A Scientific Critique of "Impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to reduce COVID-19 mortality and healthcare demand"

True, I am not a professional epidemiologist, but I am highly disappointed in those of them who support this farce of a paper. In fact, I am completely disgusted by my fellow scientists who are accepting this false model.

I have no doubt the authors crunched the numbers correctly, but all they did was recycle numbers from a previous paper on influenza. By doing this, they committed serious scientific fallacy with the numbers they chose. First, they used the transmission rates among children for influenza which are on the range of 9.8%. Why did they choose flu? Well, because by choosing the flu they didn't have to change their paper very much. We know Covid-19 is NOT highly transmissible among school aged children. Neither is SARS, which they could have used for their model. But SARS and MERS and other coronaviruses like Covid-19 have a transmission/ infection rate among school children of only 0.0098%. That's right, they increased the transmission rate by 1000%--is it no wonder they had such a breakout in schools through their model.

In addition, they assumed transmission would occur 1/3 of the time in schools, 1/3 of the time in the workplace, and 1/3 of the time in the community. Again, this is not even remotely what we see in Covid-19. A better model would have assumed 1/3 of the time in households, 1/3 of the time in hospitals, and 1/3 of the time in the community (including the workplace and schools). This is what we are seeing when we see that most of the country of Algeria has been infected by family members. Granted, if they used the real model, they would not have been able to encourage every country to lock down, since they would have quickly realized that lock down increases transmission when the primary method of transmission is households. Look at every country that has gone on lock down from the WHO situation reports. Five days after they go on lock down, their transmission rates double and then skyrocket--so much for flattening the curve.

This paper is so poorly written, that while the authors used the 5.1 days after infection before symptoms appear, they neglected to change the flu windows of transmission which begin 2 days before symptoms appear and continue only 5-7 days after symptoms appear. Covid-19 is currently thought to be transmissible through droplets from the first day of symptoms to about the 14th day of symptoms and through feces from the 9th day of symptoms to the 28th day of symptoms.

The fact they admit in the very beginning that lock downs did not help during the Spanish flu (and manage to leave out the fact that they also did not help during the swine flu or even the SARS outbreaks), they simply state that this is because during the Spanish flu they did not have pharmaceuticals or vaccines, just like now. Apparently, they did not realize (1) yes, aspirin saved many lives during the Spanish flu and is technically a pharmaceutical and (2) we are using pharmaceuticals such as antiviral drugs, respirators, and a myriad of other interventions including Tylenol(t), Aleve(t), and Advil(t). They also don't seem to care that the lock down has not worked before, but still claim it is needed today.