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Comment by acoderhasnoname | Hacker News Reader

too late to do that now? it's already in the community

One goal is to slow the infection rate, so hospitals are not overburdened. Never too late to do that.

The point of epidemiological containment is to reduce the R value such that R<1. Once this is done, eventually, inevitably, the epidemic will burn out.

Yes, more people will become infected, yes, some will die.

But the level of person-to-person transmission will have fallen below the level necessary for the epidemic to sustain itself, and it will slowly decline and fade out.

Perfect containment, 100% effective vaccines, 100% vaccination rates, (neither of which apply here: there is not yet a vaccine), 100% travel and contact curtailment, 100% sanitation, 100% filtration, are not required. Only sufficiently effective methods to reduce transmission.

Of which, strong, effective, and widespread gathering and travel restrictions within or from epidemic zones are a very sensible tool.

I can't find any relevant data, but I wonder what effects previous quarantines (eg during Spanish flu) had on other infectious agents (eg common cold, norovirus, etc). Nobody was being quarantined for those other diseases, but I'd think a general quarantine would have had an effect on them as well. Maybe there ought to be a monthly quarantine every year, kinda like the Jewish year of jubilee.

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