Waiting until we execute a successful testing and tracing program. Even the federal government guidelines for reopening are clear on what the alternate suggestion is, despite what the figurehead of that government seems to want his followers to think.
For that to work you need to get the spread down to workable numbers again, which hasn't happened with the current lock down. It's in the limbo of too harsh to actually use the medical resources but too light to set it on a quickly lowering path with a workable timescale.
If 5-10% has it you can essentially just assume everyone has been in contact within 1 or 2 steps with someone who has it, no need for fancy privacy invading tracing.
Testing is good to catch people early, but if the capacity isn't here 2 months after the Italian outbreak, when will it be?
I can only speak for San Francisco (and to a lesser extent the Bay Area): we do have workable numbers at this point. Approximately 150 new cases reported per day and declining. Our testing is also ramping up relatively quickly, especially in SF, and so is training for contact tracers. The mayor is planning for mid-May to start reopening, as a result of these numbers.
The Bay Area has high testing and contact tracing ability. As an extreme, Santa Clara County (just south of Tesla) is at a 1.5% weekly positive rate and contact tracing every positive.
I mean, tragically, testing capacity in this country may never be where it needs to be, because we don't have an election coming up soon enough to replace our incompetent leadership in time to help.
But that doesn't mean we shouldn't push back on the claim that the only two options are uncontrolled spread and never ending lockdown. There is another way, it isn't hypothetical, it is being executed elsewhere. We just aren't taking that path.
Oh I think I see your perspective now. Yes, if you don't believe a vaccine will be developed then I can see where you're skeptical of the end game of testing and tracing.
But your certainty of the unlikelihood of a vaccine is far too strong far too early. There are on the order of ten to a hundred promising efforts toward developing a vaccine well under way. It may very well be that a year or two from now, each of those will have failed. If that is the case I will be open to hearing about how best to manage this indefinitely, and you may be right that testing and tracing won't help that much (but it still seems like we may want to control the order and rate at which people are exposed).
But we're really far from having the evidence to support your claim with any certainty. We haven't run out of ideas for how to make a vaccine yet, we're just getting started.
What if the government can't execute test & trace successfully? Right now we can only test around 0.1% of the population per day and that capability is growing linearly.[1] The lockdowns aren't restrictive enough to get R0 far below 1, so it's not clear how long it will take for new cases to drop low enough for test & trace to be feasible.
It's not like people are demanding less testing. Public demand for testing is as high as it's possible to be. Test capability is being ramped up as quickly as possible, but even if we manage to double it every month, it will be February of 2021 before we can test everyone once a week.
No, there could be more public demand for testing. Just to take an example, instead of armed protesters demanding reopening, they could be protesting for a better public health response.
Test capability is not being ramped up as quickly as possible. Other countries with less wealth than we have are still able to test more people per capita. The federal government has been hesitant to use powers and financial capabilities that it uniquely has in order to ramp up testing more quickly. A lot is being left on the table here. But it's not what we're talking about because the distraction campaign is working. It's really a bummer.
We don't need to test everyone, just the subset of people who may have been exposed. And we need a lot more tracing to find those likely exposures from known positive cases.
I don't understand why people act like there is some law of nature that is forcing this to be so much worse here than in some other places. There are countries who are not struggling as much as us, we could be more like them, we just aren't doing the work to get there.
If we double it every month, since right now we're testing ~275,000 a day, we'd hit Harvard's estimate of the minimum necessary tests of 500,000 a day in less than a month. The thing that continues to be frustrating about this debate is that we have reasonably clear, achievable guidelines for getting numbers under control and, at least at a national level, we're just not doing them, because the federal response has been a bungled mess.
Waiting until we execute a successful testing and tracing program. Even the federal government guidelines for reopening are clear on what the alternate suggestion is, despite what the figurehead of that government seems to want his followers to think.