Lessons from Stanford's COVID Conference

by Vinay Prasad MD 

On Friday, I spoke at Stanford, discussing lessons from the COVID19 pandemic. Here are 5 things I learned.

Lesson 1: Some people still believe that short term elementary school closure was justified, but Anders Tegnell knows better. Tegnell didn’t follow the groupthink in 2020.

Anders led the Swedish response and notably Sweden never closed elementary schools. Anders told me that the data from Wuhan was clear. Children were not the drivers of COVID-19 spread, and they faced no risk from COVID different than typical respiratory viruses. Thus, closing elementary schools— even short term— was a bad decision, and Sweden didn’t make it because he reviewed the data. I would wager that most people who thought it was a good idea did not review Wuhan data at the time.

Lesson 2: Everyone admits that prolonged school closure was bad, but they refuse to accept responsibility for silence. I don’t think anyone denies that prolonged school closure (anything more than 6-10 wks) was completely insane and harmful. Notably, San Francisco kept schools closed for 18 months.

Yet, many people were silent about school closure at the time. Including faculty who focused on early life development and equity. I think many people should admit that they are not really good at thinking independently in the face of groupthink. That would serve them well as academics — because they might be more humble about their beliefs going forward.

For the record: I did podcasts against school closure in the summer of 2020. And famously tweeted this, which I continue to think is correct.

Lesson 3: John Ioannidis made an interesting point. He showed a graph of excess death by country and time period. Look at the countries with almost no excess death (bottom)

Sweden and New Zealand had drastically different pandemic approaches. Ioannidis’ point is that largely countries with more income inequality did poorer than more egalitarian places. Lockdowns, border closure, and the like were not as important as access to basic health care. I will continue mulling over these data.

https://www.drvinayprasad.com/p/5-lessons-from-stanfords-covid-conference