Testing first, scientific analysis next, and opening last.
Or people can go to an Oklahoma restaurant packed shoulder-to-shoulder without masks with their governor and expedite the restart the pandemic curve to end up with 100k more deaths.
I read this and think of Philip K Dicks novel “the penultimate truth” they will be very expensive. Real problems like just inexpensive preventative care goes wanting.
Wouldn’t it make more sense, from a public health perspective, to put that money into the existing local institutions (hospitals, health clinics, food banks) which are vital and soon may be strained to the breaking point?
First you allow all shops to be opened, then few weeks later open public places like gyms, museums etc, another few weeks later you open borders again, even later allow some mass events etc.
After every lift you wait at least two weeks to see how much it increases number of new cases and you balance it so that healthcare system does not get overwhelmed.
Well, do you have research on how many excess deaths there would be if states started opening up now? California is taking a cautious approach by only opening in stages after cases have stabilized, and only after testing is present. Do you have a better plan than what a group of public health experts have come up with?
Time is critical. Vaccine research, time for hospital infrastructure to scale and establish procedure, research on novel mitigation methods (is there a particular wavelength of UV that is effective? Can we scale that to millions of handheld devices?), time for orgs working with vulnerable populations to change operations, time to train up additional staff, more spare capacity of areas less impacted to help out situations like Iran instead of worrying so much about their own, will summer give us a tailwind? etc etc. Essentially everyone who is already specialized in this area is getting slammed right now and alleviating their problems will be measured in lives saved.
I agree that with re-opening, we will see a bump in infections, and therefore deaths. However, there is only one path out of this and that is herd immunity. We can accelerate herd immunity via vaccine, but either way its herd immunity. That means that we want as many people sick as our hospital system can handle, but not more. That means playing a game of optimization. Further, different states (New York vs. Arizona) should have different plans because their situations are vastly different (population density, current herd infection status, etc).
Further, we can't just optimize for Covid19 deaths, we have to look at the whole situation, which includes suicides due to shelter-in-place orders, child abuse and other domestic violence, malnutrition due to hunger from unemployment, negative impacts of poverty.
this will certainly be a case study for future generations.
I’m not sure it’s a great idea because older people are far more likely to catch the disease, so you’re crowding the most susceptible, most at-risk demographic together. But I’m not sure there’s an alternative. It’s better if the hours are longer.
It’s more complicated than that, there are other downsides to public health and economic well being to consider. We could completely eradicate the virus by welding people into their homes, the question is how to trade off cost and benefit.
I definitely hear his argument about opportunity costs, and in terms of dollars and time (particularly human effort), I agree we should be focusing on the most important efforts to combat COVID. It's the most critical threat right now, so it's more important to spend time and money on ventilation solutions than more bleach.
On the other hand, some of this is disinfection that should have been happening already and will hopefully cut down on the spread of other diseases. Just as a practical example, my wife's school has not had a single outbreak of norovirus in over a year thanks to obsessive surface-cleaning and hand-washing, and that stuff spreads like wildfire. It's not (usually) a fatal disease, but it does result in hours of lost time for everyone involved annually. Food poisoning cases, hepatitis transmission, and things like RSV are all hampered by better surface sanitation, so it's not just a tummy-bug problem. In the places where we can develop better automated sanitation solutions, that's a good side benefit—especially if we can turn around and spread those more universally.
It would be nice if they start a Great War Against Disease, and spend as many trillions as needed so no one ever gets the flu, any cold, or any other disease ever again.
People keep saying "that's not possible" but there are already a lot of companies working on it.
Show me a place I can make $300,000 working on curing diseases and I'd happily spend my life working on it. At the moment making websites pays better.
While I am strong believer that great ideas can change the world for the better, in this case we don't have time. What We need is strict quarantine and functioning hospitals. As the CDC has modelled, if we can get 70% of the patients into properly run hospitals then we can get on top of the outbreak - the corollary is that if we don't then we won't.
This plan has several serious drawbacks: many deaths, possible long-term effects, the fear and anxiety of getting an illness with a 1% fatality rate, the discomfort and pain of being ill, overloaded healthcare system even if you build hospitals because then new bottlenecks like medical staff appear.
And probably more, this is just quick out of my mind.
Here's a better approach: Hardcore lockdown for 2 weeks, which stops the spread and reveals the vast majority of cases. Then switch to high-volume testing and targeted interventions (with would be much more efficient than now because many of the processes can be improved).
Cinemas can re-open for people with the bands for instance. They will be vital in the health care sector.
We ignored organising PPE until it was to late, even with months of notice, why are we still not looking ahead?
There is no evidence of quick reinfection, and in the unlikely possibility it is possible we will quickly realise by formalising the post infection process.
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