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The virus is terrible. But our solution could turn into an economic catastrophe. It simply isn't possible to shut down the economy and then pay people, busine

The virus is terrible. But our solution could turn into an economic catastrophe. It simply isn't possible to shut down the economy and then pay people, businesses to sit idle for an undetermined amount of time. The solution is aggressive, continuous testing so that people can feel safe going back out. 1. Make hundreds and millions of the rapid tests available. 2. Deploy them to every business, every institution. 3. Test everybody coming into work every morning. 4. Isolate and quarantine the positive ones. 5. Elderly and immunocompromised self-quarantine. Lets find the actual contours of this infection within the population. And then squeeze it down. - Want to get into a theme park? You need a negative test result on your phone from this morning. - You got tested at one of the thousands of mobile test stations. You received a code with your test. - 15 minutes later, you get a test result on your phone - also sent to a national database in real time. - The theme park worker scans your phone and validates the result. This is not a fool-proof system. But it or something like it will instantly reduce anxiety of people trying to work. If you knew that everyone at your coffee house, at your gym, in your lecture hall, etc. tested negative in the morning. You'd feel safer and we'd all be able to move forward.

SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
I agree with the spirit, but theme parks specifically should probably stay cancelled until the virus is completely and universally suppressed. Temperature checks in smaller public accommodations, absolutely.
kingbirdy 7y ago
It would likely take longer to develop and roll out a system like that than for social distancing to run its course
throwaway9980 7y ago
Unfortunately the tests can’t be replicated and distributed at anywhere near the rate that the virus can be.
609venezia 7y ago
Can we make millions of the tests rapidly available? I am still reading about test shortages on both coasts, even under the restricted testing regime we have been in so far. Maybe the no-contact thermometers could be a scalable approach. Go to the bank? Forehead scan to get in. Go to the grocery store? Same. At least until--and maybe even after--we can scale the RNA testing.
- hyperion2010 7y ago
  Get IDT or (other nucleotide synthesis company) to start mass producing the detection primers, and ship them to their whole active customer catalog, they all have thermal cyclers. Then figure out the other reagents needed to locally produce tests that trade off false positive rate for the lowest false negative rate you can get. How to get swabs to the closest lab with a thermal cycler, no idea, but we have phones with gps. Rate limiting step here is probably the step from swab to sample ready for amplification. I kind of wonder if it makes sense to tell people to start swabbing now and keep the swabs in the freezer until testing comes online so that we can start filling in the missing data.
  - bilbo0s 7y ago
    I really feel like you guys are ignoring a lot of the difficulties in ramping up production to nation scale for this hypothetical test. A "rapid" test no less. These things are not as easy as everyone is making them out to be. Making one? Simple. Scaling that up to 8 figures worth? Not so simple. A lot of us are being a little too Jedi hand-wave-y about this issue. And think about it, I'm only talking about getting up to 10 mil or so here. We'd need a lot more than that to implement the plans being proposed on this thread. Logistics really does demand that medical personnel, and emergency responders be tested regularly to ensure their continued fitness for purpose under such schemes. Consider, there are right around 12,000 law enforcement officers alone in Washington state. Not counting doctors, nurses, EMT's and firemen. (And lest we forget the most important emergency worker of all right now, the Walmart stock boys.) Add all that up. Multiply it by 50 states, some much larger than Washington. Under the plans you guys are proposing, we'd need multiple tests as the crisis goes on for each of these workers to make sure they aren't out infecting citizens when they interact with them. (Or when they put food on shelves that a customer picks up 4 hours later.) Please, try to be reasonable. Maybe the current approach is not tenable, but the ideas being proposed on this thread are problematic as well.
donw 7y ago
> The solution is aggressive, continuous testing so that people can feel safe going back out. I disagree, and strongly. This would be a knee-jerk, hyberbolic, and woefully ineffective over-response. Typical for the times. The only thing this might achieve is creating an even greater climate of fear and loathing. There will be false positives. And false negatives. There are with every medical test. Back-of-the-envelope calculation: Assuming we "test everybody", and assuming both a 5% rate for both false positives and false negatives -- which is better than we currently do with influenza testing![1] -- we would needlessly quarantine 12.5 million people, and fail to quarantine an equal number of infected carriers. Not to mention, the data about COVID-19 is all over the map. We still know very, very little about this disease. Understanding it well enough to calculate the appropriate response will take time. Testing is part of the solution, yes. But the economic and social impact of "test everybody, every day" would be catastrophic. Until then, in the short term, there are things we can, and should, be doing, as individuals: (1) Limit your physical contact with others. (1a) Especially at-risk individuals. The elderly, young children, etc. (2) Support your local businesses through delivery, online ordering, and gift certificates. (3) DON'T HOARD SUPPLIES! You do not need a decade's worth of toilet paper. Three months' worth is fine. (4) Related to the above, maybe use this as an opportunity to live a bit more sustainably. I'm down to four sheets per wipe -- certainly fascinating, relevant, and not at all disgusting to all of our readers -- which means that a single CostCo-sized pack of TP might keep my household going for well over six months. On that note, I'm learning to garden. Let's see if I can manage to actually grow a fucking potato this year, all I got last year was a big leafy plant with zero tubers. A discussion on government policy in response to this is a big ball of... things that require four sheets of Kirkland Signature, so I'm so not going there. [1] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/professionals/diagnosis/rapidlab.htm https://www.cdc.gov/flu/professionals/diagnosis/rapidlab.htm
