A global pandemic is too dangerous to leave the experts in charge, part 1

As I write I have been in some form of lockdown for about two months, having resisted it for the first couple of weeks. I kept commuting into the office until the very end of March, before retreating to Newmarket and hanging out there for the past couple of months.

I still have had to use public transit to commute to my dialysis centre. The lengthy commute increases my risk level, but I am fortunate to still be well. 

Today's comment is about pandemic control. I haven't seen a lot of it, apart from the shutdowns. Unfortunately, we have almost no information allowing us to see the effects the lockdown has had on the spread of the virus, because there has been no organized process of random sampling. 

Random sampling is the only way for us to get a handle on the true number of viral cases. For instance, in Ontario, the government is reporting on sample results that are now beginning to reach about 20,000 per day. At the same time, the number of new cases verified through testing is generally between 300 and 400 each day. Given that the sampling numbers are typically around 16-17,000 per day, we may be looking at an infection rate of a little over 2%, which if reflective of the population at large would suggest about 350,000 cases in Ontario--far more than the number of cases that has been identified by testing.

However, we can't extrapolate reliably, because none of the samples are random--they are self-selected for either being at high risk, or because they may have symptoms. It would be useful for us to know the true incidence among the population, because if the number of cases is indeed around 350,000, and the hospital load and death rate have been as we have observed, then this virus is a lot less dangerous than supposed. 

We also have no idea of the true trend in the general infection rate--information that would help us assess the effectiveness of the lockdown. In the absence of random sampling, such information will not be forthcoming. What the Ontario Ministry of Health needs are mobile sampling teams that can carry out a randomized sampling program, possibly by going to pre-selected addresses, or possibly some other scheme (a lot of thought has already gone in to taking random samples of Ontario's population--but not by the government).

This is one of the first things that anyone would learn when becoming involved in setting public policy (or marketing public policy). The experts do not appear to have proposed such a program. One has to wonder why.