"Because of its virulence, wide spread and the many asymptomatic cases it causes, Covid-19 cannot be contained in the long run, and so all countries will eventually reach herd immunity. To think otherwise is naive and dangerous."
It is contained in Korea, China and Japan. Anyone can look at the numbers and see that unless something changes radically and the numbers start to increase exponentially, it will remain contained for a year or two, when a vaccine is developed. The numbers started to increase exponentially in Japan weeks ago. That put the fear of God into them, and they imposed voluntary stay-at-home rules in Tokyo, Osaka and Sapporo. Not very strong rules, because people were interviewed in pachinko parlors and bars. Anyway, that worked, as you see from the stats. Cases have declined almost as rapidly as they were increasing. In most prefectures, there was never an exponential increase. There would have been, sooner or later, if things had gotten out of hand in Tokyo.
The stats are here:
Look at the numbers and graphs for places like Yamaguchi Prefecture, my home away from home. The population is 1.4 million, about 1/8 of Georgia. They have had 32 cases and no deaths. That would be 256 cases for a population the size of Georgia's. Georgia has 25,000 cases and 1,052 deaths. In other words, the pandemic is about 100 times worse in the U.S. compared to most of Japan.
There is no reason to think daily cases will increase in Yamaguchi, or any of the other rural prefectures listed below Fukushima. The graph labeled "Confirmed Case Trajectories by Prefecture (>100 Cases)" shows the cases are flatlined, not exponential, everywhere but Tokyo of Osaka, and those two are now approaching a flat trajectory. There is no reason to think the total number of cases in the entire country will exceed 18,000 over the next 12 months. They can easily handle that. It is no threat to the larger population. There will be no reason to shut down the economy or issue stay-at-home orders, once the present burst of cases returns to around 50 per day.
Note that every single case in Japan is listed in detail in publicly available databases. For every patient you can find the age, sex, zip-code, number of people infected, and what day the patient took a train. The names and home address is not listed, but there is enough information to allow individuals to do their own case tracing. This is the level of monitoring and tracing it will take to contain the epidemic. This is what we must have in the U.S. before we stop the stay-at-home rules. Otherwise, the epidemic will simply go back to its natural increase, doubling every 3 days. Maybe every 6 days if people are careful and wear masks. But in a few months, we will either go back to lock-down, or millions of people will be infected at one time, and it will destroy the economy. Destroy it completely this time, for years to come. Meat production will fall by half or more, and all the automobile factories will be closed again. That's the "herd immunity will work" scenario. Yeah, it will work, but only after impoverishing the nation for years to come, killing millions, and destroying the lives of tens of millions.
Those are our choices: We can either do what the Asian countries have done, or we can stand helplessly, let nature take its course, and do nothing as if this were the 15th century.
During the months of March and April, the U.S. Federal government could have implemented nationwide testing and tracing, the way they did in Korea and Japan. The Japanese implemented these things in less than two months. We had plenty of time. Our internet-geeks at Google and elsewhere are just as capable, and just as fast, as the Japanese geeks. We can mobilize and train 300,000 people as quickly as they trained proportionally similar sized groups. (In Japan, the people tracing cases are mainly the local city and town government employees. In Iceland they are police detectives.) The U.S. is no less skilled or capable as these other countries. No one knows that better than me. We could have done it. But we did not. So, our population stayed home and lost billions of dollars in income for nothing. It was all a waste. It temporarily stopped the exponential growth, and flattened the curve, but only until the lock-down ends. Nothing was done to prevent a rebound. We will be right back where we were again a few weeks or months after opening up. It is a tragic waste of lives and money. The administration is to blame. The citizens did what the government asked. They made sacrifices. They did the right thing. The government did nothing. As far as I know, they have not implemented a single one of the essential steps needed to control the epidemic -- steps which have been stated and demonstrated by the Korean and Japanese experts for all the world to see.
New York and Massachusetts will try to control the epidemic with Asian methods, but people can travel freely in the U.S. so I doubt they can contain it. Nothing will be done in Georgia by our idiot governor. In Japan, if the epidemic had gone out of control in Tokyo, it would inevitably have reached every part of Yamaguchi. People were, in fact, fleeing to Yamaguchi. The authorities in Yamaguchi shut down public highway rest stops to keep others out. If the epidemic rages in Georgia, New York cannot be safe for long.
