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Comment by condiment | Hacker News Reader

The article is suggesting daily testing and used "testing at the door" as an example.

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.

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You can't just ignore people who don't travel by car. The hardest hit place in the country in New York City. Most New Yorkers don't own cars and many go months at a time without entering one. And even outside of cities, it is still classist to only allow people with cars to reenter society.

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.

A solution that works outside of the vicinity of New York, would still allow at least 47 other states to open up.

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.

New York City isn't the only place in which car ownership is low. What about Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, DC, etc? If your plan for reopening the nation doesn't include reopening our cities, it isn't a real plan for reopening the nation.

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.

I wouldn’t plan on reopening the nation, since it was never closed from the top down to begin with. Individual states, and in many cases cities and counties, made the decision and continue even now to enforce rules different from one another.

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.

that also doesn't mean that if you come up with a plan that only partially works you stop working on it. Perfect is the enemy of good.

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.

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