I suggest that you take the time to learn a bit about epidemiology before engaging in speculation. You are taking ONE CASE in France to justify a radical shift in policy. Do you know what a false positive is? Do you know the probability of a false positive on the test used in France? Do you know what r-value is for any contagious disease?
I understand what a false positive is. But do you understand that the timeline of infection has been pushed back steadily for the past several weeks? Is it really logical to assume that all of these earlier cases— in Santa Clara, France, etc. — were false positives? The French case in December is merely one piece of evidence amid a growing list.
But setting aside the French case aside, there is also research indicating that the most New York cases , in fact, from European strains of the virus in mid-February:
This, alone, would put the timeline for NY cases a month before the first “confirmed” case. Imagine a highly-contagious virus with an r0 of 2–2.5 in that human Petri dish of a city. Think about how many millions would have been infected by the time the March 20 lockdown began.
Now, ask yourself: could this be why 66% of NY Coronavirus cases contracted COVID-19 in spite of the fact that they followed lockdown protocol?
The Coronavirus ship sailed weeks (if not months) before we locked down. You don’t have to be an epidemiologist to see this. You just have to use common sense.
And somehow that significant portion of the population never developed any symptoms. Do you understand how this undermines your claims?
It appears you haven’t done sufficient research in this area. As a point of fact, “80% of infections are mild or asymptomatic” (scroll down to page 3):
Far from undermining my claims, this statistic bolsters them.
Do you believe that your understanding of epidemiology is superior to that of professional epidemiologists? If not, why do you contradict their conclusions?
No. But I have lived on this planet long enough not to trust any expert wholeheartedly:
https://medium.com/the-philosophers-stone/why-should-we-trust-experts-to-think-for-us-30bc4d522bd1
