Azhir Mahmood  🚀 🤖 🧬 🧠 🪐

I’m starting to think more and more of this war on #COVID in simpler terms. You either support eliminating the virus, or you are apologising for it. With the evidence to date, of mutations, variants, death tolls and lockdowns, really doesn’t support any other position.

Can you hope to eliminate #SARSCoV2 globally in the short/medium term? If not, what's the endpoint of 'zero-local covid'? Besides, eternally closed borders, global economic decline, famines and resurgence of HIV, TB, malaria, polio etc. in large parts of the world ...

Well said prof. Zero covid is a pipe dream.

I think it’s a bad name for the best strategy.

I've found your tweets very insightful throughout the pandemic but feel you and other scientists are, at best, glossing over the v serious implications of this strategy or, at worst, flirting with scientfic authoritarianism. Is it worth the cost v conventional risk management?

Yes.

I will have to disagree, I just don’t think it’s possible. Firstly you need a govt willing to do it plus parliament won’t allow it imv. Western Europe is too interconnected to do it.

It’s actually much easier to think through with vaccines. Almost every death from COVID is now preventable. Suppress virus to maximum extent until all adult population (that wants) gets a vaccine is now obviously best strategy.