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>...Trying to keep it contained now is like putting up a truckload of sandbags to stop a tidal wave. I don't think this is true, and since we still don't know

>...Trying to keep it contained now is like putting up a truckload of sandbags to stop a tidal wave. I don't think this is true, and since we still don't know enough about true fatality rates outside of China (yet) it seems foolish to be fatalistic at this stage about containment. There's no "shoring up the [US] health care system". We can't build hospitals out of thin air (China's attempt notwithstanding), and we can't apparate more medical devices, whose supply chains are broken because of our dependence on China. Limiting infections - especially in higher risk demographics - seems critical at this point. >If it wasn't possible to be reinfected, I'd say the wise thing to do would be to get yourself infected now, while you can still get a respirator in the hospital. Uhhh no. This would needlessly stress the existing infrastructure. If you're young and healthy, don't soak up resources that should be used to care for at-risk populations. WFH and wash your hands.

ryandrake 7y ago
> We can't build hospitals out of thin air (China's attempt notwithstanding), and we can't apparate more medical devices, whose supply chains are broken because of our dependence on China. Seems like a lot of “we can’t” assertions. If any country started seeing ~1M deaths per month or something, I bet they’d somehow figure out a way to do it.
- remarkEon 7y ago
  Sure. It would take a WWII-level mobilization to do so, and some very hard trolley_problem.jpg choices about what to do. Even then I'm still skeptical. Let's take medical devices, for example. So we could, temporarily, nationalize a PCB fab in the US to make the circuit boards ... but do we even have the gerber files? Do we have the human capital to QA a new process? How long for tooling on the rest of the mechanicals? I hope that, deep in the Pentagon, someone is asking these questions. Not necessarily because of COVID-19, but just in general.
mullingitover 7y ago
> Limiting infections - especially in higher risk demographics - seems critical at this point. We've already failed at this - it's in the community, cases are popping up with no known contact with an infected person. Asymptomatic cases are contagious for several days, and in a large chunk of patients it presents as a common cold that they won't go to the hospital for, and even if they could there isn't enough capacity to do the necessary testing. Game over.

ryandrake 7y ago

> We can't build hospitals out of thin air (China's attempt notwithstanding), and we can't apparate more medical devices, whose supply chains are broken because of our dependence on China. Seems like a lot of “we can’t” assertions. If any country started seeing ~1M deaths per month or something, I bet they’d somehow figure out a way to do it.

remarkEon 7y ago
Sure. It would take a WWII-level mobilization to do so, and some very hard trolley_problem.jpg choices about what to do. Even then I'm still skeptical. Let's take medical devices, for example. So we could, temporarily, nationalize a PCB fab in the US to make the circuit boards ... but do we even have the gerber files? Do we have the human capital to QA a new process? How long for tooling on the rest of the mechanicals? I hope that, deep in the Pentagon, someone is asking these questions. Not necessarily because of COVID-19, but just in general.

mullingitover 7y ago

> Limiting infections - especially in higher risk demographics - seems critical at this point. We've already failed at this - it's in the community, cases are popping up with no known contact with an infected person. Asymptomatic cases are contagious for several days, and in a large chunk of patients it presents as a common cold that they won't go to the hospital for, and even if they could there isn't enough capacity to do the necessary testing. Game over.