I have been trying to develop an at-home test for determining risk status, with the aim of allowing people to make a determination of whether they should go out, when the doors are opened. And/or to give guidance to people to go get a better set of testing done by a real doctor to figure out how at-risk they are.
Personally, that would be my recommendation. Divide people into groups by risk factor and let them out in waves. Having a process like that will make people more willing to wait to go free, because people like order and process, so you can draw it out more. And, obviously, it allows you to protect the at-risk groups for longer, while holding out hope that a good treatment will become available.
For the most high-risk groups - well, probably many of them won’t be employed to begin with - but for any who are employed you would probably want to see to it that they can work from home or have financial aid if not. Employable or not, anyone at high-risk should stay isolated from society (and others at high-risk) until a treatment becomes available or so long as the percentage of people with anti-bodies continues to rise (once herd immunity is established, the level will plateau). So, there, the important thing is seeing to it that the people can get medicines, food, and other basic needs supplied. That means, also, that you will need delivery people and health workers who can be kept isolated from society, to aid those at risk while they are isolated.
And so, similarly, you will need to see to it that these delivery people and health workers are being supported and regularly tested. If they have children, you would want to help pay for daycare and anything else - though it would be better to select people who are childless.
You might also want to think about entertainment options. There are some online boardgame applications that you might suggest to people.
For the at-home test, the goal is simplicity and ease-of-completion rather than medical exactitude.
Basically, the risk factors seem to be (as I understand it):
- Age
- COPD
- Diabetes
- Auto-immune disorders
Obviously, a hard diagnosis of having one of these things would be sufficient to let you give a simple yes/no on whether you have it (among the latter three). But I also wanted to include a risk test, so people could know that - diagnosed or not - they might want to be careful or get better testing. (And, realistically, diagnoses are a hard boolean result where, it’s more likely, that actual illnesses are on a spectrum.)
I determined that there’s a 95% correlation between the amount of time that a person can hold their breath and whether they have COPD.
I’ve been trying to determine a halfway decent test for diabetes based on age and activity level, but combining those two seems to be about the limit of what I can do on that one.
And I’m still trying to find a decent test for autoimmune. Plus, I have been trying to determine the risk factor for immunodeficiency as well, but that’s less common.
Between those four, though, you should be able to identify the vast majority of people who are at-risk. It will miss some, and that is unfortunate, but it’s also unhealthy to keep people in an unemployed, prison-like state. On the balance, letting people go be free who are probably not at risk is, probably, better than trying to keep everyone in quarantine for too long of a period.