Some solutions that already exist, are already in use and could be firmed up: 1. Working from home. 2. Ordering online and getting takeout. 3. Using self checkout. 4. Collaboration and socialization via phone and internet. You can't get sick if you aren't exposed. People don't get sick due to some random number generator. You have to have a vector. We already know a great many ways to disrupt the spread. The antidote…
> You can't get sick if you aren't exposed. The problem isn't the short-term; the problem is the long term. Are you suggesting the entire world work from home and interact only over the internet for the rest of our lives? One of the biggest questions in this thread is specifically what kind of immunity we can have from the virus. If catching it gives you 10-year immunity, then slowing things down might work. But what…
No, of course not.
But some people who are especially vulnerable can work from home permanently.
We can permanently crack down on things like cashiers licking their fingers to help them open bags.
I have a compromised immune system. The gross behavior of cashiers is one of my single biggest headaches in life. If we recognized how critical a link they are in transmitting disease and took that threat seriously, I imagine people would generally be healthier.
We also can design public bathrooms without doors so you don't have to touch the handle. Walmart has that mastered.
We also can make it more the standard for public bathrooms to have no-touch technology, such as hand dryers and faucets that are motion activated.
We can permanently move to bowing instead of shaking hands. Several older cultures have such practices.
We can more widely adopt the practice of removing our shoes at the front door when we get home rather than tracking dirt all over the house. There are plenty of cultures that do that.
We can move away from wall-to-wall carpeting in most homes in the US. It is not the norm in other countries.
We can move to passive solar design and away from forced air HVAC systems.
I'm suggesting that this isn't a situation where we need to throw our hands up and just be resigned to it being utterly futile. There are many things we can do to reduce the transmission of disease without simply calling a halt to life. And for a professional scientist to suggest otherwise is basically being alarmist because they are stressed out or because the solutions don't fit their mental models of "just pop a pill" or whatever.
They are boring and a lot of them are basically the purview of what housewives historically did. And no one wants to admit housewives did anything of real value.
American culture acts like homemakers and full-time moms are losers and leeches and not actually contributing anything of real value to the economy. A charitable reading of that is that it's a blind spot and people just don't get it.
A less charitable reading is that it's misogynistic BS rooted in intentionally being disrespectful of women and of the value and importance of "women's work" and that people would literally rather die than admit that women's work has real value on par with what important men do, like doctors and scientists. And to whatever degree that is true, the world can now either get over its crap or die due to clinging to it.
A lot of people may die over that. Change tends to occur one funeral at a time because most people stubbornly cling to their ideas and refuse to change.
This can either be an age of enlightenment or a new dark age.
Ain't no big thing. We're all dust in the wind anyway. But the dark path is not the only option.