- kalleboo 7y ago
  > we would needlessly quarantine 12.5 million people As opposed to needlessly quarantining 300 million people?
  - donw 7y ago
cma 7y ago
>. It simply isn't possible to shut down the economy and then pay people, businesses to sit idle for an undetermined amount of time. We need to develop that capability. Imagine the next pandemic was worse, spread more asymptomatically and/or required a longer isolation time to get over without spreading combined with higher fatality rate, or fatalities in a younger demographic. This could also help us learn how to deal with more tangentially related things like grid disruptions (hopefully we don't eliminate cash in response though as that might hurt in that scenario).
aaron_m04 7y ago
> It simply isn't possible to shut down the economy and then pay people, businesses to sit idle for an undetermined amount of time. Is that actually true though? What resource are we low on? Do we not have enough nonperishable goods or public funds to pay for utilities and basic infrastructure?
- ip26 7y ago
  We might have enough food etc stockpiled, but the servicing of debt (upon which everything is built) drives a certain modest urgency through the whole system.
  - mindslight 7y ago
    The need to service crushing debt is a large part of what everybody is hoping will fall away. A primary economic concern right now is people losing their homes for failing to make rent, whether they rent from a landlord or "own". Businesses will go bankrupt for much the same reason - high burn rates that were mainly just going to the banks. Debt has metastasized and spawned many industries, so its retraction is unlikely to be a peaceful event. But it is a cancer that will kill our society some time. The only question is if now is that time, or if some patching will get the system through this and we can go back to pumping the stock market as a false idol of productivity.
    - aaron_m04 7y ago
      Yes! That's what my comment was hinting at. We have: * work to be done * people willing and able to do the work * resources with which to do the work So what exactly is stopping us from putting those three together?
  - ivalm 7y ago
    I think it is implied that the debt is serviced via quantitative easing.
  - lumost 7y ago
    As a point of theory, in a highly deflationary scenario the correct response may be for the government to (controllably) print paper. Given the right distribution mechanism debt could be serviced on the freshly printed paper. The effectiveness of such a strategy is dependent on how efficient the mechanism to distribute paper to end debt holders as well as how well monitored the money supply is. The worst case on such a scenario is that an economy sits on rationing for a period of time, followed by a strong and possibly inflationary demand spike, but businesses and people's balance sheets could be partially paused.
hogFeast 7y ago
Yep, I am not totally sure what you do about it (stuff like testing people at work is going to be tricky legally) but I came to this conclusion the other day too. The issue really isn't the virus but the fact that people who end up spreading it, don't know they have it. Shutting down the economy is a backwards way of solving this...it is assuming that everyone has it. I am not sure how exactly we get to that point and you are kind of hoping that people who have it isolate...but testing really should be priority. My govt is ramping up but the numbers they are talking about are still ludicrously small...total tested is 0.1% of population, and they are saying it is a resource issue (whilst they are spending literally hundreds of billions on stuff that is being caused by their testing strategy).
maxaf 7y ago
Are you writing a “Black Mirror” episode?
senordevnyc 7y ago
Worth discussing, but it would take months to deploy the level of testing required. You’d need to test a significant fraction of the entire US population every day. Say 30%, which is probably too low. So we need 100 million tests per day? That’s many months away, as is the miraculous (and privacy issue laden) database you’re talking about. By then, this will all be over and millions dead if we just let it run unchecked. We’re buying time to be able to actually implement something like that. It can’t happen in a matter of days or weeks.
- im3w1l 7y ago
  Test everyone at onset of cold symptoms or a fever. Taking hypochondria into account it should come out to once a month. So 10 million tests per day.
  - senordevnyc 7y ago
    People can be contagious before symptoms. And that’s also a very different strategy than testing everyone before they go into work each day. You’ll miss the vast majority of people if you just test people with symptoms.
    - zaroth 7y ago
      South Korea isn’t testing everyone, every day. Neither is China. So there’s a middle ground here somewhere.
      - positr0n 7y ago
        Neither country took the middle ground compared to where the US was when we finally started reacting. South Korea has been aggressively testing, contact chasing, and quarantining from day 1. Look at their number of tests per capita compared to ours. China did indeed shut down the entire economy for months for provinces containing 900M people iirc. In barely hit provinces they have teams of thousands of people doing aggressive testing, contact tracing, and quarantine.
zouhair 7y ago
> It simply isn't possible to shut down the economy and then pay people, businesses to sit idle for an undetermined amount of time. Why not? This is a matter of survival. If the economic system breaks because of one pandemic that will last less than a year maybe that economic system needs to die and be replaced by something more solid and useful for most.
- zaroth 7y ago
  “If the economic system breaks...” No, this is people breaking. Peoples lives and livelihoods break due to this kind of economic and social strain. And the quarantine effects everyone severely, not just 14% of people.
- JoshuaDavid 7y ago
  > If the economic system breaks because of one pandemic that will last less than a year maybe that economic system needs to die and be replaced by something more solid and useful for most. Out of curiosity, why do you think it's likely that something more solid and useful to most is likely to come out of an economic collapse? Economic collapses have happened before - are there any instances of a solid and useful system coming out of them (maybe the new deal after the great depression? That one is arguable though).
