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> Why spend resources on mass testing and preparing for mass-scale treatment This is a good question, I hear it a lot. So here's an inarticulate stab at an a
by jhayward 7y ago
> Why spend resources on mass testing and preparing for mass-scale treatment
This is a good question, I hear it a lot. So here's an inarticulate stab at an answer.
[TLDR: After quarantine the population is still at risk and the virus will start its exponential growth again, just a few weeks down the line]
No matter how effective your mass quarantine may be, we will never "nip transmission in the bud". This thing is endemic and may well be chronic.
The purpose today of mass quarantine is just to slow down the exponential growth of the epidemic. It's only worth doing if you have something to stop the growth from starting again at the end since shutting down the economy isn't sustainable and is enormously damaging even in the short term.
What's that something? Wide-spread, universal testing. Rapid follow-up on positive tests to trace contacts and isolate them. This way you cut down the number of people each person can infect so that the growth rate is less than 1.
You have to keep this regime going until a sufficiently large proportion (in this case, 60%-70%) is immune either because they have recovered from infection or they have been vaccinated.
So, barring getting really lucky with some kind of seasonal disappearance of the virus, we will have to maintain this surveillance-tracing-isolation three legged stool until a vaccine is available.
If we had done this from the beginning we would not now have to be shutting down and destroying the economy to prevent a worst-case disaster, which is estimated that it would peak at about 40,000+ deaths per day in the US, sometime in late May, if left unchecked.
If we had done wide-scale test-trace-isolate from the beginning we could just be going about our business, albiet with this new factor in our lives. Since the criminals bungled, and are still bungling the response, we instead will have many many deaths and serious illnesses w/lifetime consequences and unprecedented economic damage.