And also the exemption on masks which required no official documentation. I never understood why more people did not take it up.
Peer pressure!
Going back to my earlier post, I can now add a bit more as I didn't have time earlier.
Below is an argument between Thomas Pueyo (basically a modeller / maths person whose logic is deeply flawed) and John Edmunds (who was largely right initially but then changed his tune and supported harsher measures):
Both of them made mistakes but it is clear that John Edmunds was - at the time of this interview -
broadly correct in the majority of the gist of what he said (in hindsight he should have said "endemic equilibrium" instead of "herd immunity"). He was incorrect about certain matters but the general gist was correct. He later changed his tune and supported a suppression approach; he should have stuck to his original approach. Looking at some of the things he said which were correct, it is incredible to see Puyeo shaking his head; Puyeo today can have absolutely zero credibility whatsoever.
Thomas Puyeo's claims now in the video are completely
laughable in hindsight. He contradicts himself to a ludicrous degree which is totally cringeworthy listening to now. At one point suggests his strategy would achieve "herd immunity within 6 months to a year" despite apparently supporting a suppression strategy. The guy is a complete fruitcake and it is deeply disturbing that some number cruncher like him was ever given such airtime by the irresponsible media.
Puyeo's
ludicrous claims can also be found in this blog post, which is still accessible; I'll produce some key extracts below:
What the Next 18 Months Can Look Like, if Leaders Buy Us Time
tomaspueyo.medium.com
...Strong coronavirus measures today should only last a few weeks, there shouldn’t be a big peak of infections afterwards...
Totally false; see New Zealand, Hong Kong etc.
If we choose to fight hard, the fight will be sudden, then gradual.
We will be locked in for weeks, not months.
Then, we will get more and more freedoms back.
Totally false; places that did harsh lockdowns with the aim of suppressing the virus did indeed do so for months.
Not only that, but the best way for this virus to mutate is to have millions of opportunities to do so, which is exactly what a mitigation strategy would provide: hundreds of millions of people infected.
That’s why you have to get a flu shot every year. Because there are so many flu strains, with new ones always evolving, the flu shot can never protect against all strains.
Put in another way: the mitigation strategy not only assumes millions of deaths for a country like the US or the UK. It also gambles on the fact that the virus won’t mutate too much — which we know it does. And it will give it the opportunity to mutate. So once we’re done with a few million deaths, we could be ready for a few million more — every year. This corona virus could become a recurring fact of life, like the flu, but many times deadlier.
This is ludicrous; any virologist could have confirmed that Sars-CoV-2 variants is nothing like the situation we have with multiple strains of influenza. Puyeo made up this claim of not generating an immune response when the virus mutates; we now know that exposure to Sars-CoV-2 confers good immunity against severe disease and that a natural infection plus two or more shots of the vaccine with sufficient intervals provides excellent levels of immunity and that our population immunity is increasing all the time. Sars-CoV-2 is absolutely not "many times deadlier" than influenza; he simply made this up.
Option 3: Suppression Strategy
The Mitigation Strategy doesn’t try to contain the epidemic, just flatten the curve a bit. Meanwhile, the Suppression Strategy tries to apply heavy measures to quickly get the epidemic under control. Specifically:
- Go hard right now. Order heavy social distancing. Get this thing under control.
- Then, release the measures, so that people can gradually get back their freedoms and something approaching normal social and economic life can resume.
This is a complete joke; Edmunds was right that suppressing the virus just means it comes back when you release.
It's deeply concerning that many people thought that if you "gradually" lifted restrictions, the virus would just go away, and some of those people are otherwise intelligent people on good salaries. Looking back this was laughable yet many people were hoodwinked by such claims by dubious individuals such as Puyeo and his ilk.
He is one of the early advocates of what is now known as a "zero covid" strategy:
We could also set up a tracing operation like the ones they have in China or other East Asia countries, where they can identify all the people that every sick person met, and can put them in quarantine. This would give us a ton of intelligence to release later on our social distancing measures: if we know where the virus is, we can target these places only. This is not rocket science: it’s the basics of how East Asia Countries have been able to control this outbreak without the kind of draconian social distancing that is increasingly essential in other countries.
This did NOT work in places like Singapore, Korea etc and is not going to work in China. Even Xi 'Winnie-the-Pooh' Jinping is going to have to give it up at some point and he's only got away with it so far because of the oppressive communist regime being feared by the people.
He cites places like Singapore as if they made Sars-CoV-2 go away; it was nonsense. It came back.
He then goes on about how you can theoretically "keep R below one". No, you can't, not without increasing levels of immunity.
Puyeo also went on to make further disinformation blog posts, including erroneously criticising Sweden, advocating the ludicrous "swiss cheese strategy" (a false equivalence analogy on an amazing scale which is as laughable as the supermarket analogies to justify bad customer service by train companies in railway ticketing disputes)
Spreaders of disinformation such as Pueyo are
dangerous. As for Edmunds he is a
weasel, having changed his view and then tried to deny what he originally said.
