Tomas Pueyo does not agree with the Dutch approach to the Corona outbreak. He argues we should adopt a strategy called ‘The Hammer and the Dance’, where we crack down harder for a few weeks to relieve the medical sector (The Hammer) and then manage the measures to keep the spread just below R0=1 (The Dance). Sounds like a plan, although we don’t know the rate of spreading at the moment. The chart below shows how that could look.
The article is fascinating to read. This part about the steps politicians have to take is insightful as well.
During the Hammer period, they want to go as low as possible while still remaining tolerable. In Hubei, they went all the way to 0.32. We might not need that: maybe just to 0.5 or 0.6. But during the Dance of the R period, they want to hover as close to 1 as possible, while staying below it over the long term. What this means is that, whether leaders realize it or not, what they’re doing is:
- List all the measures they can take to reduce R
- Get a sense of the benefit of applying them: the reduction in R
- Get a sense of their cost: the economic and social cost.
- Stack-rank the initiatives based on their cost-benefit
- Pick the ones that give the biggest R reduction up till 1, for the lowest cost.
∞ Via Kottke.org
