Quote:
Originally Posted by Carth
and there is the honest answer for about 85% of the questions asked about Covid 19
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Pretty much. Luckily, us armchair health policy don’t have to live with our decisions. Most of the policies are based on partial knowledge, modelling, assumptions, previous experiences and yes, best guesses.
Doing nothing was never an option here so the government had to decide what policies to out in place based on what it did know so far. This tends to be very poorly communicated as the government never wants to be found to be wrong. As more information comes in and policies change, the communications are muddled to the point where the public gives up.
On top of this is the publics attitude to risk. There’s no ‘on/off’ switch for risky behaviour. For example, wearing masks reduces but does not eliminate risk. Social distancing reduces but does not eliminate risk. All the mitigating behaviours and barriers will help to a greater or lesser extent and, in some cases can all add up but this is often poorly explained. I saw a paper a while back giving estimates for how much each change reduces the R value for this disease. I think this could be communicated better but then maybe if we said that social distancing reduced R by 0.2 or something, maybe people wouldn’t bother.