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Comment by Skunkleton | Hacker News Reader

We already missed the boat on options 1 and 2 due to various governmental incompetencies. Did you not notice that a full third of all cases globally have been in America?

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I disagree that we missed the boat on OPTION 1. Option 1 may be the only path currently available to us by removing restrictions in a controlled way.

OPTION 2 is even still a possibility IF we massively ramped up testing and contact tracing. This is possible in theory, but we just not hearing ANYTHING about the real status of mass testing and/or contact tracing procedures (including things like the apple-google app).

It’s frustrating to consider, but if we were capable of the level of testing we would need to re open in the next few weeks, why haven’t we started doing it?

Cases is a very poor metric for this because a country that does zero tests will have zero cases, and therefore look very good.

Total deaths IMHO is much more comparable statistic between countries. By that metric it looks a little better for the US, since we have slightly less than a third of the world death total.

For a better comparison, I think you need to look at deaths per capita.

The US is somewhere in the middle of the pack on this metric.

That doesn’t capture what’s important. There are plenty of places that could probably have never closed and not had any real spike in infections. It’s places where people live densely that are at the greatest risk. The Bay Area in particular probably isn’t at the top of that list, but it is still a higher risk area. Really we just need more testing, and randomized testing. I think we would all be able to move forward more intelligently if we had data.

That just means that US has the most advanced testing regime.

You wrote this with a straight face? Or this is a Trump quote?

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