My newsletter today is has NOTHING to do with the election!

Instead, it's a look at the rhetoric and strategies of COVID eradication and how that rhetoric inherits from the strategies of smallpox eradication. And that's bad. https://polimath.substack.com/p/covid-is-not-smallpox

The key metric to look at is whenever there is talk about "14 days of no new cases" or "fewer than 10 cases per 100K over 14 days.

The CDC defines that as "near-zero incidence" and it is born in the concept that COVID can be fully eradicated

Only one human disease has ever been eradicated. Smallpox eradication is one of the most important, heroic stories of the 20th century.

But the steps taken to isolate and eradicate smallpox are far past what we're doing with COVID

Importantly, DA Henderson (the epidemiologist who led the effort to eradicate smallpox) pointed out that smallpox had a dozen important features that made it a good candidate for eradication.

He was far far less optimistic about eradicating any other diseases

All the things that made smallpox a good candidate for eradication are absent in COVID.

Targets that aim for near-zero-incidence of COVID without *severe* travel restrictions and heavy-handed contact tracing and quarantine are probably not very realistic.