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There absolutely is an acceptable way out of this. China, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore, at least, are going to be just fine. They are focused on suppressin
by blueblimp 7y ago
There absolutely is an acceptable way out of this. China, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore, at least, are going to be just fine. They are focused on suppressing and controlling the virus. Once they get few enough imports from travel (presumably by restricting travel from countries where the virus is uncontrolled) and eliminate local transmission, they can resume life-as-usual, apart from being on high alert for imported cases.
There is no other acceptable solution. Countries hoping to avoid the short-term economic cost of suppressing the virus will find themselves paying a greater economic cost over the long-term along with a massive cost in lives.
The question is now: which countries will adopt the correct approach before it's too late?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- hackandtrip 7y agoIn 5-10 days we'll see if the first EU country to adopt police-state measures will be added to that list. Spain and France are on the right track too, other than Italy.
- blueblimp 7y agoI'm not sure exactly what Italy is doing at the moment, but an important result out of China is that they found quarantine-at-home was not good enough for R<1. They needed centralized quarantine to achieve R<1. https://twitter.com/XihongLin/status/1236076749491929094 https://twitter.com/XihongLin/status/1236076749491929094 So the first attempt does not necessarily work. But I hope it does, and if not, I hope they quickly iterate to find one that does.
- closeparen 7y agoYou can have as many nines of reduction as you want; they are all worthless the moment the social graph reconnects. I'm skeptical that "life-as-usual" is a serious possibility.
- blueblimp 7y agoIf the reduction is maintained until there are no infectious cases (and any virus outside bodies has either been sanitized or died on its own) then you can reconnect the social graph and the virus will not re-emerge. It's not magic after all: the physical virus has to actually be present to restart the outbreak.
- closeparen 7y agoSure, but the whole thing can start again from any amount of virus.