While the Inquiry's focus on improving quarantine adherence is important (summary: www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/...), it's a shame it overlooks DCT - one of the few pandemic policies validated through modelling + RCTs and then rolled out to reduce societal impacts while controlling transmission.

I'm mainly talking about when it's already at the point where it's pandemic, so high R and high N, lots of cases, widely distributed.

I think for containment at source it's a different question, I think there's more reason to throw the book at it there to stop it becoming a pandemic.

I think the West could have done all those things and had a better experience (I think a comprehensive rapid testing approach could allow us to avoid lockdowns) but I don't think global eradication was or is feasible for something like Covid.

But to test efficacy/effectiveness of vaccines, you need to have cases somewhere. So the success of countries like Australia/NZ owes a lot to other countries like the having big epidemics which allowed for vaccine trials. A very tricky issue (potentially solvable with human challenge studies - TBD)

Like I think the below is rather simplistic, as the success of NPIs in large part is determined by timely development and rollout of PIs. Hard lockdown early isn't going to be effective if you haven't rolled out good vaccines by the time you loosen it - look at experience of Australia/NZ vs China.

Of course its already a thing: knowyourmeme.com/memes/accide...

Article: www.theguardian.com/business/202...

Though interesting that Neukölln - which was in the West - has gone to Die Linke, for the first time ever

Gotta be that guy and say it's the proportion of people within those that said they wouldn't want to go to the moon, so it's a smaller fraction of the overall population (0.23*0.48 = ~11%)