A recently posted op-ed by two professors — an associate professor of Mathematics at Carnegie Mellon University and an assistant professor of Molecular Biology at the University of Pittsburgh — calls for greater “honesty in pandemic modeling,” which, they suggest, too often conceals the fact that after lock-downs and other extreme social distancing measures are lifted, the number of infections will rapidly rise again.
The problem, Carnegie Mellon’s Wesley Pegden and Pittsburgh’s Maria Chikina explain in an analysis posted on Medium Sunday, is that many of the models that have been shaping the narrative on COVID-19 mitigation efforts only present “the effects of mitigations over a limited time-frame,” when “most of the impact of the epidemic would occur outside of that time-frame.” In so doing, the models appear to show that extreme social distancing measures for a given period of time will save a large number of lives, but they often fail to show what happens after the measures are lifted (emphasis theirs):
There is a simple truth behind the problems with these modeling conclusions. The duration of containment efforts does not matter, if transmission rates return to normal when they end, and mortality rates have not improved. This is simply because as long as a large majority of the population remains uninfected, lifting containment measures will lead to an epidemic almost as large as would happen without having mitigations in place at all.
The professors acknowledge that there can be real benefits in using mitigations efforts as a form of “delay tactic.” “For example, we may hope to use the months we buy with containment measures to improve hospital capacity, in the hopes of achieving a reduction in the mortality rate,” they write. “We might even wish to use these months just to consider our options as a society and formulate a strategy.”
However, they argue, “mitigations themselves are not saving lives in these scenarios; instead, it is what we do with the time that gives us an opportunity to improve the outcome of the epidemic” (emphasis theirs). – READ MORE
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