It is not clear to me how long this study lasted. Marines were locked down two to a room, so infection might be expected to pass from room-mate to room-mate. It would therefore need some time to show a positive effect. Would there be an increase in infections if room-mates were spending more time close to each other? As an argument against lockdowns this seems rather fishy without questions being answered.
It was two weeks.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2029717
It was done during the standard 14 day quarantine that all Marines have to do at the moment when they are redeployed. In this case it was to bootcamp. One of my kids friends had to do it when he was shipped to South Korea about two months ago. He said the food sucked. It could have been worse. He could have been put in a draughty tent at the the other end of the base with a case of MRE's. Like they did in the good old days.
The study showed, as expected, that young people have very low symptomatic infection rates. The rates found were not statistically significant. Random noise. And at about at the same rates as in the general population. As shown in Liverpool and elsewhere.
What those numbers tell me is that even when you have the most extreme lockdown possible the number of test positives are about same as if you had no lockdown. I've know a whole bunch of ex Marines and heard some of their stories about boot camp. I can guarantee you that those poor kids got the most extreme lockdown quarantine that its possible to have. And yet the numbers were pretty much the same as with no lockdown. Low frequency statistical noise.
Thanks. Two weeks. Too short to draw any conclusions, then, I would have thought.
