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by baxtr 1637 days ago
What is good enough though?

I always thought the whole prevention thing is because we want to “flatten the curve”, remember? Not to prevent every single infection, which is impossible.

3 comments

Different places, different goals.

If you're on an Antarctic base where medical facilities are meager and the time and cost for evacuation is high, zero infections is likely the goal.

As an extreme example, the US grounded an astronaut for being exposed, not infected, by measles:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Mattingly#Apollo_13

As another fun example, the doctor (and only the doctor) overwintering in Antartica needs to have had their appendix out.

Medical evacuations are tricky, especially in the winter, and the logic is that the (single) doctor could remove someone else's appendix, but it would much harder for them to remove their own. Leonid Rogozov did remove his own in the 1960s, but I think most stations would prefer to avoid a repeat of that.

It did make for a fascinating BMJ Christmas Article though, written by his son: https://web.archive.org/web/20100925041337/http://www.bmj.co...

China is still pursuing a zero case strategy and locking down huge sections of the country. Apologies for daily Mail

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10349531/China-Covi...

In the US there are literally thousands of different public health agencies headed by health officers with strategies ranging from herd immunity by any means necessary to attempting COVID 0. Vague gripes about public health tag lines in such a fractured environment is unproductive.
Isn’t that in itself a big problem? You need a united strategy for public health initiatives to be effective.
You need correct strategy for public health initiative to be effective.