Sunday,
December 13,
2020

Resolution

Coronavirus lockdowns should be lifted and replaced with a targeted strategy that protects the old and other high-risk groups.

For the affirmative:

Martin Kulldorff is a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and a biostatistician and epidemiologist in the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics, Brigham and Women’s Hospital. His research centers on developing and applying new disease surveillance methods for post-market drug and vaccine safety surveillance and for the early detection and monitoring of infectious disease outbreaks. Another major research area is spatial and spatio-temporal disease surveillance, for which he has developed various scan statistics for disease cluster detection and evaluation; and for the early detection and monitoring of infectious disease outbreaks. These methods are used by most federal and state public health agencies around the world, and by many local public health departments and hospital epidemiologists.

For the negative:

Andrew Noymer is an epidemiologist and population health scientist at the University of California, Irvine, where he is associate professor in the Department of Population Health and Disease Prevention. A specialist in infectious disease mortality, Prof Noymer has closely studied the prior modern pandemics of influenza (2009,1968,1957, and the most severe, 1918) from demographic, epidemiological, and social perspective. Prof Noymer is active on Twitter (@AndrewNoymer) in giving public information on COVID-19, and he predicted in January that the coronavirus pandemic would have severe outcomes. Prof Noymer's scholarly work, on a number of aspects of population health, particularly mortality, is sampled on his webpage: https://webfiles.uci.edu/noymer/web/