A thousand times this! The viral growth is not the only exponential thing here, the costs of bringing down R0 are also highly non-linear, and it works both for

A thousand times this! The viral growth is not the only exponential thing here, the costs of bringing down R0 are also highly non-linear, and it works both for and against us. Against: it is going to be much more expensive to get R0 from 1.5 to 1 than from 4 to 3.5. A plausible assumption may be that a constant percentage reduction carries a fixed cost. Also: the more infected you have the more expensive it becomes. For: As you said, once it's brought under control, cheaper measures that don't work at scale can be be used it to keep it from flaring up again [1]. That's what China is trying to do and so far it seems to work well. The whole herd immunity insanity seems to be predicated on the idea that social distancing does not work and the second wave will kill you later. But evidence so far suggests the opposite, although this may change. In terms of war-style production: It seems criminally stupid that so far no Western country has embraced readily available trivial and ridiculously low cost means to significantly reduce spread. Like getting everyone to wear face masks, all the time. There seems to be excellent evidence it is very effective for bringing R0 down massively, both from academic studies on influenza[2] and SARS and also from circumstantial evidence like just comparing case growth between face mask using countries and non-using countries for the current outbreak[3]. Of course that requires actually producing a lot of face masks – but how hard can that be? As far as I am aware the current state is that even terrible face masks would help massively with preventing carriers from infecting others. [1] This argument is also made here: https://arguablywrong.home.blog/2020/03/12/epidemiological-modeling-costs-of-controls/ https://arguablywrong.home.blog/2020/03/12/epidemiological-m... The cost per live is somewhere on the humanitarian end of the spectrum, but I think this argument is worth engaging with. If there is any realistic chance of eradicating covid-19 rather than just mitigating it, clearly is is what we must do and will pay enormous dividends even in the fairly short term. [2] e.g. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1539-6924.2010.01428.x https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1539-6924.... [3] https://twitter.com/epsilon3141/status/1238838106440241152 https://twitter.com/epsilon3141/status/1238838106440241152