Simulating an epidemic [video]
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The modeling is fairly clear that the tracking is a more effective public health measure than the distancing, and the general public don't get as riled up about erosions to privacy rights as other "realer" ones. It'll be interesting to see what happens.
In the mean time we'll continue to have ineffective measures because I think a lot of meat space businesses will have a kind of prisoner's dilemma going on. If every company voluntarily isolates, the pandemic damage is minimized, but the larger the percent of a given industry that isolates, the larger market share is left for any company/individual that operates business as usual.
I mean, it doesn't really have to be. It's really no secret when you have complications from this disease. Cautious quarantine is probably the reasonable procedure for those who refuse to be tested or share their results. It isn't a broad invasion of privacy, but a specific request for information.
> If every company voluntarily isolates, the pandemic damage is minimized, but the larger the percent of a given industry that isolates, the larger market share is left for any company/individual that operates business as usual.
I don't think it's that simple. The damage of the disease may be minimized by that approach, for as long as you can sustain it (you can't forever), but the overall damage, or even the mortality, isn't necessarily limited most effectively by non-essential businesses remaining closed until we have a vaccine or a very effective treatment.
https://www.ft.com/content/7e56cf84-6a9e-11ea-a3c9-1fe6fedcc...
Or if that link doesn't work: https://www.google.com/?q=FT+Neil+Ferguson+a+virus+modeller+...
The article talks about the modeller Neil Fergusson, and in my next link it talks about how he has advised the UK government:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-diseas...
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/s...
is by Neil M Ferguson et al.
16 March 2020 Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team
DOI: https://doi.org/10.25561/77482
"Impact of non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to reduce COVID-19 mortality and healthcare demand"
In my opinion, the experts were aware of the problems in approach of many governments, but the governments managed to do what they wanted (pretend nothing is happening) for too long. Also in my opinion, the smaller players believed too much to the most influential one, which has a specific history of bluffing. That even works in social contexts, but, in the words of Richard Feynman eventually:
"reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled."
1) E.g. The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/16/new-data-new-p...
The modelling most often goes wrong either when people do something bizarrely stupid that the modellers didn't think of, like farmers in the UK foot and mouth disease epidemic moving animals at night to farms that had been declared clean in order to avoid having them destroyed, or lack of good numbers to go into the model in the absence of adequate testing.