Early on in the pandemic, it was noticeable that:
(1) covid was spreading among locked down families — especially high density, multi-generational households and
(2) workers in some open businesses — think: grocery stores — weren’t experiencing pandemic levels of covid consequences.
Said differently, people confined to ostensibly protective “bubbles” were getting infected … but customer-facing workers weren’t.
Is this just Fauci-shunned non-projectible anecdotal evidence … or a relatively broad based truth?
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Casey Mulligan — a University of Chicago economist — studied that question and recently published his results in a research paper:
The Backward Art of Slowing the Spread? Congregation Efficiencies during COVID-19
Conventional public health wisdom held that lives would be saved by shutting workplaces and schools and telling people to stay home.
But, Mulligan found the opposite to be true:
Micro evidence contradicts the public-health ideal in which households would be places of solitary confinement and zero transmission.
Instead, the evidence suggests that “households show the highest transmission rates” and that “households are high-risk settings for the transmission of [COVID-19].
How can this be?
Mulligan argues that after the first months of the pandemic, organizations that adopted prevention protocols became safer places than the wider community.
Schools, businesses, and other organizations implemented a range of prevention protocols – from adjusting airflow to installing physical barriers to monitoring compliance to administering their own testing services – that households did not, and perhaps could not
But, households were bubble-fortresses isolated from the virus, right?
Wrong.
Few households were strictly “bubbled off” completely. The bubbles were routinely breached.
One or more members of practically all households would venture out to work or run errands — being exposed to the virus.
If the outside venturers happened to catch the virus, the other household members would be close-contact sitting ducks.
Without the business-level precautions, penetrated homes became veritable petri dishes for the virus.
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Mulligan’s conclusion:
Officials forgot that organizations are rational and look for cooperative solutions that improve the welfare of the group, such as reducing the risks of communicable disease.
Gee, who would have thought that self-interested private enterprises would be more creative, more efficient, more practical and more successful than government bureaucrats’ ivory-tower edicts..
The Homa Files 