Can the U.S. reopen the economy with a fairly constant number of 10,000 new cases per day?
Absolutely not. No sane person would return to ordinary life when 300,000 people a month are become seriously ill, 60,000 are hospitalized, and 6,000 are dying. That's 72,000 deaths a year, like a good-sized war. The hospitals would be continuously full, with hallways and atriums and emergency facilities in other parts of the city filled. Ordinary elective surgery would be impossible. People with other conditions such as heart problems would die.
A general requirement that people wear masks outside their homes. This wouldn’t just be for the grocery store, but people would have to wear them at their places of business, and kids would wear them in school etc. I am not sure Western society is ready for something like this.
That was the law in 1918. Everyone followed it. Americans sometimes claim they are less obedient than our grandparents, but when your life is at stake, even a modern person tends to follow the rules. When hurricanes approach the Outer Bank islands and people refuse to evacuate, the police officer will say, "in that case, do me a favor . . ." The cop hands the person a sharpie permanent marker and says, "write your Social Security number on your thigh so we can identify the body." That usually gets people to cooperate.
The Governor of each State needs to create testing SWAT teams. So if someone tests positive in a particular place they can go in fast and test everyone and do contact tracing.
Yes. In any sane country, the federal government would do this. It will take roughly 300,000 people to do this in the U.S. by Korean methods. That would cost a lot of money, but not even a few percent of what it is costing to keep the nation closed down. Obviously, we could have and should have done this weeks ago. It would have saved tens of thousands of lives. There is no indication the Federal government intends to do it now, and I doubt state governments can do it, despite the fact that Fauci said it is essential and there is no way to open the country without it.
call me pessimistic but I don’t think the outbreak is going to fade down to a negligible number on its own. This could just be how life goes for the next couple of years.
It could easily be reduced to negligible numbers, as it has been in Korea. There is no reason why this should not be done. The methods are not rocket science. They are common sense public health measures updated to use the internet and big data techniques. Any industrial country could implement them, but so far, only China, Korea and Japan have done it. I suppose the only reason other countries have not done this is because the leaders are ignorant fools.
In my wildest imagination of how things might turn out, it never occured to me that we would have a 100% proven, workable solution to this pandemic, that would cost ~1% of the economic damage the pandemic is causing, and yet no one in government would lift a finger to implement this solution. Perhaps I am wrong, and there is a plan to do this. But there has been no mention of it in the mass media. Trump has repeatedly said this is up to the states. He said, "they better have a plan to open up the economy." Since Fauci and others in the administration have said a plan must include testing and contact tracing, that means the governors must do it. Maybe that is what Cuomo and the other governors are working on?
I think it is likely a vaccine will be deployed before "a couple of years" elapse. So it will not go on that long.