  - ramblenode 7y ago
    French Revolution? Arguably the Russian Revolution if you accept the USSR as a step up from feudalism.
    - pdonis 7y ago
      > French Revolution? Didn't even last a decade until they got themselves an emperor. > Arguably the Russian Revolution if you accept the USSR as a step up from feudalism. Considering that the USSR killed orders of magnitude more of its own people than feudalism under the Czars ever did, I'm going to vote "no" on this one.
ringshall 7y ago
Well worth noting: If everyone is tested, the disease can be controlled: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/18/scientists-say-mass-tests-in-italian-town-have-halted-covid-19 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/18/scientists-say...
buboard 7y ago
the test kits would be positive when it's too late to stop this highly contagious virus. PCR tests are needed, which means, every day submitting a spit sample in some collection space, and get the result at night. It's not impossible, with a lot of automation and scaling of PCR machines and huge mobilization. It could become a routine for a long time if automated.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Abishek_Muthian 7y ago
China's Red Cross supposedly advised Italy yesterday that 'total economic shutdown'[1] is the only way to contain the COVID-19 situation in the country now. It all comes to what part of the curve the country is now, the choice being total lockdown incl. economic shutdown vs aggressive testing. Considering US lapsed on aggressive measures in the beginning and that proper test kits are just being flown in from Italy[2]; total economic shutdown seems to be the only option left. P.S. There are still high-risk countries which hasn't gone into lockdown neither doing aggressive testing as of now, claiming the number of cases are low although the day-to-day delta is increasing exponentially. [1]Italy correspondent of Aljazeera gave this information multiple times on live, couldn't find static link to it as of writing. [2]https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/air-force-flew-500000-coronavirus-test-kits-from-italy-to-tennessee/ar-BB11nimy https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/air-force-flew-500000-coro...
- nostromo 7y ago
  > total economic shutdown seems to be the only option left That's quite the overreaction. Italy found that among fatalities the median age is over 80 (older than the average lifespan of an Italian man). 99% of fatalities were among people with a prior illness. About 50% of the deaths were people suffering from at least three other illnesses. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-18/99-of-those-who-died-from-virus-had-other-illness-italy-says https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-18/99-of-tho... To put it another way: most of the folks dying from COVID-19 were already dying. This disease is the straw that broke the camel's back. Should we just give up on them? No! But instead of quarantining everyone, and sending us back to the stone age, we should work to quarantine these folks while the rest of us return to normalcy and build up our antibodies and herd immunity.
  - airstrike 7y ago
    > 99% of fatalities were among people with a prior illness. About 50% of the deaths were people suffering from at least three other illnesses. So far... wait until you get the number of critical cases above the number of ICU beds and you'll see 18 year olds dying from this
ccktlmazeltov 7y ago
Considering that people generally go to work even when they're sick in the US, and that people are scared to go to the doctor because of the hidden cost, I don't think your solution is valid. On the other hand, we cannot pause the economy for too long. The damages are already done but what is going to happen if we wait too much? I cannot imagine the level of stress the people working at the government must be under now... Whatever solution they come up with could be the collapse of the US as we know of now.
- syshum 7y ago
  >>Whatever solution they come up with could be the collapse of the US as we know of now. Pretty sure that ship already sailed.
asdff 7y ago
> It simply isn't possible to shut down the economy and then pay people, businesses to sit idle for an undetermined amount of time. Thinking abstractly, why not? If the businesses are open, the money is there to pay everyone. If you send everyone in the economy home, where has that money that would have been used for salary gone? Someone is holding it rather than distributing it, that's the only reason. So, take a look at who is hoarding money like a dragon sleeping on a pile of gold, tax it, and pay everyone else enough for a roof and food.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- gnicholas 7y ago
  Huh? An idle business can only distribute cash for so long before it runs out.
  - asdff 7y ago
    But again, follow the money. Where is that exact dollar that would have gone to that business had there not been any coronavirus? The economy is a circular river system. If it stops one day, there is going to be areas of drought in places, as well as huge reservoirs protected by dams. Money does not disappear, it only moves. You lose money on stocks, someone else on the other side of the world made money with their short position. Perhaps that dollar is held up in some whale's cash account after they closed their positions. You would tax that whale for that cash, and redistribute it to the working class to afford food and shelter. In any recession, the big stall is capital being too skiddish to pay for labor, resulting in lowered consumer spending, justifying less demand for labor, and creating a worsened financial crisis due to even lower consumer spending levels. If you are able to keep the working class afloat, you can conceivably keep consumer spending afloat, and therefore keep the economy afloat, even if capital is fearful.
    - gnicholas 7y ago
      If the business is providing no services or products, then it cannot afford to pay its employees. This is because the economy is built around mutually beneficial exchange, which only happens when people can work. Example: I go to a clothing store and give them an amount of money that I value less than the clothes they give me in exchange. We are both better off because we have made that mutually-beneficial exchange. If the exchange doesn't happen because the store is closed, then there is no revenue (let alone profit) to divvy up. The only way to simulate that transaction in a way that gives money to employees is to literally take it from customers who receive nothing in return.
