3 ms·

It’s interesting to think about how many other viruses would perish if there were no new hosts for them to live in. Maybe we should start doing this every year

It’s interesting to think about how many other viruses would perish if there were no new hosts for them to live in. Maybe we should start doing this every year as a sort of cleansing of viruses? 3 weeks in February - quarantine weeks. Every year.

yodsanklai 7y ago
It's not going to work. This should be done worldwide and you need some interaction for people to be able to live.
- ianai 7y ago
  It’s doable with a year of planning and social initiative. But we’d also need a sea change in our laws to make it not a yearly recession.
  - tzs 7y ago
    I wonder if you could do it as a kind of near universal social and economic time-out? Let's say it starts on a Sunday night and is to last for two weeks. What happens is that everything starting Monday is pushed back two weeks. Stock markets close. Non-essential workers stay home. Non-essentially businesses close. During the two weeks, government pays for everyone's utilities, food, rent, and so on, both for people and companies. The idea is to as much as possible pause the normal economy for a couple of weeks, and then resume it hopefully pretty much right where it left off, with the government seeing to everyone's needs during the economic pause. Do this once a year as a readiness exercise, probably trying to time it around when that year's flu season is getting serious so that it may also help reduce the intensity of flu season. Over the years, the government should over fund this to build up a cushion, so that whenever the next pandemic comes around they have enough to do longer than a two week pause if necessary.
    - Exmoor 7y ago
      I am not a microbiologist, but I'm not confident that this "three week annual quarantine" even works in an ideal world, much less the imperfect world that we actually live in. Is it a guarantee that 100.0000000000% of the population will eliminate the virus with their own immune system in three weeks? If one or two people with poor immune systems carry around the virus for one day past the quarantine then we we would very quickly have gotten back to where we started. It's also implausible to quarantine everyone for the same three week period. Are we just supposed to let anyone with a major health crisis die at home if it happens mid-quarantine? What would we do about the millions of people who require round the clock care in nursing facilities, etc.? Additionally, I'm willing to bet that if we dedicated 5.8% of worldwide GDP (21 days out of 365) to fighting viruses, the results would be much more successful and less invasive.
SpicyLemonZest 7y ago
It's definitely something we should put a marker on to come back to. Three weeks is a lot, and the full extent of measures here just isn't feasible outside of a pandemic. But if we come back in a year and realize there's been a significant impact on overall disease burden, maybe we should mandate a 2 week block of national holiday for all nonessential businesses.
ilammy 7y ago
> 3 weeks in February - quarantine weeks. Every year. But it's summer in the southern hemisphere that time of year...

yodsanklai 7y ago

It's not going to work. This should be done worldwide and you need some interaction for people to be able to live.

ianai 7y ago
It’s doable with a year of planning and social initiative. But we’d also need a sea change in our laws to make it not a yearly recession.
- tzs 7y ago
  I wonder if you could do it as a kind of near universal social and economic time-out? Let's say it starts on a Sunday night and is to last for two weeks. What happens is that everything starting Monday is pushed back two weeks. Stock markets close. Non-essential workers stay home. Non-essentially businesses close. During the two weeks, government pays for everyone's utilities, food, rent, and so on, both for people and companies. The idea is to as much as possible pause the normal economy for a couple of weeks, and then resume it hopefully pretty much right where it left off, with the government seeing to everyone's needs during the economic pause. Do this once a year as a readiness exercise, probably trying to time it around when that year's flu season is getting serious so that it may also help reduce the intensity of flu season. Over the years, the government should over fund this to build up a cushion, so that whenever the next pandemic comes around they have enough to do longer than a two week pause if necessary.
  - Exmoor 7y ago
    I am not a microbiologist, but I'm not confident that this "three week annual quarantine" even works in an ideal world, much less the imperfect world that we actually live in. Is it a guarantee that 100.0000000000% of the population will eliminate the virus with their own immune system in three weeks? If one or two people with poor immune systems carry around the virus for one day past the quarantine then we we would very quickly have gotten back to where we started. It's also implausible to quarantine everyone for the same three week period. Are we just supposed to let anyone with a major health crisis die at home if it happens mid-quarantine? What would we do about the millions of people who require round the clock care in nursing facilities, etc.? Additionally, I'm willing to bet that if we dedicated 5.8% of worldwide GDP (21 days out of 365) to fighting viruses, the results would be much more successful and less invasive.

SpicyLemonZest 7y ago

It's definitely something we should put a marker on to come back to. Three weeks is a lot, and the full extent of measures here just isn't feasible outside of a pandemic. But if we come back in a year and realize there's been a significant impact on overall disease burden, maybe we should mandate a 2 week block of national holiday for all nonessential businesses.

ilammy 7y ago

> 3 weeks in February - quarantine weeks. Every year. But it's summer in the southern hemisphere that time of year...