How should you protect yourself? Your precautions depend on your age, health and tolerance for risk, said Dr. John Swartzberg of UC Berkeley’s School of Public Health.
“People have to do their own calculus. If they’re very anxious, they’re going to want to do [sic] comfortable doing less,” he said.
“What’s your situation? Are you 65 or older? Immunocompromised? Do you have pulmonary disease, diabetes, obesity or cardiac disease? In that circumstance, you’re going to want to do more,” he said. “On the other hand, if you’re 30-something, in great health and boosted, you might not need to do very much.”
But remember others, he added. When gathering, plan how you’ll protect the person who is most vulnerable or most anxious.
This is from Lisa M. Krueger, “Expert advice on how to get through our fourth wave,” San Jose Mercury News, reprinted in Monterey County Herald, December 19, 2021.
These suggestions are quite sensible and they track the recommendations in the Great Barrington Declaration.
Of course, critics of my post will point out a big difference: these recommendations, as the last sentence of the second last quoted paragraph above reminds us, are for a post-vaccine world whereas the GBH came out well before the FDA allowed us to have the vaccines.
Still, it would be interesting to ask Dr. Swartzberg if his advice would have been any different in April 2020, by which time we knew just how little risk young healthy people were facing from COVID-19.
READER COMMENTS
Bob Gardner
Dec 20 2021 at 12:34pm
The article downplays the vaccines by wondering if the “advice would have been any different” if they had been available at the time, as if the substantial benefits in reducing serious illness, hospitalizations and deaths might not have had any influence on such deliberations. Yet the vaccines provide these substantial benefits even for those having a prior infection.
It also says “well before for the FDA allowed us to have the vaccines”, as if the FDA was dragging their feet. In fact, the first vaccines were administered just a few months later.
This article adds no substance to the overall discussions around COVID.
David Henderson
Dec 20 2021 at 2:44pm
You wrote:
It took me a minute to figure out that by “article” you meant my post.
That’s incorrect. Wondering something doesn’t presume the conclusion that that wondering might lead to.
Also note what I wrote at the end of the post:
We really did know that early how little risk young healthy people faced even without the vaccine.
You wrote:
The FDA was dragging its feat. Months is a long time to wait during a serious pandemic. It’s true that that’s short for the FDA, but that just shows how horrible the FDA is normally.
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
Dec 20 2021 at 5:34pm
Young people suffer less severe cases of COVID, but vaccines are important for them, too becasue they can transmit the virus even asymptomatically.
Don Boudreaux
Dec 21 2021 at 10:32am
Thomas Lee Hutchison:
Your point is based on both a faulty fact and on faulty reasoning. First the fact: Contrary to your belief, vaccines do very little after a few weeks to prevent transmission. Now the faulty reasoning: Because vaccines are indeed effective at protecting the vaccinated from suffering serious consequences, even if vaccines prevented infections and spreading for a long time, the cost-benefit calculus argues against vaccinating children, who are at virtually no risk from suffering from Covid (but are at some risk from the vaccines themselves).
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
Dec 20 2021 at 5:31pm
Well FDA dud “drag its feet.” It could have speeded up things with human challenge trials and generally its cost benefit analyses not seem to account for either the external value of the vaccine to the people who do not get infected becasue of the receiver does not transmit or the time cost of the very approval procedures. In addition it dragged its feet on approving rapid screening tests which allow people to self isolate on actual infection not on exposure.
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
Dec 20 2021 at 5:22pm
Good (hardly novel) advice, but it leaves out the positive externality that one confers on others by not infecting whether through vaccination, distancing, frequent testing-isolation or other precautions.
steve
Dec 20 2021 at 7:36pm
We did not know then and largely still dont know how to protect older people, the immunocompromised, etc. We really dont have a model outside of heroic measures at some nursing homes where this has been done successfully. What we mostly see is that older people continue to make up most of the deaths. I guess I could amend that to say we dont know how or are unwilling to do it. Either way, this was also true in 2020. I dont know if you were reading WHO and CDC recommendations back in 2020 but they were advocating that we find ways to protect the at risk population.
Steve
Don Boudreaux
Dec 21 2021 at 4:52pm
Steve,
In opposition to the Focused Protection advocated in the Great Barrington Declaration – and, presumably, endorsed also by David Henderson – you again insist that “We did not know then [October 2020] and largely still don’t know how to protect older people, the immunocompromised, etc.”
And so I again remind you that the Declaration’s three eminent co-authors – Jay Bhattacharya of Stanford, Sunetra Gupta of Oxford, and Martin Kulldorffof Harvard – did indeed offer details on what Focused Protection would look like. The fact that these measures would not have worked perfectly and with 100 percent certainty is true. It’s also irrelevant because no measures to achieve any desirable outcome work perfectly and with 100 percent certainty.
But allow me to offer my own proposal – one that I believe would work quite well – for how we might carry out Focused Protection: Give all vulnerable people hazmat suits to wear, and require negative Covid tests of any and all persons who might come near vulnerable people during those times when the hazmat suits aren’t being worn.
“Outlandish! Ridiculous! Absurd!” you’ll cry. “That’s not only impractical; it’s also dehumanizing!”
Really? Compared to what? Compared to lockdowns and school closures – compared to the terrible consequences of indefinitely severing countless, complex webs of commercial, familial, and social relationships – my hazmat-suit proposal is downright mundane and highly doable.
The relevant comparison for any Focused Protection measures (including my hazmat-suit proposal) is not to life as it was up through 2019. Instead, it’s to a world indefinitely locked down or under the threat of lockdown; it’s to a bizarro world filled with deep distress, depressing isolation, unprecedented uncertainty, and terrible tyranny. I submit that by this comparison, Focused Protection (again, even including a measure as extreme and disagreeable as my hypothetical hazmat-suit proposal) is far more practical and acceptable – and far more humane – than are the cruel measures, as ludicrous as they are odious, that most of humanity has suffered since early 2020.
Don Boudreaux
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