airstrike 7y ago
Leave it to HN to come up with an oversimplifying app-on-your-phone-solution to any of the world's problems. By the time you're done developing the app, deploying "thousands of mobile test stations", figuring out a way to get test results in 15 minutes (!!!) and implementing security checkpoints at each establishment from gyms to workplaces, we'll all be infected. > Want to get into a theme park? Nobody cares about theme parks right now. We care about getting infected at the supermarket, or bringing infected bags home. You're missing the forest for the trees.
cjslep 7y ago
> It simply isn't possible to shut down the economy and then pay people, businesses to sit idle for an undetermined amount of time. The Swiss Federal Council is setting aside billions of CHF (I think the total is currently at 32 billion) for exactly this: some relief for small and medium sized businesses. They've recently announced a process to have 80% of your salary insured up to a certain high cap, between 150k and 200k CHF. There might be vastly different political and scale differences between the USA and Switzerland that make this infeasible for the USA. But Switzerland is showing that in principle it can be done. Making your blanket statement for the whole world, false.
- lucasverra 7y ago
  France is having same stategy. “Chomage partiel”
- danvet 7y ago
  42 billions total now, the 32 billions just announced is on top of the 10 billions already put aside last week. And yes with these measures essentially any income is now assured: Salaries, salaries of SMB owners (normally excluded from unemployement benefits for obvious reasons), hourly workers, limited contracts, internships/apprenticeships, self-employed (i.e. without being employed by an LLC or something else like that) business like artists. Also daily stop-gap money if you have to stay home for more than a few days to figure out how to take care of your homeschooled kids. Plus like 20 billions in credit guarantees for small businesses to avoid a cash flow squeeze. All measures use existing infrastructure for paymenet (commandeering the banks for the cash flow squeeze credits) to guarantee the money has arrived by end of the month, latest. And that it will continue to flow, like regular pay check.
lend000 7y ago
Not to mention it isn't really solving the virus situation in most implementations. For example, everybody is packed into the local supermarkets at the same time in my area. Not only is there higher density due to closed restaurants, but also due to reduced hours (somebody thought curfews were a good idea). In their panic, people want "something" to be done. In a couple years, we will be talking about how 90% of policies enacted during this crisis were a net negative, and 50% of them directly made the problem worse. Not to mention the ethical concerns of legal overreach. * Disclaimer: It's a serious situation and I do not endorse a hands-off approach. That doesn't mean we can't have a civil debate about the complexities of trying to mitigate it, though.
- syshum 7y ago
  Thank you, I thought I was the only that see these government measures as not only being destructive to the economy but actively make the situation worse They are shutting down many businesses, and more or less forcing people in to situation where the virus will spread further. the Panic in society currently right now will do more to spread this virus than anything. But hey lets destroy our economy as well, that will do wonders to stop the panic
- chewz 7y ago
  > For example, everybody is packed into the local supermarkets at the same time in my area. Well in my country (Poland) with all the noise and confusion some rational procedures get implemented. Supermarkets limit strictly the number of customers inside. Cashiers get physical protection from customers. Contactless payment limits have been doubled. Etc. So we are getting time for implementing changes and the life can start returning to 'new normal'.
- vkou 7y ago
  > 90% of policies enacted during this crisis were a net negative Compared to what? An exponential explosion, like what we saw in Italy, prior to the measures, but ten times worse, because you don't even do anything to check it?
sjg007 7y ago
There are not enough tests and it will take months and months to make them. Also HIPPA laws prevent what you propose.
- oggy 7y ago
  What do you base the months and months estimate on?
bufferoverflow 7y ago
No, that will not work. This virus is so infectious, one person can infect a whole bus by just coughing a few times, or the whole elevator by just breathing in an elevator. By the time he tests positive, he had infected dozens of people. That's what happened in South Korea, as far as I understand. They missed just one guy out of 31, and he started a massive infection. Yes, massive testing is indeed better than what we do now, but if you let people to just walk around, it will do absolutely nothing.
polskibus 7y ago
It is a good idea, however it is too late to execute it well at this moment. As a society we should put incentives differently, so that things like adtech and cheap imports from China get less incentives, but health and solving social problems get more than today and can attract and retain more talent.
stjohnswarts 7y ago
I suspect after 1 or 2 months people will say enough is enough and force their reps to call off the quarantine. We can't do this for 18 months.
- vkou 7y ago
  And then 3 weeks later, they'll say enough is enough, and beg for it back.
ken 7y ago
Interesting that almost all of your examples of "contours of infection" are places that people don't need to go to, and the last one can be replaced by teleconferencing. That makes it sound easy: if you don't want to be tested, or it's too much hassle, just don't go there! I assume in your system that everyone would need to be tested before going to work every day, because that's the most common in-person gathering for most people. The USA has run fewer than 50,000 tests in the months since this began. Your plan would require 100,000,000 tests in the USA every day. No need to make the test stations "mobile". You could put 1,000 in every city, and they'd never have time to be moved. Every sidewalk downtown would be lines of people waiting for a test -- which itself would be a bigger gathering for me than just going to work.
tathougies 7y ago
I don't think this solution is sustainable either. It takes one bad apple to restart the exponential growth rate. Look at south Korea and patient 31.
ghthor 7y ago
Yeah, sorry buddy, I'm not going to get tested like that.

