![]() In a March 16 paper, University of Pittsburgh’s Maria Chikina and Carnegie Mellon University’s Wesley Pegden describe a “heterogeneous mitigation” strategy that seeks to shift the distribution of infections toward age groups who are far less likely to require hospitalization and die from COVID-19, and away from older populations and individuals with pre-existing health conditions who are at a much higher risk: ![]() One alternative to a population-wide lockdown strategy involves implementing more targeted, age-sensitive measures that seek to reduce virus transmission rates among high-risk populations while keeping them normal among low-risk populations. The decision to employ a population-wide lockdown strategy requires a high evidentiary standard what’s more, public trust must be based on knowing that our governing institutions are thinking carefully through every possible policy option. What we also need is a comparison of the government’s current lockdown strategy with other strategies that have been proposed to reduce mortality rates and burdens on the healthcare system. The problem, however, is that it sets the bar too low and does not provide a robust enough test of the government’s approach. According to the government’s more recent models, released April 20, its lockdown strategy is performing better than expected, having prevented an estimated 280,000 infections and saved hundreds more lives.Īssessing the current strategy against a no-intervention scenario is important, as it helps quantify, albeit imperfectly, the severity of the COVID-19 threat. By adopting its lockdown strategy, the government estimated, it will have prevented 220,000 infections and saved 4,400 lives by April 30, and anywhere from 85,000 to 97,000 lives in the long run. In this scenario, the government estimated, there would have been 300,000 infections and 6,000 deaths by April 30, and 5 million infections and 100,000 deaths by the end of the pandemic. To justify its strategy, the government compared it with doing nothing, which it referred to as the “no intervention” option. The briefing was described as an opportunity for the government to provide Ontarians with “ full transparency.” It was also an opportunity for the government to justify its current population-wide lockdown strategy, which, as Premier Doug Ford described it, has ground daily life to a halt. At a media briefing on April 3, Ontario government officials made public the data and projections they were using to build their strategy to minimize the threat posed by COVID-19.
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