Bret Weinstein (the evolutionary biologist) has argued for a new, "brief but intense" lockdown. We know so much more about the virus now than we did back in March, we might yet be able to orchestrate a way to suffocate the virus completely.
It makes sense. If individuals are supposed to quarantine for two weeks when they're exposed, then if everyone quarantined for the same two weeks, it would be gone.
Obviously you can't do a true, 100%, lockdown like that, but the logic is there: the harder the lockdown, the shorter it needs to be; the looser the lockdown, the longer it'll be before this thing gets better.
If you're willing to ration food and other resources, a lot of options open up. Nobody wants to rip the bandaid off, though, so we're stuck in limbo.
The rest of us schmoes, yes.
In $8,000 per month hotel rooms, of course![1]
[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/S-F-s-hotels-for...
Until the next airplane or ship or whatever arrives from any country in the world and has one infected person on it. Then we start all this madness again.
The cure cannot be worse than the disease.
There have been fits and starts for this using empty hotel rooms, but nothing universal. In San Francisco, they offer hotel rooms to the homeless under the idea that they are more likely to catch the virus on the street, but they offer nothing to people who are actually confirmed to be infected. Those people go home and spread it to their family/roommates.
Exactly. Authoritarianism works really well during a pandemic. But it isn't the American "way," so we're stuck with coronavirus.
According to the data they reference, Lock downs don't work and there is evidence that this virus is becoming more like the other 4 Corona Viruses in circulation.
Literally impossible
If your argument is that we cannot remove the vector for viral spread, while technically true, we can have a large enough suppression of spread through isolation that the virus would not have enough human infections to propagate. Animal vectors are a different story, of course, and often are the impetus for larger human infections.
It has been 8 months. That ship has sailed
I'll say this - all of the resulting pains are temporary except one. Maybe we should continue to be thoughtful of that as we battle what is a temporary struggle.
It's a dire situation with no good solution. Ascribing grand malice diminishes that. It's reductionist.
Lockdown will not frustrate the virus regarding any long term objective.
For what? People who side on curtailing a public health crisis do not want the economy to collapse.
To claim a lockdown is ineffective is to deny the transmissivity of airborne viruses.
Good thing I didn't claim that then
All these non pharmacological interventions are just bandaids.
You compared lockdowns to a bandaid, and I agree. We need bandaids sometimes until we get proper treatment.
OTOH, I'm not aware, at least in the EU (where I am located) of large pharmacological efforts sponsored by governments: most of the results have come, for good or bad, from the USA's Warp Speed or the UK. Yes, BNTech and CureVac are German, but they are exceptions, rather than the rule.
It isn't even proven that lockdowns can actually save lives, although the last study touching this among a whole load of other risk factors (from U of Toronto) can be now considered old (data up to early May).