Pandemic response strategies and threshold phenomena.

This paper critically evaluates the Suppression Threshold Strategy (STS) for controlling Covid-19 (C-19). STS asserts a "fundamental distinction" between suppression and mitigation strategies, reflected in very different outcomes in eventual mortality depending on whether reproductive number is caused to fall below 1. We show that there is no real distinction based on any value of which falls in any case from early on in an epidemic wave.

Can you lock down in a slum? And who would benefit if you tried? Difficult questions about epidemiology's commitment to global health inequalities during Covid-19.

The initial response to the Covid-19 pandemic was characterised by swift "lockdowns," a cluster of measures defined by a shared goal of suppressing Covid-19 and a shared character of restricting departure from the home except for specific purposes. By mid-April 2020, most countries were implementing stringent measures of this kind. This essay contends that (1) some epidemiologists played a central role in formulating and promulgating lockdown as a policy and (2) lockdowns were foreseeably harmful to the Global Poor, and foreseeably offered them little benefit, relative to less stringent measures.