An Important Detail
Everyone is so deeply involved in the debate over the effectiveness of NPIs that we're all forgetting the basic principle underlying their use.
Does everyone remember this graph?
It comes from a 2019 WHO report, titled Non-pharmaceutical public health measures for mitigating the risk and impact of epidemic and pandemic influenza1.
This graph was very popular in early 2020 when everyone was first discussing lock downs, masks, and other pandemic related measures. But it hasn’t been seen much since - perhaps because lots of people don’t want us to think about the actual content of the report and the reasoning behind the use of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) in a pandemic.
What does the graph mean?
The report containing this graph is a summary of the scientific evidence for 18 different NPIs that might be employed during a pandemic (like masks, social distancing, limiting crowds, etc.), and the graph shows the intended collective impact of their use.
But a lot of people either didn’t understand, or have forgotten, what this graph is portraying: these measures are not expected to reduce the total number of infections, just to spread them out over a longer period of time. Everyone still gets sick, just not all at once.
The concept they are illustrating with this graph is not that NPIs themselves will save lives. This is not what the authors are saying, and no one else who works in this field claims to have proved these NPIs will keep you from dying.
For example, no scientist claims wearing a mask will indefinitely keep you from getting sick. Some of them think wearing a mask might reduce the probability of infection on any given day, but you will eventually get sick - and you won’t be less sick because you were wearing a mask. The whole phrase “my mask protects me” is in fact a bit nonsensical. A more sensible statement would be “my mask delays the day when I inevitably get sick.” (Although even this point is arguable, since it’s not supported by the evidence - a fact admitted in the WHO report.)
So why do these things?
If the NPIs might only delay some infections - then why bother? Per the WHO report there are two ways this could be beneficial:
Preventing the over burdening of hospitals so people don’t die for lack of access to medical care.
Allowing more time to develop pharmaceuticals for the disease (either vaccines or other drugs).
If hospitals aren’t at capacity then these measures don’t reduce the eventual number of deaths, they just lengthen the pandemic.
If we have vaccines (and we insist they work) then we no longer benefit from additional delay of infections.
Both possible reasons for utilizing NPIs ended a long time ago - even if you think these measures work as claimed, there is no justification to continue with any of this. It has become nothing more than ridiculous COVID theater.
So what’s really going on?
Is all the emphasis on hospital capacity early in the pandemic starting to make sense? If hospitals aren’t full and they can still treat all their COVID patients, then we don’t need these interventions.
Is the changing target for percentage of people vaccinated also making more sense? Once health officials declare “enough” people are vaccinated, then we don’t need these interventions.
The simple fact is this: these measures benefit elected officials and career bureaucrats, not the public they ostensibly serve. They have successfully persuaded everyone to forget the actual reasoning behind these measures, and are using them instead for their own political benefit.
In the process they have made mask wearing into a form of religious cult, where the members ascribe qualities to their masks that even the most optimistic scientific researchers never claimed.
For anyone posting on social media here’s the really concise summary
The non-pharmaceutical pandemic measures were only intended to delay infections - but eventually everyone still gets sick.
This is per a comprehensive WHO report on the subject, published right before the pandemic.
Delaying infections helps keep hospitals from being overburdened - which is no longer an issue, if it ever was.
Delaying infections allows time to develop things like vaccines - which we now have, and health officials claim work.
These emergency measures are no longer capable of providing even a theoretical benefit. We’re done.
Update:
The current date is 26 April 2023, and the WHO page containing the pdf file no longer exists. Here is a new link for the original report:
https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/non-pharmaceutical-public-health-measuresfor-mitigating-the-risk-and-impact-of-epidemic-and-pandemic-influenza
I checked the file against the original file (using a Linux tool called diff) and the new file is identical to the old file, it’s just been moved. I don’t know when they moved the report; this is the first time I have double checked the original link.
Non-pharmaceutical public health measures for mitigating the risk and impact of epidemic and pandemic influenza; World Health Organization 2019. ISBN: 978-92-4-151683-9.
Original:
https://www.who.int/influenza/publications/public_health_measures/publication/en/
Archived copy: https://web.archive.org/web/20200313050816/https://www.who.int/influenza/publications/public_health_measures/publication/en/