Saturday, May 23, 2020

Three Neglected Advantages of Controlled Infection

I've increasingly come to think that my previous post on when SARS-CoV-2 Controlled Voluntary Infection is worthwhile was excessively pessimistic.  I previously noted the benefits of low viral load (variolation), timing the burden on the medical system, and enabling people to safely return to normal life.  Three additional factors to consider include:

(1) Controlled infection enables pre-symptomatic treatment, which tends to be more effective (in some cases yielding "virtually total protection" against an illness whilst still developing protective antibodies and subsequent immunity to reinfection).

(2) Reducing accidental spread.  Each person who undergoes CVI (followed by two weeks quarantine) is someone who won't unknowingly acquire an asymptomatic (or pre-symptomatic) infection and spread it to others without realizing.  This makes everyone else much safer.

(3) With reduced spread comes reduced overshoot beyond herd immunity.

It's completely insane that nobody seems to doing the necessary research to find out just how effective CVI could be, especially when some parts of the world are (either deliberately or de facto) pursuing a strategy of herd immunity via uncontrolled infectious spread, which we have every reason to expect to be vastly inferior.

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