71–80 of 535 posts
This is a pleasant thought, but we can't even get most people to obey speed limits most days, even though it's far easier and we know it would save large numbers of lives.
Public spaces generally comply with these types of things because of the fear of getting caught by random inspections and steep fines and penalties.
If you 're doing contact tracing right, you should need to test very few people per million every day. If you need to do a lot of testing, you ve probably already lost and will be forced to shutdown again. The solution is probably the second: antivirals.
OTOH i wonder what's the effectiveness of optical-based methods to detect viral particles: https://phys.org/news/2006-11-laser-nanotechnology-rapidly-v...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No analogy is perfect, but people need context to understand fatality rates, and see what risk is acceptable. Society doesn't have a goal of 0% death rates. We all accept some risk of death as a cost of continued existence. New data is showing that the fatality rate from covid-19 is more like existing risk we were all previously exposed to in the course of our existence, and not like a second version of smallpox.
As you said, you gotta die of something. If the covid rate equals the regular rate, then the US death rate would effectively double if we simply did nothing. That’s assuming no second order effects like a shortage of medical care making things worse.
For one year (or however long it takes to reach herd immunity -- and if longer, then death rates wouldn't double but increase much less). Assuming recovery confers significantly long lasting immunity, which I agree is not a trivial assumption (and one we don't know yet how reasonable).
Definitely not trivial, but -- in context -- means a reduction of life expectancy by less than one year. The US already lags Japan by 6; there's a lot that can be done to improve it by a year, with costs much lower than those currently spent to avoid reducing it by a year.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Paul Romer, an economist at NYU, has been advocating for testing millions of people a day for a few weeks. He is co-author of a piece in The Atlantic, "Without More Tests, America Can’t Reopen", https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/04/were-testi... Googling for "romer covid 19" should turn up a lot of news sources covering the notion of testing millions of people a day.
Yes, he is the best I've found. This proposal is still at least an order of magnitude more testing though :) (on the order of 100 million tests/day, not 1 million tests/day)
> If we were able to identify and quarantine everyone who is contagious, including those who are asymptomatic, then we could let everyone else out of lockdown and resume ordinary social and economic activity. > Even with imperfect screening, if we are able to prevent 90% of disease transmission, then the virus’s reproductive number, or R0, will drop below one and the pandemic will quickly fade. There is no risk of re…
Not trying to show bravado or anything, just pointing out that I and probably others feel this way; I would fight tooth and nail against pervasive, mandatory "test and release" policies on humans (and the necessary concomitant growth of the surveillance state). The second-order social and political effects of such a policy would be disastrous - orders of magnitude worse, in the long run, than the population-level hea…
^or whatever the true number ends up being
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's why I think testing at the door is the more straightforward way to start. We can reopen factories, office buildings, even shopping malls, but no one gets in without passing the screen.
But that just moves the compliance and logistics problem back one step. Who's doing this massive amount of testing? If it's the government, you'd need armies of workers spread out everywhere. If it's the owners of these buildings, who checks to ensure compliance? Imagine trying to enforce this on every non-residential building in, say, NYC. It would be practically impossible.
I'm working with a team that has a test that detects proteins associated with covid. It works like a pregnancy test and does not need a special scanner. Would love to discuss further.
This isn't a unique idea. This is the mainstream view. Everyone knows we need more testing and that testing is the only way to effectively ease distancing rules. That was a pretty extensive writeup to say what we've been hearing from all rational information outlets for a month.
Everyone says "we need more testing", but there's actually very little discussion of how that testing would translate into lower transmission. I'm skeptical any program less aggressive than the one proposed here would get R0 < 1.