"How would paid voluntary human experimentation work? To find the true IFR, you recruit a thousand volunteers, test them for coronavirus and coronavirus antibodies, deliberately infect half of the never-infected subjects, and then compare the death rates for the two groups. Morbid? Callous? No more morbid or callous than paying people to fight in a war, mine coal, or cut down trees. The social value of the knowledge is immense, they knowingly accepted the risk, and they were paid for their efforts. Deaths along the way are unfortunate, but in no way blameworthy.
To find the risk of fomite infection, similarly, first measure fomite levels in, say, eleven grocery stores. Then recruit a thousand volunteers, randomly send half of them to the median store to shop for an hour, quarantine all of them for two weeks, then compare the infection rate for the two groups.
Finding the true infection rate isn’t quite as clean, admittedly. But you can still randomly offer citizens a lot of money to participate in the study, until you get 90 or 95% participation. Then measure prevalence. Way better than even Iceland has done so far."
https://www.econlib.org/what-we-would-now-know-if-demagogues-didnt-rule-every-country-on-earth/
To find the risk of fomite infection, similarly, first measure fomite levels in, say, eleven grocery stores. Then recruit a thousand volunteers, randomly send half of them to the median store to shop for an hour, quarantine all of them for two weeks, then compare the infection rate for the two groups.
Finding the true infection rate isn’t quite as clean, admittedly. But you can still randomly offer citizens a lot of money to participate in the study, until you get 90 or 95% participation. Then measure prevalence. Way better than even Iceland has done so far."
https://www.econlib.org/what-we-would-now-know-if-demagogues-didnt-rule-every-country-on-earth/