I was referring to the numbskulls in the pews. The dumb griftees as it were.
According to the numbers my local gov puts out, 500k Americans have it. Realistically, the real number is somewhere between two and five times that many. How the fuck are you going to contact trace when you have between five hundred thousand and two million shadow cases that no one knows about?
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If we can get the numbers down low enough and practice a modified social distancing it might allow a runway before tightening back up is required. But on the other hand our society and governmentâŚ
The problem is that the expansion side of the equation is always going to be multiples faster than the contraction side. Every week of cases going up is likely to take a month on the way back down. Thatâs why the math canât be beat unless you can keep the expansion term very low.
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China put something like 300,000 people on contact tracing.
With everyone out of work, a similar scale response is absolutely feasible in every country (with a functioning state)
Contact tracing is what you do in the early stages to stop it from getting a foothold. Thereâs no way it works when itâs already nationwide.
Right now the main point of testing is to track its progress and seeing how well our countermeasures are working. Testing isnât going to help slow it down or help with treatment at this point. I think the Erins talk about this in their episode on controlling the coronavirus:
yeah, youâre obviously not. You clearly need a months-long lockdown to get the numbers way down. You can only do testing and contact tracing after the months-long lockdown has gotten those numbers way way down.
Iâm sorry, but this is wrong and not what the experts say. Yes, obviously you canât do contact tracing at the current state of the outbreak. But if you can lock down long enough to get the numbers back down again you can do contact tracing again coupled with testing to try to keep the numbers manageable.
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You canât do that lockdown enough to bring the numbers down though. Everybody knows this! What the fuck! Itâs over until a vaccine is devolved. Fucking aliens gameoverman.youtube
Where are you getting this from? Contact tracing after the disease has already run its course is like closing the barn doors after the cows have left. I donât know how itâs even practical to do with with a respiratory virus thatâs this contagious. Are we going to track down every single person whoâs been to the same grocery store or been on the same bus?
Donât get me wrong, testing is important to study the epidemiology of coronavirus.
If we donât what is the alternative. I agree with you that is is nearly impossible but plot out the next two years if we just let this burn through us at a medium level. Because what I come up with is scary as fuck.
Again, Iâm not saying weâre going to do it, it would require a new deal level of mobilization with hundreds of thousands of people drafted into the workforce solely to do the contact tracing and administer tests, and produce tests, etc. But its possible. The reason why I know that itâs possible, again, is because itâs what China is kind of doing now, and is what South Korea has kind of been doing the whole time.
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You really need to go read about what South Korea is doing dude, last time I brought them up as an example of how to control spread you claimed it was the result of mask-wearing and the communitarian Asian mindset or some bullshit and I just dropped it because I couldnât be bothered arguing. But itâs this:
South Korea has gone a step further than other countries, tracking individualsâ phones and creating a publicly available map to allow other citizens to check whether they may have crossed paths with any coronavirus patients.
The tracking data that goes into the map isnât limited to mobile phone data, credit card records and even face-to-face interviews with patients are being used to build a retroactive map of where they have been.
Not only is the map there for citizens to check, but the South Korean government is using it to proactively send regional text messages warning people they may have come into contact with someone carrying the virus.
The location given can be extremely specific, the Washington Post reported a text went out that said an infected person had been at the âMagic Coin Karaoke in Jayang-dong at midnight on Feb. 20.â
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Right, but Iâm not talking about contact tracing after the disease has run itâs course. In an ideal world if we maintained our current lockdown, until say, mid-summer, the cases should drop dramatically, but the disease will most definitely have not ârun its course.â We wonât be anywhere near herd immunity. Most people still wontâ have contracted the disease. You cannot keep everybody locked in their houses for 18 months to 5 years until you get a vaccine. So you have two options. You go through an endless cycle of re-opening and re-closing while letting the disease burn through the entire population resulting in like .5 to 1 percent of the population dying, or you do a massive mobilization with massive testing and contact tracing to prevent the disease from running through the entire population before you hopefully develop a vaccine. Iâm not saying weâre going to do it. Under Trump weâre clearly going to do option 1. But Option 2 is certainly possible.
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And as far as âWhere am I getting this from?â Iâm getting it from the CDC:
Edit: Also, contact tracing and testing for an endemic disease has a long history. Itâs literally what we did with polio before there was a vaccine. Itâs not great, itâs not a vaccine, lots of people will still get it, but it prevents it from running through the entire country.
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Happy Easter Everyone! My mom forwarded this text to me so now you have to read it too. I swear she would be shocked and insulted if I pointed out this was a political ad
From my friend-
The churches are empty,
The schools are empty,
The shelves are empty.
But thatâs OK because
The tomb is empty too!
The theaters are empty,
The arenas are empty,
The offices are empty.
But thatâs OK because
The grave is empty too!
Donât touch your face,
Donât touch your mouth,
Donât touch your eyes.
Thatâs OK because
He touched my life.
Wipe clean your house,
Wipe clean your car,
Wipe clean your food.
Yes, and Jesus
Wiped clean my heart.
The President said
Stay safe, Stay home,
The Governor said
Stay safe, Stay home,
The Doctors said
Stay safe, Stay home.
Jesus said
Youâre safe,
Your heart is my home.
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Option 3.
All the middle class and upper class people get to work from home/live off their savings.
Poor people have to go to work to keep the former fed.
Group 2 gets sick, but itâs massively under reported and so group 1 thinks itâs fine and vote trump.
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We flatten the curve such that hospitals donât get overrun more than they already are, the virus eventually gets everyone itâs going to get, mass vaccination campaigns eventually get spun up, COVID-19 pops up next year in a different form but weâve all got better antibody libraries. Itâs what Iâve been saying for a while now.
I mean, look at those âflatten the curveâ gifs that are going around. The area under the curve doesnât change. Itâs implicit that we arenât ever stopping or containing this but merely slowing it down.
How well did that work out? Also, polio spreads in a completely different way. Itâs much slower than a respiratory virus, itâs much easier to trace it to contaminated food or water.
Itâs already everywhere, every state and every town in the US. It has a two-week head start before symptoms even begin to appear. Youâre not containing it at this point. I canât speak to other countries like SK or the Czech Republic where it might still be a viable option. But the catâs out of the bad for the US.
The experts see contact tracing as part of the solution for when to lift the lockdown.
Think of the lockdown as a form of contact tracing. We lock things down so that we can drop the number of contacts you make to a manageable number that is easy to trace. We should open things back up only if we can still track the spread of the virus. Weâre not just going to test everyone once a week. Contact tracing allows us to figure out who should be isolated and tested.
The practical way involves using technology to an extent that makes privacy advocates nervous.
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I get that youâre a coastal lib and all but in my fairly large, fairly liberal, middle American city, middle of the day traffic is about what it was before the virus. The lockdown just isnât happening in any real terms. I think this is where we differ because, sure, I agree the South Korean strategy could work if things were different, but theyâre not. Contact tracing is needed to get the economy going again but that literally canât happen.