Predicted consequences of segregating and isolating vulnerable people into care facilities

Our paper, Hickey & Rancourt, was published today in a good scientific journal

PLOS ONE has today published our extensive study:

Hickey J, Rancourt DG (2023) Predictions from standard epidemiological models of consequences of segregating and isolating vulnerable people into care facilities. PLoS ONE 18(10): e0293556. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0293556

Basically, Joseph Hickey and I proved that the standard epidemiological models used by governments to justify lockdowns and isolation predict that this is the worst possible scenario for elderly and vulnerable people, who are most at risk of dying.

We present a direct contradiction of the baseless idea that residents of care homes must be “protected” by contact separation from the general society and isolated during a presumed pandemic.

Models were misused by governments to make all kinds of incorrect claims during COVID. Modelers used wrong models, wrong parameters, fantastic interpretations, hidden contradictions… in-effect to strengthen deliberate propaganda. We are engaged in exposing this misbehaviour, one invalid propaganda-supporting claim at a time.

Irrespective, governments need to stop forcing “protection”, and allow freedom.

We think our paper is quite clever and completely rigorous. Here is its abstract.

Abstract

Objectives

Since the declaration of the COVID-19 pandemic, many governments have imposed policies to reduce contacts between people who are presumed to be particularly vulnerable to dying from respiratory illnesses and the rest of the population. These policies typically address vulnerable individuals concentrated in centralized care facilities and entail limiting social contacts with visitors, staff members, and other care home residents. We use a standard epidemiological model to investigate the impact of such circumstances on the predicted infectious disease attack rates, for interacting robust and vulnerable populations.

Methods

We implement a general susceptible-infectious-recovered (SIR) compartmental model with two populations: robust and vulnerable. The key model parameters are the per-individual frequencies of within-group (robust-robust and vulnerable-vulnerable) and between-group (robust-vulnerable and vulnerable-robust) infectious-susceptible contacts and the recovery times of individuals in the two groups, which can be significantly longer for vulnerable people.

Results

Across a large range of possible model parameters including degrees of segregation versus intermingling of vulnerable and robust individuals, we find that concentrating the most vulnerable into centralized care facilities virtually always increases the infectious disease attack rate in the vulnerable group, without significant benefit to the robust group.

Conclusions

Isolated care homes of vulnerable residents are predicted to be the worst possible mixing circumstances for reducing harm in epidemic or pandemic conditions.

Read the full article is here.

You can also see the peer reviews here.

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All our main research articles related to COVID, since April 2020, are published and republished by CORRELATION: https://correlation-canada.org/research/

My many research areas are presented on my website here.