I was on two great lectures about the pandemic crises. The first lecturer, Prof. Yoram Louzon, analyzed data about COVID-19 and came to conclusions that he shared with us during the lecture.

In the beginning of March 2020 there were hysteria and fears that COVID-19 would have an exponential growth to infect the entire population of the world as many others diseases had before, but what we observed is numbers are stabilized on some level. So, the predictions were slightly exaggerated. Expected predictions about mortality also were exaggerated: mortality from COVID-19 was expected to be two times more than a regular flu, so if the whole world would be infected, 2% of the entire population, mortality would be 200 million people. But the situation in reality is that the infection rate has stayed on the same level for a long time.  If we compare COVID with other pandemics that have happened before, we can see that this one continues for a long time with approximately the same numbers of new infected and deceased people.

Prof. Yoram Louzon analyzed how different factors influenced mortality in different countries and came to the unexpected conclusion that the strongest factor is obesity. Other factors include number of tourists and pluralism in the country.

Looking at the fluctuation of mortality and observing the variety of actions different countries applied, we can conclude that the numbers were not really dependent on how strong the measures each country took. If we compare Israel that took very strong actions and a series of lockdowns and Sweden that took very little steps to prevent COVID-19 and didn’t apply lockdowns at all, or Finland and Norway that took minimal steps, we can see that the level of mortality is not dependent on if the country had a lockdown or took other strong actions.

If we take all the facts mentioned before, we can conclude that all lockdowns that we had in Israel have had very little effect on mortality. Israel lost so much money during the lockdowns, many businesses went bankrupt and people became very depressed. Instead we should spend more money on the health system. Educate people to live healthy life, have physical activity and eat healthy food. Any products that are not good for health or lead to obesity should have red stickers on them. More pluralism in political system leads to better decisions. In times of a pandemic crisis a country should carefully manage tourist traffic. I completely agree with Prof. Louzon that “it is not about managing the crisis, it is about managing the country.”

Another good lecture was given by Dr. Lewis about vaccination campaigns. What we learned from her lecture is, first of all, you can not force people, you need to persuade them, at least in democratic countries. So, to persuade people to vaccinate, we can use different methods, and of course in democratic countries, we should be concerned in case there some ethical issues there. For example, you can appeal to anticipated regret, showing how a whole family wasn’t vaccinated and was infected at a birthday party. Another example is creating the fear of missing out, like showing people who were vaccinated and rewarded by the ability go abroad or enjoy a social life. I think we can learn from successful campaigns in the past, like the well-known ‘The Truth’ campaign. The Truth campaign was against smoking among young people, and it was successful because they applied a creative approach, invited the youth to participate in the campaign actively. On the other hand, the vaccination campaign in Israel I would not count as successful. Several sectors of the population mostly didn’t get vaccinated, and the government didn’t find a way to speak with these groups.

It would be good if our government listened to lectures like these two before making solutions like enforcing a lockdown or deciding how to conduct a vaccination campaign.

Photo by Hakan Nural