Virus Suppression Is Out of Reach: It Is the Dance & the Hammer
This is tremendously depressing. Stomping the virus is now out of reach. This means that we are in “hammer & dance” land: trying to push cases out beyond the vaccine horizon and the better antivirals horizon, without incurring very large economic costs for little long run mortality benefit. Almost all other countries will do better:
Kelsey Piper: California Coronavirus Cases Are Rising Despite Early Lockdown https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2020/5/16/21254748/california-coronavirus-cases-lockdown: ‘That’s a problem. One of the hopes for stay-at-home orders was that they would cause significant declines in new case numbers, not just get to a plateau. Once new cases become relatively rare, states could set up contact tracing, isolation of confirmed and possible cases, and other less restrictive strategies for combating the virus. That remains the best way out of lockdown, but those strategies are harder to implement when case numbers keep rising. The fact that California’s stay-home order didn’t decrease, or only slightly decreased, the number of new cases means that the road ahead will be a very hard one.... What went wrong? The best explanation is that California’s stay-home order, like many orders around the country, did not get the so-called R0 for the coronavirus to significantly below 1 (some preprints estimate it around 0.9).... The California stay-at-home order still involves more face-to-face contact with other people than the lockdowns in places that successfully controlled the virus.... And even worse, California has largely been unable to take advantage of the time the lockdown buys them to increase testing capacity, provide hospital workers with sufficient personal protective equipment (PPE), or establish large-scale contact tracing programs... #coronavirus #noted #macro #publichealth #2020-06-04
