BENEFITS:
NPI/SOCIAL DISTANCE POLICY
- Preserve commitment to focus on welfare of each individual person
- Reduce pressure on health care workers and facilities
- Establish new social norms and interpersonal behavior patterns that can endure for a long time.
HERD IMMUNITY POLICY
- Build a sustainable world community with most if not all people being immune
- Set realistic expectations regarding short-term impact of virus on human health
- Set hard but realistic policies regarding health priorities with specific populations
DISADVANTAGES: D
NPI/SOCIAL DISTANCING POLICY
- May lead to recurrent outbraks of the virus and ultmately more deaths
- Will sustain global uncertainty about long-term status of human health
- We don’t know if social distancing can be sustained by most socieities
- May set precedence for short-term solutons to pandemic outbreaks in the future
HERD IMMUNITY POLICY
- We don’t know if human societies can really tolerate large scale death rates without revertng to short term actions
- We don’t know what this policy would do in terms of its impact on the ethics and soul of human societies
- Who would make the decision about who lives and who dies?
These initial summary statements regarding the pull between two public policies can be framed as a polarity. What tends to occur is that we linger briefly on the advantages inherent in one of the options (in this case the NPI/social distancing policy). Then we begin to recognize some of the disadvantages associated with this option.
We are pulled to the second option. If social distancing and other preventative actions are not the answer, then we must embrace a herd immunization policy. Yet, as we linger on this second option, we discover that this policy also has its flaws and disadvantages. We are led back to the first policy—and must again face the disadvantages inherent in this first option.