SpicyLemonZest 7y ago

I agree with the spirit, but theme parks specifically should probably stay cancelled until the virus is completely and universally suppressed. Temperature checks in smaller public accommodations, absolutely.

kingbirdy 7y ago

It would likely take longer to develop and roll out a system like that than for social distancing to run its course

throwaway9980 7y ago

Unfortunately the tests can’t be replicated and distributed at anywhere near the rate that the virus can be.

609venezia 7y ago

Can we make millions of the tests rapidly available? I am still reading about test shortages on both coasts, even under the restricted testing regime we have been in so far. Maybe the no-contact thermometers could be a scalable approach. Go to the bank? Forehead scan to get in. Go to the grocery store? Same. At least until--and maybe even after--we can scale the RNA testing.

hyperion2010 7y ago
Get IDT or (other nucleotide synthesis company) to start mass producing the detection primers, and ship them to their whole active customer catalog, they all have thermal cyclers. Then figure out the other reagents needed to locally produce tests that trade off false positive rate for the lowest false negative rate you can get. How to get swabs to the closest lab with a thermal cycler, no idea, but we have phones with gps. Rate limiting step here is probably the step from swab to sample ready for amplification. I kind of wonder if it makes sense to tell people to start swabbing now and keep the swabs in the freezer until testing comes online so that we can start filling in the missing data.
- bilbo0s 7y ago
  I really feel like you guys are ignoring a lot of the difficulties in ramping up production to nation scale for this hypothetical test. A "rapid" test no less. These things are not as easy as everyone is making them out to be. Making one? Simple. Scaling that up to 8 figures worth? Not so simple. A lot of us are being a little too Jedi hand-wave-y about this issue. And think about it, I'm only talking about getting up to 10 mil or so here. We'd need a lot more than that to implement the plans being proposed on this thread. Logistics really does demand that medical personnel, and emergency responders be tested regularly to ensure their continued fitness for purpose under such schemes. Consider, there are right around 12,000 law enforcement officers alone in Washington state. Not counting doctors, nurses, EMT's and firemen. (And lest we forget the most important emergency worker of all right now, the Walmart stock boys.) Add all that up. Multiply it by 50 states, some much larger than Washington. Under the plans you guys are proposing, we'd need multiple tests as the crisis goes on for each of these workers to make sure they aren't out infecting citizens when they interact with them. (Or when they put food on shelves that a customer picks up 4 hours later.) Please, try to be reasonable. Maybe the current approach is not tenable, but the ideas being proposed on this thread are problematic as well.

donw 7y ago

> The solution is aggressive, continuous testing so that people can feel safe going back out. I disagree, and strongly. This would be a knee-jerk, hyberbolic, and woefully ineffective over-response. Typical for the times. The only thing this might achieve is creating an even greater climate of fear and loathing. There will be false positives. And false negatives. There are with every medical test. Back-of-the-envelope calculation: Assuming we "test everybody", and assuming both a 5% rate for both false positives and false negatives -- which is better than we currently do with influenza testing![1] -- we would needlessly quarantine 12.5 million people, and fail to quarantine an equal number of infected carriers. Not to mention, the data about COVID-19 is all over the map. We still know very, very little about this disease. Understanding it well enough to calculate the appropriate response will take time. Testing is part of the solution, yes. But the economic and social impact of "test everybody, every day" would be catastrophic. Until then, in the short term, there are things we can, and should, be doing, as individuals: (1) Limit your physical contact with others. (1a) Especially at-risk individuals. The elderly, young children, etc. (2) Support your local businesses through delivery, online ordering, and gift certificates. (3) DON'T HOARD SUPPLIES! You do not need a decade's worth of toilet paper. Three months' worth is fine. (4) Related to the above, maybe use this as an opportunity to live a bit more sustainably. I'm down to four sheets per wipe -- certainly fascinating, relevant, and not at all disgusting to all of our readers -- which means that a single CostCo-sized pack of TP might keep my household going for well over six months. On that note, I'm learning to garden. Let's see if I can manage to actually grow a fucking potato this year, all I got last year was a big leafy plant with zero tubers. A discussion on government policy in response to this is a big ball of... things that require four sheets of Kirkland Signature, so I'm so not going there. [1] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/professionals/diagnosis/rapidlab.htm https://www.cdc.gov/flu/professionals/diagnosis/rapidlab.htm

kalleboo 7y ago
> we would needlessly quarantine 12.5 million people As opposed to needlessly quarantining 300 million people?
- donw 7y ago

cma 7y ago

>. It simply isn't possible to shut down the economy and then pay people, businesses to sit idle for an undetermined amount of time. We need to develop that capability. Imagine the next pandemic was worse, spread more asymptomatically and/or required a longer isolation time to get over without spreading combined with higher fatality rate, or fatalities in a younger demographic. This could also help us learn how to deal with more tangentially related things like grid disruptions (hopefully we don't eliminate cash in response though as that might hurt in that scenario).

