There Are Sensible Ways to Reopen. Then There's the US's Way

"84,000 Americans have died of COVID-19"

This article acts as if only the US has death due to Covid. Nearly the entire world is affected by this virus and the US actually has a pretty low death rate compared to the rest of the world.

Without mentioning per-capita statistics, any article mentioning only the total death rate is intentionally being disingenuous.

Johns Hopkins has some good stats:

https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/data/mortality

"In the early days of their fight against COVID-19, New Zealand, Norway and Switzerland tested their populations at nearly 40 times the U.S. rate, per capita, and now have one-fifth the death rate"

All of the countries listed are the size of a US state. It's very easy to test an entire country when it's this small. When you scale anything up, you will have to deal with a different set of issues.

I'm also curious how they actually tested beyond a simple spot check of symptoms. Most tests were not even close to being accurate until recently and we didn't even know that much about the virus early on.

"included a revised forecast for the virus’s toll, estimating some 3,000 Americans could be dying per day by June 1—a 9/11 every day"

Every prediction so far by experts has been an order of magnitude off about deaths or completely wrong. Why is this new one going to be more accurate?

"South Korea built an innovative digital infrastructure to identify and track every new coronavirus case within its borders"

South Korea also removes the infected from their families, including children, by force. The government is also violating citizens' privacy with this tracking. I seriously doubt anyone in the US would see this as an acceptable solution.

" U.S. is now conducting some 390,000 tests a day—a major jump after a sluggish start."

There was a 'sluggish' start because none of the tests were accurate and the US government would rather have accurate tests than a 60-70% test failure rate. Many politicians in other countries pushed out these inaccurate tests because they didn't want to lose support by looking like they didn't do enough during a crises.

" in May that the U.S. should be conducting 40 million to 50 million tests every month to provide basic surveillance on the spread of the disease in this country"

There really is no point in this much testing. Since there is no vaccine, and the fact that it spreads so quickly, you would need to test everyone every day. This just isn't a good use of our resources or practical.

Until a vaccine is invented, we need to slowly open up and require social distancing while protecting the vulnerable (people older than 60, have health issues, etc).