But the idea that the "most effective" time is going to be later doesn't make much sense to me. Marginal rate changes in exponential spread are most likely to have the biggest impacts early. It doesn't much change the total volume of people who get sick, but it very likely changes the volume of people who get sick at once, and that can save lives.
This sounds like saying "we can only imagine quarantine working if things get fucked, so we're going to let things get fucked, so that the quarantine will work except for the fact that things are already fucked oh well too late."
In addition, new constellations of people gathering become likely. E.g. children from different schools may play together more in the neighborhoods, opening new pathways for the disease to spread.
So when a quarantine is not expected to help in most cases (because most people are not infected), the drawbacks easily outweigh the benefits.
It seems strange a hospital cannot respond to daycare needs in their own population in a situation like this...
I don’t think hospitals have “emergency daycare” available generally speaking. If it does come down to quarantine, I’m sure efforts will be made. It is still a cost and a negative outcome of the quarantine so my point remains: when the benefit is very small, the costs easily outweigh the benefits.
Social distancing, reduce frequency of contact, stop meeting in large groups. That's the whole ballgame now.
Statistically speaking there is a good chance no-one at your work place has the virus yet. We are still counting infections in the hundreds or the thousands in populations of millions. If all you do is to spend time at home and at work, there are good odds you’re just switching between two disease free spheres. You can’t get sick without meeting sick people. The only thing that will change that steady state is contact with new people (by yourself or your coworkers/family).
The point the government was making in this case, I believe, is that quarantine can in fact cause more novel connections, faster, and perversely increase the velocity of the spread. The people who are at home will not just sit there. They will meet other people and those people may be from outside of their ordinary, currently disease free social sphere. Thus new vectors of infection spread are introduced that would not have existed without the quarantine.
A quarantine can certainly help down the road, it’s a numbers game. But right now they’re doing the math and think it would be a net negative.
An infection travels like a game of 'telephone' passed from one to the next, right across the world.
Quarantine will initially regroup people, but in much smaller groups. If the disease is not yet widespread, then your new cohort will also likely be disease-free. There may be a tiny spike as an infected person in a large group joins a different, small group. But this is a good thing, since that group is smaller, and fewer people will now be at risk.
No, quarantine is the only effective way forward.
All else is not equal. You pull the quarantine lever, you increase social distancing but you also increase local mixing. Costs and benefits. The right choice at any given time depends on the disease spread. Computer modelling and simulation tells us when there is a net benefit.
If that's the case... it seems like it heavily relies on timing, good data & models, and more precisely timed and effective social cooperation, and I'm not sure I'd want to bet on having all those pieces in place, but it is interesting.
But if the disease is spread enough (inside or outside your borders) so that is impossible, the next best thing is to reduce social interaction just before your health system collapses, and just enough to avoid a collapse. That minimizes both the cost and time of isolation.