aaron_m04 7y ago

> It simply isn't possible to shut down the economy and then pay people, businesses to sit idle for an undetermined amount of time. Is that actually true though? What resource are we low on? Do we not have enough nonperishable goods or public funds to pay for utilities and basic infrastructure?

ip26 7y ago
We might have enough food etc stockpiled, but the servicing of debt (upon which everything is built) drives a certain modest urgency through the whole system.
- mindslight 7y ago
  The need to service crushing debt is a large part of what everybody is hoping will fall away. A primary economic concern right now is people losing their homes for failing to make rent, whether they rent from a landlord or "own". Businesses will go bankrupt for much the same reason - high burn rates that were mainly just going to the banks. Debt has metastasized and spawned many industries, so its retraction is unlikely to be a peaceful event. But it is a cancer that will kill our society some time. The only question is if now is that time, or if some patching will get the system through this and we can go back to pumping the stock market as a false idol of productivity.
  - aaron_m04 7y ago
    Yes! That's what my comment was hinting at. We have: * work to be done * people willing and able to do the work * resources with which to do the work So what exactly is stopping us from putting those three together?
- ivalm 7y ago
  I think it is implied that the debt is serviced via quantitative easing.
- lumost 7y ago
  As a point of theory, in a highly deflationary scenario the correct response may be for the government to (controllably) print paper. Given the right distribution mechanism debt could be serviced on the freshly printed paper. The effectiveness of such a strategy is dependent on how efficient the mechanism to distribute paper to end debt holders as well as how well monitored the money supply is. The worst case on such a scenario is that an economy sits on rationing for a period of time, followed by a strong and possibly inflationary demand spike, but businesses and people's balance sheets could be partially paused.

hogFeast 7y ago

Yep, I am not totally sure what you do about it (stuff like testing people at work is going to be tricky legally) but I came to this conclusion the other day too. The issue really isn't the virus but the fact that people who end up spreading it, don't know they have it. Shutting down the economy is a backwards way of solving this...it is assuming that everyone has it. I am not sure how exactly we get to that point and you are kind of hoping that people who have it isolate...but testing really should be priority. My govt is ramping up but the numbers they are talking about are still ludicrously small...total tested is 0.1% of population, and they are saying it is a resource issue (whilst they are spending literally hundreds of billions on stuff that is being caused by their testing strategy).

maxaf 7y ago

Are you writing a “Black Mirror” episode?

senordevnyc 7y ago

Worth discussing, but it would take months to deploy the level of testing required. You’d need to test a significant fraction of the entire US population every day. Say 30%, which is probably too low. So we need 100 million tests per day? That’s many months away, as is the miraculous (and privacy issue laden) database you’re talking about. By then, this will all be over and millions dead if we just let it run unchecked. We’re buying time to be able to actually implement something like that. It can’t happen in a matter of days or weeks.

im3w1l 7y ago
Test everyone at onset of cold symptoms or a fever. Taking hypochondria into account it should come out to once a month. So 10 million tests per day.
- senordevnyc 7y ago
  People can be contagious before symptoms. And that’s also a very different strategy than testing everyone before they go into work each day. You’ll miss the vast majority of people if you just test people with symptoms.
  - zaroth 7y ago
    South Korea isn’t testing everyone, every day. Neither is China. So there’s a middle ground here somewhere.
    - positr0n 7y ago
      Neither country took the middle ground compared to where the US was when we finally started reacting. South Korea has been aggressively testing, contact chasing, and quarantining from day 1. Look at their number of tests per capita compared to ours. China did indeed shut down the entire economy for months for provinces containing 900M people iirc. In barely hit provinces they have teams of thousands of people doing aggressive testing, contact tracing, and quarantine.

zouhair 7y ago

> It simply isn't possible to shut down the economy and then pay people, businesses to sit idle for an undetermined amount of time. Why not? This is a matter of survival. If the economic system breaks because of one pandemic that will last less than a year maybe that economic system needs to die and be replaced by something more solid and useful for most.

zaroth 7y ago
“If the economic system breaks...” No, this is people breaking. Peoples lives and livelihoods break due to this kind of economic and social strain. And the quarantine effects everyone severely, not just 14% of people.
JoshuaDavid 7y ago
> If the economic system breaks because of one pandemic that will last less than a year maybe that economic system needs to die and be replaced by something more solid and useful for most. Out of curiosity, why do you think it's likely that something more solid and useful to most is likely to come out of an economic collapse? Economic collapses have happened before - are there any instances of a solid and useful system coming out of them (maybe the new deal after the great depression? That one is arguable though).
- ramblenode 7y ago
  French Revolution? Arguably the Russian Revolution if you accept the USSR as a step up from feudalism.
  - pdonis 7y ago
    > French Revolution? Didn't even last a decade until they got themselves an emperor. > Arguably the Russian Revolution if you accept the USSR as a step up from feudalism. Considering that the USSR killed orders of magnitude more of its own people than feudalism under the Czars ever did, I'm going to vote "no" on this one.

