If Public Health people start considering the ‘costs and benefits’ of an intervention—especially one that could be framed as a default right now—that makes lives worse in exchange for less disease,
To be fair, he didn't ask for Public Health people to consider it.
Do you know of any non-pooled tests that are cheap and fast, that perhaps a group of individuals could order loads of? I’ve heard people talk about LAMP and such for a while but without any persuasive end-to-end evidence.
Antigen tests. They take 15min to give results, and are 0.8€(retail) here.
In Australia, hotel quarantine has caused one outbreak per 204 infected travellers. Purpose-built facilities are far better, but we only have one (Howard Springs, near Darwin) and the federal government has to date refused to build any more.
But no cases of infections slipping thru the testing, no?
Or another framing: The question is, how long is the time between being infected and then infecting someone else? And the answer might be smaller than the time before you show symptoms, but if it’s negative the virus is doing something involving time travel.
They seem to be referring to the serial interval between symptom onset.
Which indeed can't be negative on average. But they write it was only negative in 21.6% of cases. And there is no rule stating there can't be cases where it's negative (as long as you have transmission before symptoms).
A toy example: suppose we have a big pile of rocks, and we want to find the rock whose mass is closest to the mass of a reference weight (without going over).
A search-in-territory algorithm might use one of those old-school balance-scales to compare masses pairwise. We could pull each rock out of the pile one-by-one, and:
First, compare the rock to the reference weight. If it’s heavier, throw it away and move on to the next rock.
Second, compare it to the best rock found thus far, and replace the best rock with this one if
Or it has a higher viral load.