To lock down or not to lock down? An evidence-based approach to anti-covid measures
As you might have noticed, we have been in the middle of a pandemic for about nine months now. There has been much talk, and much controversy, about what does and does not work to counter the spread of the covid-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) inducing agent, known as severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2).
Just the other day I was having a conversation about this with a follower on Twitter, who was rather skeptical of government lock-downs. He presented me with some home generated graphs drawn from public databases that seemed to make his point. I was, however, a bit skeptical of his skepticism. At some point I thought, wait a minute, surely by now there are serious peer reviewed studies on this! Let’s take a look.
Sure enough, a quick Google Scholar search turned out a number of peer reviewed papers. I picked two in particular, on the basis of three criteria: they are very recent (both published this month), they are fairly comprehensive in terms of datasets and anti-covid interventions, and they were published in the two top scientific journals in the world: Nature and Science.
You can download the full articles here (Nature) and here (Science), but of course they are fairly technical, especially in terms of methodology and…
