Thread by @abirballan, @gummibear737 I was against the lockdown when the epidemic started. Any one [...]

@gummibear737 I was against the lockdown when the epidemic started.
Any one with a background in public health could’ve known back in March the following: 1/n https://twitter.com/gummibear737/status/1298246378657808384

https://twitter.com/gummibear737/status/1298246378657808384

1. In March, WHO said: 80% of infections are mild or asymptomatic... (not more dangerous than other respiratory viruses).. This was concluded from the cases they were seeing in primary care and hospitals. Many more cases never reach the hospital because they are too mild.. 2/n

so one could expect it to be milder than this in the end.

2.Cases of a respiratory infectious disease are always a small percentage of real infections. To calculate total illness of the flu, they use a multiplier of hospitalizations https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/how-cdc-estimates.htm
3/n

3.C19 is the 7th coronavirus and cross-immunity is a known scientific fact. Why did the world speculate otherwise for this virus, I don’t know. 4/n

4.Since not everyone in the world will get it (pre-existing immunity), taking a phone and punching in the CFR of 3.4% by the world population was the craziest thing I saw. 5/n

5.CFR is never a good measure of the lethality of a disease. It declines as the epidemic progresses and the denominator gets larger. It was used to scare people who don’t know this. 6/n

6.Dr Fauci -believe it or not- said “ the overall clinical consequences of Covid-19 may ultimately be more akin to those of a severe seasonal influenza (which has a case fatality rate of approximately 0.1%)” on March 26, 2020 https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe2002387 7/n

Covid-19 — Navigating the Uncharted | NEJM

Editorial from The New England Journal of Medicine — Covid-19 — Navigating the Uncharted

https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe2002387

7.Dr Bhattacharya estimated the IFR @ 0.17% end of April. No body stopped and changed direction. https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.04.14.20062463v2.full.pdf 8/n

8.Viruses don’t disappear until there are no susceptibles= herd immunity. It’s a scientific fact. 9/n

9.Locking down whole cities was the craziest thing to do even back in March, with the little information we had, we knew enough. 10/n

10. Damaging the economy has serious consequences among them lost lives and livelihoods, mental illness and weakened healthcare systems. How did governments allow themselves to overlook this???!! 11/n

11.Small strategies could’ve been implemented to reduce spread: protect those at risk -only- as much as possible, work from home if u can, distant learning for university students, skip closed crowded places (nightclubs and pubs), skip crowded events (concerts), .. 12/n

...don’t shake hands, wash hands, stay home when sick,. This applies to when the pandemic was here, not now. When you use small strategies you can add and subtract as needed. 13/n

12. We don’t have a vaccine for any other coronavirus so it’s better not to count on an imaginary silver bullet. Hopefully, we’ll get a safe and effective one that has been tested diligently to be suitable for the population at-risk and not for the healthy and young. 14/n

Vaccinating those not at serious risk is called overmedicalization. The risk of the a vaccine (as in any other medication) is higher than the benefit of not getting C19. 15/n

Anybody with a public health background who didn’t speak up back in March is too risk averse. 16/16

I forgot the most important strategy: increasing hospital capacity
a) By adding makeshift hospitals not by denying lifesaving treatments... this will also keep infections outside hospitals and reduce nosocomial infections (infections acquired as a result of hospital stay) 17/18

b) Assigning specific hospitals to take C19 patients only- to reduce nosocomial infections of hospitalized chronic disease patients 18/18

And please make sure not to put C19 cases back in care homes. That’s not a good mitigation strategy. It’s just evil.

I m glad hotmail saves your sent emails. https://twitter.com/abirballan/status/1299609742415998977