Medic Debate

In this publication Professor Joannidis and Melnick are debating the pros and cons of Lockdown. Very interesting reading!

"No dictatorship could imagine a better precedent for absolute control. Lockdowns were desperate, defendable choices when we knew little about covid-19. But, now that we know more, we should avoid exaggeration.21 We should carefully and gradually remove lockdown measures, with data driven feedback on bed capacity and prevalence/incidence indicators. Otherwise, prolonged lockdowns may become mass suicide.

Highlights: • Drastic measures of national lockdowns are taken by many countries to slow-down SARS-CoV-2 spread. However, these measures have detrimental economic effects. • Here we compare two strategies to control the epidemic using a modified SEIRD model: 1. Global national lockdown 2. Focused isolation of people at high exposure risk, following detailed epidemiological investigations. • We show that strategy 1 is modestly superior in saving lives compared to strategy 2, but with tremendous costs to prevent one case of death. This might result in overwhelming economic effects that are expected to increase future death toll.