Mon Mar 23, 2020 12:35 pm
Any potential answer to the problems facing our country requires a lot of strategic thinking, which we should be familiar with at this site.
We already blew the first stage of the outbreak where (perhaps) you could track and isolate people and stopped the virus from ever getting started. I am not really sure this would have worked totally anyway, but our initial response was pathetic.
Now we're in full containment mode, which needs to be as draconian as possible so that it as short as possible. That probably includes calling out the National Guard to enforce social distancing. Because the economy cannot take it for more than a month or so before going into free-fall. A Nobel laureate talking to the LA Times has tracked numbers in 78 countries and he sees favorable signs in the slow-down in the increase in cases and deaths. So that indicates a shut-down will work but that is only the first step.
The other part of the strategy is dealing with the huge influx of severe cases that are going to hit shortly and that requires a federal response with massive production of safety equipment and ventilators, and production of temporary beds to accommodate all the people that will need ICU treatment and those who need to be on ventilators. Our efforts so far on this have been, well, pathetic.
Once you get cases back to a manageable level, the next step is how to restart the economy. In order for the virus not to restart I think we would need knowledge about who has the virus in real-time. So I think there are three potential ways to do this, though the first two I am not sure are technologically feasible:
(1) Development of a self-test. Something you can do at home every day and upload the results to some website. Then you would have an app that basically flashes green if you're negative or red if not. And to go into a public building you would to have your phone and it had better be green. You would need scanners at every public building. And you could not visit private residences.
(2) The second way is a person could wear something akin to a an apple watch that would monitor heart rate, blood pressure, (temperature), whatever we can monitirv to see if there are changes. So we would have to investigate now whether the virus causes immediate physiological changes. Obviously, people who register significant changes get immediately tested and do not go out into public.
(3) We have to keep track of who has recovered. We'll assume that provides immunity (for now at least). We still need massive, massive testing to know who has the virus. When we find out that a person has the virus we track all their contacts and test them as quickly as possible. If any of those contacts test positive we track them. And temperature testing at public buildings (though given that people dont sem to get a fever until 4 or so days after symptoms start this is imperfect at best) Since the incubation period is 5-6 days, I still think people should not go into public unless they had a test result within seven days. Whatever option we choose is going to require a massive increase in testing capability.
Unless the virus just stops being so contagious with warm weather (and there is no evidence that it will), if we do not devise an effective method for controlling the virus while getting the economy mostly going again (with some restrictions--I doubt we could back to filled arenas/stadiums anytime soon) then we are faced with a Hobbesian choice: having an extreme depression with societal chaos or letting the virus burn through the country unabated with one or two million dead (maybe a lot less but still a lot). This talk from some government officials about a long-term shut-down is so absurd and I wonder how on earth they got such an important job.
So I am hoping that there are some very smart people thinking right now on how to do this, because this is an extraordinarily difficult problem to solve.
