No, and I wasn’t arguing that it was. It is, however, an example of the lack of political will and responsible leadership to manage a ‘structured reopening’. If we had a more cognizant public lead by responsible leaders who were implementing a careful plan of staged reductions in lockdown combined with a comprehensive testing and tracking program, we could have the kind of ‘controlled burn’ that DSeid is recommending where we essentially allow a certain amount of the population to be infected at a given time, accept the minimum of casualties that will inevitably occur but be prepared with good medical interventions to help those who can be saved and protect those that are at most risk (which we still need a good, science-based criteria to identify, because this is not just “an old peoples’ disease”). Unfortunately, there are too many people like Magiver who insist that we’ve endured enough lockdown and we just need to reopen as quickly as possible regardless of consequences, which will essentially maximize mortality. And this has rapidly become a partisan issue where the science has been excluded in favor of appeals to “freedom” and “the Constitution” as if either of those things is going to protect people from getting sick and dying where they could be saved.
Although there has been a lot of hype and promotion that we may have a vaccine by the end of the year, maybe in twelve months, or eighteen months, I think we need to proceed at this point under the assumption that an effective and safe vaccine may not ever be available. In that vein, we need to a) start implementing comprehensive occupational protections to minimize spread where people have to work in public facing or group work roles, including wearing effective masks (not just cloth face coverings that do very little to prevent the spread of aerosols), b) develop effective and accurate near-real-time antigen testing and a qualified antibody test that can be used to correlate immunity to exposure so that we can have some hard evidence whether and for how long immunity from exposure will protect someone instead of guessing, c) implement long-term changes in social behaviors and environs to minimize spread, and d) have a comprehensive infection surveillance system in place so we can not only track outbreaks of COVID-19 but other potential epidemics including influenza and other highly transmissible diseases, because having a bad flu season would magnify the effects of a COVID-19 outbreak manyfold.
To do all of this, we need to have a plan. The plan needs to be flexible to allow for different conditions in different regions, but every single state needs to buy into that plan and follow it. The Federal government needs to support the states so that they can implement said plan instead of telling them to declare bankruptcy, and we need political leaders to stop turning this into a partisan issue about freedom and Constitutional rights.
Another thing we need, and that relatively few people have talked about, is some kind of oversight on information that is collected to make sure it isn’t used for the wrong purposes, because there is an incredible potential for abuse from surveillance, and not addressing that just feeds into the fears of people who are concerned about government overreach. Of course, many of those people are not going to be convinced regardless, and there is little way to compel people to report or provide data necessary for comprehensive tracking & tracing, which means we’re going to have to make that a secondary effort to tracking epidemic spread in the aggregate…which is problematic because of how much latency and asymptomatic spread this virus is capable of. Which means…having to have very localized and controlled relaxation of isolation and stay-at-home criteria.
If we could be assured of better reporting and widespread compliance with effective measures to limit spread, we could open up more like Sweden, but as can be seen from the link in the previous post, and in countless other incidents where even the most basic physical distancing protocols are flaunted by people who don’t even ‘believe’ in essential facts, that kind of social responsibility just doesn’t exist for a large and vocal segment of the US population (many of which are aligned with a particularly political part and/or ideological movement), and so all of the planning is probably for naught. With the current non-plan of many states opening up now I’ll frankly be surprised if we don’t get up to a rate of 3k deaths/day by mid-June, and if we aren’t looking at a mortality count approaching 400k before we get to influenza season, and then…who knows.
Stranger