Aside from the difficulties of getting everyone in the world to agree that the first three weeks of February during a leap year are observed through social distance, it doesn't seem like it would be as bad on a recurring basis as it is during an emergency like this. You could plan for your self-isolation in advance, so there wouldn't be a rush for supplies the way there is now; you would already know not to schedule anything for February; you'd probably still have to solve some money problems for a large number of people, since being able to WFH probably anti-correlates with living paycheck to paycheck.
If you could actually eliminate -- or at least, dramatically reduce the incidence of -- common colds and seasonal flu through such a scheme, it would probably be worth both from a QoL standpoint for the everyone in the world (would you trade 3 weeks of cabin fever every four years for never having another actual fever?) and from an economic standpoint (three weeks of predictable low productivity is almost certainly better than the unpredictable constant costs associated with illness and death).
The only suggestion that seems remotely plausible is 'all participants getting tested first'. There are still issues with getting tested, as there are false negatives and it can be hard to get tested for all diseases, but this would dramatically reduce incident of STIs.
I recently picked up 1984 again and finally managed to complete it this time. I read the last line with a mixture of relief and a tinge of disappointment. Until the very end, I was hoping for a Hollywood-style turnaround in the political situation.
And the speed with which it spreads in a population that has little immunity against the current strain should be a good indication of how little you'd save.
Part of the problem we have in our war against infectious diseases is that they mutate in endless variety. The cold you catch tomorrow is slightly different than the cold you had last week; the variety of the seasonal flu spreading this year is different than the variety of last year.
But these endless varieties are generated at a rate proportional to the available hosts. If we can successfully reduce the number of hosts available, we would also reduce the number varieties of colds and flu we have to contend with, and the rate at which new ones appear. Everyone not getting a little sick all the time might conceptually weaken our immune systems, but it would also weaken the diseases against we're fighting, and we would still have our other tools we use to fight them.
Very hard. We can’t even properly do it in the face of this pandemic.
And obviously colds and flu aren't the only way people get sick and miss work, but if you could cut those two weeks per year to one week per year by having three weeks of quarantine every four years, that's a productivity win before you include the more predictable "nothing happens in February this year", the economic value of the lives saved, and the savings on healthcare spending on the people who don't get sick.
Some of us are lucky enough to be able to weather this without severe downsides. But we're in the minority.
I have been cooped up in my apartment for three weeks and only left it four times to go to the grocery store. Finally I have some time to spend on my oss projects
[*] The common cold is a half dozen distinct viruses.
Some of them coronaviruses. It makes sense, but it's funny that we classify the common cold by symptoms, ignoring that the viruses are in different families.
If so, it'll just immediately get reintroduced to humans even if we distance it out of our population successfully.
No mutations required.
We’re actually seeing a hint of what he described, thankfully not near the full scale.