Read on Twitter
1/ Lockdowns were a blunt & indiscriminate tool that slowed infections, but with no clear strategy for what came afterwards. We know enough now about how to bring down infections at a much lower cost to the economy. My latest.
2/ We had never used lockdowns before, not even during the 1918 flu. Pre-Covid, they were seen as too draconian and difficult to enforce and thus weren& #39;t part of the epidemiological toolkit.
3/ The U.S. missed its chance to emulate HK, Taiwan & SK using testing, tracing & quarantine to stop the pandemic without Covid. But nor did it make a clear choice between simply flattening the curve and allowing infections to continue, as Sweden did ....
4/ ... or suppressing the disease, regardless of cost to economy or freedoms, as China and New Zealand did. Trump didn& #39;t want to stick with lockdowns beyond six weeks and even Democrats like Calif. Gov. Newsom succumbed to local pressure to reopen.
5/ This suggests we need an alternative to lockdowns that is politically sustainable while holding the reproductive rate below 1. Fortunately, those alternatives exist. My article highlights a comprehensive approach by James Stock at Harvard and @michaelmina_lab ...
6/ ... that utilizes sectoral and demographic risk data to reopen highest-economic-benefit, lowest-health-risk sectors and activities. This achieves better GDP & fewwer deaths than the alternatives. (More detail here: https://www.brookings.edu/bpea-articles/policies-for-a-second-wave/)">https://www.brookings.edu/bpea-arti... /endit.
By the way here& #39;s a link to the story which I forgot to add to the first tweet: https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-lockdowns-economy-pandemic-recession-business-shutdown-sweden-coronavirus-11598281419">https://www.wsj.com/articles/...
