects, although some Nazi concentration-camp doctors did just that. Instead, scientists use their knowledge of the infectious pathogen to model a disease’s pattern of contagion, and then work out which policy interventions will modify it.Predictive modeling was first developed for malaria over a century ago by an almost-forgotten English doctor, Ronald Ross.
Because there is currently no COVID-19 vaccine, governments have had to find other ways to prevent “excess deaths.” Most have opted for lockdowns, which remove entire populations from the path of the virus and thus deprive it of hosts. The U.K., by contrast, is hobbled by incoherence at the center of government and by what former foreign secretary David Owen has called the “structural vandalism” inflicted on the National Health Service by years of cuts, fragmentation, and centralization. As a result, the country lacked the medical tools for a German-style response.
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