ringshall 7y ago

Well worth noting: If everyone is tested, the disease can be controlled: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/18/scientists-say-mass-tests-in-italian-town-have-halted-covid-19 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/18/scientists-say...

buboard 7y ago

the test kits would be positive when it's too late to stop this highly contagious virus. PCR tests are needed, which means, every day submitting a spit sample in some collection space, and get the result at night. It's not impossible, with a lot of automation and scaling of PCR machines and huge mobilization. It could become a routine for a long time if automated.

deleted 7y ago

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Abishek_Muthian 7y ago

China's Red Cross supposedly advised Italy yesterday that 'total economic shutdown'[1] is the only way to contain the COVID-19 situation in the country now. It all comes to what part of the curve the country is now, the choice being total lockdown incl. economic shutdown vs aggressive testing. Considering US lapsed on aggressive measures in the beginning and that proper test kits are just being flown in from Italy[2]; total economic shutdown seems to be the only option left. P.S. There are still high-risk countries which hasn't gone into lockdown neither doing aggressive testing as of now, claiming the number of cases are low although the day-to-day delta is increasing exponentially. [1]Italy correspondent of Aljazeera gave this information multiple times on live, couldn't find static link to it as of writing. [2]https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/air-force-flew-500000-coronavirus-test-kits-from-italy-to-tennessee/ar-BB11nimy https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/air-force-flew-500000-coro...

nostromo 7y ago
> total economic shutdown seems to be the only option left That's quite the overreaction. Italy found that among fatalities the median age is over 80 (older than the average lifespan of an Italian man). 99% of fatalities were among people with a prior illness. About 50% of the deaths were people suffering from at least three other illnesses. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-18/99-of-those-who-died-from-virus-had-other-illness-italy-says https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-18/99-of-tho... To put it another way: most of the folks dying from COVID-19 were already dying. This disease is the straw that broke the camel's back. Should we just give up on them? No! But instead of quarantining everyone, and sending us back to the stone age, we should work to quarantine these folks while the rest of us return to normalcy and build up our antibodies and herd immunity.
- airstrike 7y ago
  > 99% of fatalities were among people with a prior illness. About 50% of the deaths were people suffering from at least three other illnesses. So far... wait until you get the number of critical cases above the number of ICU beds and you'll see 18 year olds dying from this

ccktlmazeltov 7y ago

Considering that people generally go to work even when they're sick in the US, and that people are scared to go to the doctor because of the hidden cost, I don't think your solution is valid. On the other hand, we cannot pause the economy for too long. The damages are already done but what is going to happen if we wait too much? I cannot imagine the level of stress the people working at the government must be under now... Whatever solution they come up with could be the collapse of the US as we know of now.

syshum 7y ago
>>Whatever solution they come up with could be the collapse of the US as we know of now. Pretty sure that ship already sailed.

asdff 7y ago

> It simply isn't possible to shut down the economy and then pay people, businesses to sit idle for an undetermined amount of time. Thinking abstractly, why not? If the businesses are open, the money is there to pay everyone. If you send everyone in the economy home, where has that money that would have been used for salary gone? Someone is holding it rather than distributing it, that's the only reason. So, take a look at who is hoarding money like a dragon sleeping on a pile of gold, tax it, and pay everyone else enough for a roof and food.

deleted 7y ago
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gnicholas 7y ago
Huh? An idle business can only distribute cash for so long before it runs out.
- asdff 7y ago
  But again, follow the money. Where is that exact dollar that would have gone to that business had there not been any coronavirus? The economy is a circular river system. If it stops one day, there is going to be areas of drought in places, as well as huge reservoirs protected by dams. Money does not disappear, it only moves. You lose money on stocks, someone else on the other side of the world made money with their short position. Perhaps that dollar is held up in some whale's cash account after they closed their positions. You would tax that whale for that cash, and redistribute it to the working class to afford food and shelter. In any recession, the big stall is capital being too skiddish to pay for labor, resulting in lowered consumer spending, justifying less demand for labor, and creating a worsened financial crisis due to even lower consumer spending levels. If you are able to keep the working class afloat, you can conceivably keep consumer spending afloat, and therefore keep the economy afloat, even if capital is fearful.
  - gnicholas 7y ago
    If the business is providing no services or products, then it cannot afford to pay its employees. This is because the economy is built around mutually beneficial exchange, which only happens when people can work. Example: I go to a clothing store and give them an amount of money that I value less than the clothes they give me in exchange. We are both better off because we have made that mutually-beneficial exchange. If the exchange doesn't happen because the store is closed, then there is no revenue (let alone profit) to divvy up. The only way to simulate that transaction in a way that gives money to employees is to literally take it from customers who receive nothing in return.

