Seriously what is the point of this other than to remove or encroach on people’s personal liberties.
For your information, a stay-at-home order also violates personal liberties.
We have now seen dozens of ways to handle this in numerous countries. In no case could simple behavioral recommendations stop the virus from spreading.
There are two broad scenarios to choose from for the time until a vaccine is found, tested, mass produced, and made generally available (prob. early 2021).
In
scenario A, everything goes back to normal and all civil liberties are fully upheld. The virus stops spreading when 60-70% of the people have been infected. Without any restrictions whatsoever this will happen within a couple of months.
The virus' lethality is around 0.5-1% if perfect medical treatment is available. Unfortunately, 10-20 times as many need hospital treatment for weeks. This quickly overwhelms medical capacity. It has been shown that the lack of resources (staff, ventillators, ICU beds, drugs, masks etc.) increases lethality considerably to around 3%. It also must be taken into account that other treatments must be postponed or are not possible at all during that time, e.g. people having a car accident will also die for the lack of treatment capacity.
Doing the math, around 6 million people will die in the US until the end of the year due to COVID-19. Maybe only 3 million, maybe 10 if you take indirect causes into account. In any case, there will be total chaos as far as medical treatment is concerned. And probably elsewhere too: don't underestimate fear if people are dying left and right.
On the other hand, the American people will then have herd immunity. Also, the bigger part of the dead people would have died soon anyway. And of course no personal freedoms are compromised. If you think that this is an ethically and politically viable scenario, by all means propagate it. But you have to be aware of the consequences. And you must understand why other people have a different opinion.
In
scenario B we are playing for time. In one way or another personal liberties must be limited to keep cases low for the rest of the year. Obviously, a lockdown is a very effective measure, but very extreme and deadly for the economy. And it only helps as long as it is upheld. After loosening, case numbers will quickly grow again, forcing additional lockdowns and stay-at-home orders later this year. Eventually, the economy will be completely destroyed. So what else can be done? Fine-grained lockdowns at the village level are one possibility. However, this is still rather extreme and will still cause a lot of damage.
A better compromise would be to let people move freely, but couple it with very fast testing and tracing. Two facts are important:
1. People infect others before they have symptoms
2. We can detect the virus early in PCR, long before people are contagious
In theory, 2) means that testing everyone frequently would stop the pandemic, unfortunately that's not possible. Relying on people quarantining themselves after showing symptoms doesn't work due to 1). But if we could identify people who might have been infected and test them before they are contagious, that could work.
Traditionally, this would be done as follows: someone would show symptoms. The person then arranges an appointment to be tested / goes to a drive-in test. When the test is positive, the person is interrogated about their closest persons, contacts and activities in the last few days etc. Tracers try to find these contacts and convince them to self-quarantine / get tested.
It has been shown in models that this doesn't work. The virus just spreads too quickly (tracing takes a lot of time) and too easily (sitting in a restaurant at a neighboring table is enough). A lot of potential infections would be missed or identified too late to bring down the virus' replication rate enough.
Luckily, technology can help identify everyone an infected person came in contact with during the incubation period in an instance. This gives us a few options. For example, tell people to get tested if a contact has tested positive. Or tell people to self-quarentine if a contact has tested positive. Or tell people to self-quarantine when a contact started showing symptoms. The latter probably won't work as people will massively overreport intentionally and unintentionally. But all of this would still be a lot better than destroying the economy. And than millions dying (my opinion).
www.theverge.com
