It's daily screening for exactly that reason. Is there something I should change to make that more clear?
Wouldn't it stand to reason that you could be tested once per day, in the parking lot to a mall or some other shopping establishment, and thereafter _verify_ that you had been tested that day for the remainder of your commercial transactions?
Thinking in those terms, 10 minutes per day is not so great of an imposition. We could formalize it and create drive-through test centers where you drive up, spit into the tube, have a bar code on your phone scanned, and drive off. On your way to the mall you get a text message with your results. Everywhere else you visit that day scans your phone upon entry and confirms that you've been tested.
The system also becomes much more complex and requires a bigger infrastructure if you aren't literally testing people at the door. How do you verify someone has had a test today? In your bar code idea, can the bar code be faked? Is there some centralized database behind the system that tracks who tests positive? Is that database politically feasible? Some comments here are already objecting to that idea.
As for checking who has a test, simply give colored stickers. If someone wants to “beat” the system, so be it. Social disapproval and common sense will keep most people honest.
You need a plan for people who want to beat the system because they present a huge danger. The whole idea behind this system is to allow the people inside the secured bubble to return to normal behavior. They aren't going to be wearing masks, social distancing, or taking other precautionary measures. Therefore one person acting inappropriately could present a huge problem for the people on the inside. Keep in mind there are still people who think this entire thing is a conspiracy and that COVID-19 is no worse than the flu. You have to consider what happens with people like that who might not participate in this system in good faith.
Hawaii is an island, thousands of miles away from the rest of the USA, so why shouldn’t it open on a different schedule?
Even China, ground zero for the crisis, close and reopened different providences, districts, and even neighborhoods independently.
Could you protect a food processing plant with this method? Yes. Does it cover testing in LA? No. Does LA need food and other shipments? Yeah they do.
Imagine trying to enforce this on every non-residential building in, say, NYC. It would be practically impossible.
Who checks to make sure every restaurant follows the standards of cleanliness? They have inspectors who (theoretically) show up randomly, so it ensures most places comply voluntarily, because the cost of getting caught is very high.
A combination of random inspections and steep fines would solve the compliance problem.
Edit: I just had another idea. Offer cash rewards to people who can prove they they weren't tested when entering a public place (which the business pays for via fines). You'd have people running around trying to find missed testing for the cash reward.
I think economic incentives are also fairly well aligned here. If tests are widespread, a significant segment of the market is likely to prefer locations that are testing to those that don’t, just like the market tends to prefer clean restaurants to unsanitary ones.
you can't reject solutions because they sound dystopian unless you've got better, non-dystopian solutions. and everybody has to stay in their homes at all times and all non-essential services are shut down is not a less dystopian solution.
What “solution” are you looking for to solve this relatively small share of “death from natural causes” that we call COVID? How much damage should we inflict upon ourselves in this moral quandary?
How many people should die because we’re willing to spend trillions of dollars due to our innate fear of a virus rather than our innate fear of much much bigger problems, like poverty or starvation?
Why can we muster so much energy in this case, and so little on much bigger problems? My theory is that you can’t catch hunger on the subway, you can’t catch underprivilege from a doorknob, and you can’t catch climate change from shaking hands with constituents.
There’s a lot wrong with our planet, it’s too bad we’ll all go bankrupt and unemployed chasing such a trifling disease as COVID when there were actual real problems we could have solved with mountains of cash that large, rather that burning the cash in effigy for modest to no effect once COVID has run its course.
If I could still edit the comment, I would replace the first “you” with “we”, as none of the comment is meant to be directed personally at OP.
The dystopia we have is purely one of our own creation. One which TFA seems to not only welcome with open arms, but seeks to capitalize upon. It’s really quite sad.
One is that cash is not a resource. It's even less of a resource when it's not only not metal, but mostly not paper either.
The other is that the flu comparison doesn't make sense to me on multiple levels. Given deaths from COVID at the moment are nearly ten times flu on an annualized basis, given the partial shutdown, obviously they would be more than ten times without the shutdown...but what is even significant about exactly one order of magnitude?
