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Comment by StreakyCobra | Hacker News Reader

Indeed, I wanted to point out that all countries seem to go through the same process over time.

It's somehow like all countries are adopting the limitations gradually, like a bit of denial that it will really happen. Wouldn't it make sense to skip some steps and be proactive? At the end we all seem to take the direction of Italy [1], maybe we should consider quarantine directly. It may be a bit more brutal, but it will cost less lives and be over sooner.

The federal council is meeting on Friday morning if I'm not mistaken, I would not be surprised to see new measures during Friday lunch.

[1] https://ibb.co/gZDfgPy

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The risk increases as the fraction of infected people increases. For example, if you have 200 people on an airplane from SFO today, there is a good chance that nobody will be infected. Next week, when there are many more cases, a gathering of 100 people might be as risky as one of 200 today.

So it plausibly makes sense to reduce the limits over time. I don't know how much science is actually going into determining these limits, though.

Or maybe its about gradually easing a population in to isolation.

The issue is that this wont be contained anymore, it wont be over, we fucked up.

Lets say that a country, for example Sweden with its 500 known cases and 10M population goes into a total lockdown for. A few new cases emerge and after a few weeks of no new infections they open up everything again. But since other countries are still infected, they will be reinfected within days.

The only way to stop it would be if the whole world goes into lockdown for a month or so, but that wont happen.

We will have to live with no mass gatherings for 1-2 years, until someone comes up with a good vaccine

I don't think it's that dire. All we really need to do is get R0 below 1.0.

In Wuhan, they got it down to 0.3 with the huge lockdown and also aggressive testing and out-of-home quarantine. We will need a period of that to get the case count down to near zero.

Then it's possible to let up, but just a bit. People will need to wear masks and wash their hands a lot, but if R0 is say, 0.8, each new case leads to just a few more cases and then it dies out instead of exponentially growing. That's the flip side of an exponential function.

If it embeds itself into the population substantially enough, it becomes 'endemic'. Like influenza.

Still not that dire? :(

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