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Comment by Strilanc | Hacker News Reader

Well, for example, deaths being down instead of going down. Get the active cases down to a manageable number, then switch to test and trace while gradually opening up as advocated for in The Hammer and the Dance [1].

1: https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-the-hammer-and-th...

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> Get the active cases down to a manageable number

Isn't this the problem, the world over? That no government has actually baked into their stay-at-home orders what the specific metric is that unlocks the lockdown. People with mouths to feed are justifiably terrified as they see lockdown stretching out in front of them with no clearly defined endpoint, knowing that the keys to that lockdown are held by politicians who are very much detached from the hardship on the ground.

I thought NY came out with a set of conditions for going out of lockdown for each county. I believe it was on HN front page within the last week.

Thanks for clarifying. I was only aware of government-level announcements over here in Europe. From what I've seen here any conditions are more along the lines of "x, y, and z must all be improving" and those values have been left deliberately ambiguous.

Pretty sure PA has defined thresholds in place.

are the active cases at an unmanageable number though? The hospitals are overstaffed and furloughing workers.

It depends on your overall strategy. If you want everyone to get the disease but at a rate that hospitals can handle, then hospital capacity vs case count will be a very important piece of data for making decisions. If you want to control the cases using test and trace, then you instead care about case count vs test and trace capacity, which is different from your hospital capacity.

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