airstrike 7y ago

Leave it to HN to come up with an oversimplifying app-on-your-phone-solution to any of the world's problems. By the time you're done developing the app, deploying "thousands of mobile test stations", figuring out a way to get test results in 15 minutes (!!!) and implementing security checkpoints at each establishment from gyms to workplaces, we'll all be infected. > Want to get into a theme park? Nobody cares about theme parks right now. We care about getting infected at the supermarket, or bringing infected bags home. You're missing the forest for the trees.

cjslep 7y ago

> It simply isn't possible to shut down the economy and then pay people, businesses to sit idle for an undetermined amount of time. The Swiss Federal Council is setting aside billions of CHF (I think the total is currently at 32 billion) for exactly this: some relief for small and medium sized businesses. They've recently announced a process to have 80% of your salary insured up to a certain high cap, between 150k and 200k CHF. There might be vastly different political and scale differences between the USA and Switzerland that make this infeasible for the USA. But Switzerland is showing that in principle it can be done. Making your blanket statement for the whole world, false.

lucasverra 7y ago
France is having same stategy. “Chomage partiel”
danvet 7y ago
42 billions total now, the 32 billions just announced is on top of the 10 billions already put aside last week. And yes with these measures essentially any income is now assured: Salaries, salaries of SMB owners (normally excluded from unemployement benefits for obvious reasons), hourly workers, limited contracts, internships/apprenticeships, self-employed (i.e. without being employed by an LLC or something else like that) business like artists. Also daily stop-gap money if you have to stay home for more than a few days to figure out how to take care of your homeschooled kids. Plus like 20 billions in credit guarantees for small businesses to avoid a cash flow squeeze. All measures use existing infrastructure for paymenet (commandeering the banks for the cash flow squeeze credits) to guarantee the money has arrived by end of the month, latest. And that it will continue to flow, like regular pay check.

lend000 7y ago

Not to mention it isn't really solving the virus situation in most implementations. For example, everybody is packed into the local supermarkets at the same time in my area. Not only is there higher density due to closed restaurants, but also due to reduced hours (somebody thought curfews were a good idea). In their panic, people want "something" to be done. In a couple years, we will be talking about how 90% of policies enacted during this crisis were a net negative, and 50% of them directly made the problem worse. Not to mention the ethical concerns of legal overreach. * Disclaimer: It's a serious situation and I do not endorse a hands-off approach. That doesn't mean we can't have a civil debate about the complexities of trying to mitigate it, though.

syshum 7y ago
Thank you, I thought I was the only that see these government measures as not only being destructive to the economy but actively make the situation worse They are shutting down many businesses, and more or less forcing people in to situation where the virus will spread further. the Panic in society currently right now will do more to spread this virus than anything. But hey lets destroy our economy as well, that will do wonders to stop the panic
chewz 7y ago
> For example, everybody is packed into the local supermarkets at the same time in my area. Well in my country (Poland) with all the noise and confusion some rational procedures get implemented. Supermarkets limit strictly the number of customers inside. Cashiers get physical protection from customers. Contactless payment limits have been doubled. Etc. So we are getting time for implementing changes and the life can start returning to 'new normal'.
vkou 7y ago
> 90% of policies enacted during this crisis were a net negative Compared to what? An exponential explosion, like what we saw in Italy, prior to the measures, but ten times worse, because you don't even do anything to check it?

sjg007 7y ago

There are not enough tests and it will take months and months to make them. Also HIPPA laws prevent what you propose.

oggy 7y ago
What do you base the months and months estimate on?

bufferoverflow 7y ago

No, that will not work. This virus is so infectious, one person can infect a whole bus by just coughing a few times, or the whole elevator by just breathing in an elevator. By the time he tests positive, he had infected dozens of people. That's what happened in South Korea, as far as I understand. They missed just one guy out of 31, and he started a massive infection. Yes, massive testing is indeed better than what we do now, but if you let people to just walk around, it will do absolutely nothing.

polskibus 7y ago

It is a good idea, however it is too late to execute it well at this moment. As a society we should put incentives differently, so that things like adtech and cheap imports from China get less incentives, but health and solving social problems get more than today and can attract and retain more talent.

stjohnswarts 7y ago

I suspect after 1 or 2 months people will say enough is enough and force their reps to call off the quarantine. We can't do this for 18 months.

vkou 7y ago
And then 3 weeks later, they'll say enough is enough, and beg for it back.

ken 7y ago

Interesting that almost all of your examples of "contours of infection" are places that people don't need to go to, and the last one can be replaced by teleconferencing. That makes it sound easy: if you don't want to be tested, or it's too much hassle, just don't go there! I assume in your system that everyone would need to be tested before going to work every day, because that's the most common in-person gathering for most people. The USA has run fewer than 50,000 tests in the months since this began. Your plan would require 100,000,000 tests in the USA every day. No need to make the test stations "mobile". You could put 1,000 in every city, and they'd never have time to be moved. Every sidewalk downtown would be lines of people waiting for a test -- which itself would be a bigger gathering for me than just going to work.

tathougies 7y ago

I don't think this solution is sustainable either. It takes one bad apple to restart the exponential growth rate. Look at south Korea and patient 31.

ghthor 7y ago

Yeah, sorry buddy, I'm not going to get tested like that.