A type specimen for Classical Liberal Age of Enlightenment freedom of speech

This is a bit of a case study of the epistemic future which many of us hoped for with the advent of the internet and smart phones.  Ideas and constructive conversations occurring and breeding with one another across the globe.  It is easy to see instances where AI and smart phones and the internet seem to be fostering totalitarian constraints on communication, deplatforming, etc.  But there is hope.

In this instance, Raj Bhopal is a Scottish medical academic of Indian extraction who published in July a paper attempting to synthesize learnings from around the world about the nature and course of Covid-19.  COVID-19 zugzwang: Potential public health movestowards population (herd) immunity by Raj S. Bhopal.  An excerpt from the Abstract: 

Until there is a vaccine, population immunity is going to occur only from infection. Allowing infection in those at very low risk while making it safer for them and wider society needs consideration but is currently taboo. About 40–50% population immunity is sufficient to suppress an infection with a reproduction number of about 1 or slightly more. Importantly, in children and young people COVID-19 is currently rarely fatal, roughly comparable with influenza. The balance between the damage caused by COVID-19 and that caused by lockdowns needs quantifying. Public debate, including on population immunity, informed by epidemiological data, is now urgent.

"Until there is a vaccine" is a hugely critical note.  MERS was a Covid virus, as was SARS, as is the common cold.  Our track record of vaccine for Covid viruses is at best mixed.  We are sinking a lot of time and money into the vaccine solution approach but we have to be pragmatic and acknowledge that there is more than a reasonable probability that we will not have a useful Covid-19 vaccine at all or in a time frame where it might make a difference.

If you grant that predicate assumption, that leads to the conclusion that "population immunity is going to occur only from infection."  Which in turn leads to Dr. Bhopal's conclusion that our best approach is to strive for population immunity and that that should be achieved by carefully staging exposure by age cohort.  Below 40 years of age, there is virtually no chance of death.  The chances of death are more and more remote the younger you are.  

The solution is to get our 0-10 year olds who won't die exposed.  Then our 11-20 year olds.  And on up the age cohorts.  Once you hit 50, you can, and need, to start doing some segmentation by co-morbidities.  As you get past 30-40, you are at more than half the population, and approaching population immunity - with virtually no deaths.  If you have been able to shelter your elderly and co-morbid in that time frame, you might escape with very low death rates.  At whatever level population immunity kicks in (25-50%?) then you have to maintain vigilance but you are basically done.  It is now endemic, and it becomes part of the statistical background noise of occasional but incremental damage.

In addition to the paper, whose data is open access, there is also a youtube interview between Indian journalist Karan Thapar with Scottish medical researcher Raj Bhopal.  Both of Indian heritage, both speaking in English, Bhopal with a subtle Scottish accent.

Bhopal's underlying concern is that much research has become politicized and people are driving solutions based on commercial interests and/or ideological or partisan convictions rather than simply trying to understand what the data is telling us.  Which is that the death rates follow a pretty common left skewed distribution curve; that once you are past the hump, deaths fall pretty quickly; hygiene, general fitness and social distancing are useful treatments; lockdowns may incur more deaths than Covid-19 and certainly has far greater societal economic costs than are being accounted for and which need to be factored in; etc.  

The interviewer is somewhat obnoxious in his interruptions but in many ways this is the type specimen for Classical Liberal Age of Enlightenment freedom of speech.  A dialog and interrogation, based on polite norms and mutual respect, founded on data, reason, and logic.  A dialog occurring across timezones, language, traditions, etc.  A dialog free (so far) from suppression by interests of a commercial, ideological or partisan nature.

Is Dr. Bhopal right about lockdown failures and right about the need to age-group transmission strategies?  We don't know yet, but my thinking is reasonably aligned with his.  I think he is on the right path.  Despite the repressing powers of vested interests.  So far.