I’m not quite sure what to say to “cash is not a resource”. Even if just a proxy for attention cash is obviously a resource. But really, cash in itself is a resource. $10 trillion dollars can do a lot of things if spent wisely. $10 trillion dollars can also be destroyed for practically no benefit at all.
I agree it’s not strictly $1 spent on A means $1 less to spend on B. But it’s at least true to some extent, and again, as a proxy for attention and willingness to enact change, it’s a valid measure.
So the flu comparison is because they are both respiratory illnesses which kill a lot of people. In the 2017-2018 season the flu killed 61,000 in the US. Hospitals in NYC were stretched very thin. Nobody really noticed. It wasn’t even declared a pandemic.
Obviously it’s impossible to say with certainty if we have seen 1/4th, 1/3rd, or 1/2 of the total deaths that we are going to see from this SARS-CoV-2. But I think nobody is currently out there claiming that we’ve only seen 1/10th of the total deaths from SARS-CoV-2 that we’ll get by the time it’s over. (SARS-CoV-3 is another story?)
“Ten times flu on an annualized basis...” So 50k times 4 is 200k. That’s not nearly 600k. Just trying to follow your math. If we’re halfway through now (IHME thinks we’re about 3/4 through) then we‘ll have seen in COVID the equivalent of two bad years of flu.
Orders of magnitude generally provide rough measures of classification and are a nice rule of thumb for telling if one thing is “radically different” than another thing. So, flu kills up to 650k globally per year. Maybe COVID will do roughly the same, maybe 2-3x, but I think at least we’ve long past the days of claims that COVID will kill 5 million worldwide are being tossed around. And it’s not because no one’s caught it and we just need to keep hunkered down. It’s because a massive number of people caught it and overall its just not that deadly.
If governments around the world had done their jobs and shared data and been truly prepared and with a little luck and a lot of hard work this whole thing perhaps could have been avoided by early and arduous contact tracing. That day is long behind us.
I worry that by now so much energy and ink has been spilled getting the country into lockdown, and people are so politically invested in it, and all the social pressure campaigns have ramped up to max,... that now as data finally emerges which demonstrate it was all a gross overreaction, we will be too slow to correct.
In the meantime 10s of millions have lost their jobs, perhaps millions have lost their businesses. A $1T deficit seems like a quaint memory (sorry grandkids!).
And it was all for, what, exactly? When herd immunity is the endpoint and the IHME hospitalization predictions were wrong by 10x... overbending the curve only causes suffering and does not save lives. Bending the curve too far into next winter could actually cost lives, which the CDC acknowledged earlier this week in a very roundabout way. And bending the curve at all only helps if additional medical treatment availability would have actually saved more lives, something which I have not seen a strong case for.
$10 trillion is probably over twice the (financial) cost of WWII adjusted for inflation. Having numbers of that size written down, deleted, moved around, doesn't mean we are suffering that level of loss.
As far as comparing covid to flu, I was talking about annualized daily deaths from covid, compared to a normal year of flu. That was deliberate. I'm saying, if it neither increases nor decreases from this point on, it's nearly ten times the rate in the long run.
You are comparing the total deaths from covid, assuming it declines and goes away in due time. That would be fine in a vacuum, but you're using the consequences of trying to stop it to argue the efforts to stop it are unnecessary. What is the point of this sophistry?
https://www.wbur.org/commonhealth/2020/04/03/contact-tracing...
Now is the time to express opinions on these "proposals"..
The cheap flight was what made this epidemic a pandemic.
We can continue lockdown until everyone who has got it has recovered and is no longer infected. This is a matter of weeks and we are mostly there.
Once we get to no new cases per week for a couple of weeks then we can end the lockdown and get on with our lives.
To prevent reinfection then anyone that flies in gets quarantined unless they come from a plague free country. The same applies to other border crossings, e.g. ferries and roads.
This approach works with rabies in the UK and with other historical plagues. No widespread daily testing is needed this way just the health service testing we have now.
This approach is the only realistic option using what we can do now. However there is little talk of quarantine being used for those that fly. Quarantine means forty days.
No lines to spread the disease, and better throughput if you're testing many cars simultaneously rather than whoever is at the front of the line. (Although I suppose many people could be tested near the front of the line too.)
> Sounds like a logistical nightmare.