Sweden is making the same decision and they explained it quite well. A quarantine means children stay home from nurseries, daycare and school. This increases the stress on the medical system because some doctors and nurses have to stay home to take care of their children.
In addition, new constellations of people gathering become likely. E.g. children from different schools may play together more in the neighborhoods, opening new pathways for the disease to spread.
So when a quarantine is not expected to help in most cases (because most people are not infected), the drawbacks easily outweigh the benefits.
I think I get it now and I think it's probably not about the stresses of closing school: I think it may actually be a calculated gamble that what you want is the low-risk population widely exposed first, falling ill at a rate just below the level at which you can treat people. If that rate threatens to climb, then maybe they close the schools and try to slow the rate. Otherwise the at-capacity wave is moving people from the "not immune potential vulnerable & vector" population into the "immune and not a vector" population.
If that's the case... it seems like it heavily relies on timing, good data & models, and more precisely timed and effective social cooperation, and I'm not sure I'd want to bet on having all those pieces in place, but it is interesting.
Also something that was mentioned during the conference with the prime minister yesterday - if we close the schools and tell the kids to stay at home, who are some of them going to stay with? Their grandparents. The group that's at the highest risk from the virus.
They are smaller pools in the neighborhood, than in a school. Slowing down the infection rate is the whole game right now. Closing schools is a huge step toward that.
It seems strange a hospital cannot respond to daycare needs in their own population in a situation like this...
It’s not the size of the pool but the novelty of the configuration of people. Every time an infected individual meets a healthy one that’s a new chance to spread the infection. But you can only spread it once to each person, so if you meet the same people over and over that’s okay. When you ask people to change their routines, you also encourage new “lateral” disease spread.
I don’t think hospitals have “emergency daycare” available generally speaking. If it does come down to quarantine, I’m sure efforts will be made. It is still a cost and a negative outcome of the quarantine so my point remains: when the benefit is very small, the costs easily outweigh the benefits.
Now that isn't right. Meeting the same people over and over spreads the disease - we don't all get it at the same moment, and each contact even with the same person is a new opportunity to get infected (because they got it from somewhere else since your last contact).
Social distancing, reduce frequency of contact, stop meeting in large groups. That's the whole ballgame now.
Of course, reducing the frequency of contact with other people in general is good. I don’t think anyone is arguing against that. What I’m saying is that quarantine can cause more novel contacts.
Statistically speaking there is a good chance no-one at your work place has the virus yet. We are still counting infections in the hundreds or the thousands in populations of millions. If all you do is to spend time at home and at work, there are good odds you’re just switching between two disease free spheres. You can’t get sick without meeting sick people. The only thing that will change that steady state is contact with new people (by yourself or your coworkers/family).
The point the government was making in this case, I believe, is that quarantine can in fact cause more novel connections, faster, and perversely increase the velocity of the spread. The people who are at home will not just sit there. They will meet other people and those people may be from outside of their ordinary, currently disease free social sphere. Thus new vectors of infection spread are introduced that would not have existed without the quarantine.
A quarantine can certainly help down the road, it’s a numbers game. But right now they’re doing the math and think it would be a net negative.
Again, not right. New people are not necessary at all. People are not in little bubbles with no communications between them. If there's even one person in common between two groups, then infection can/will in time cross between.
An infection travels like a game of 'telephone' passed from one to the next, right across the world.
Quarantine will initially regroup people, but in much smaller groups. If the disease is not yet widespread, then your new cohort will also likely be disease-free. There may be a tiny spike as an infected person in a large group joins a different, small group. But this is a good thing, since that group is smaller, and fewer people will now be at risk.
That does not contradict anything the government said. All else being equal, of course smaller groups, in the sense of people seeing fewer other people, is better. That’s not the argument. Nobody is saying “we should see more people”.
All else is not equal. You pull the quarantine lever, you increase social distancing but you also increase local mixing. Costs and benefits. The right choice at any given time depends on the disease spread. Computer modelling and simulation tells us when there is a net benefit.
In addition, new constellations of people gathering become likely. E.g. children from different schools may play together more in the neighborhoods, opening new pathways for the disease to spread.
So when a quarantine is not expected to help in most cases (because most people are not infected), the drawbacks easily outweigh the benefits.