Yes, many will have no choice but to go into risk. This is not freedom.
And those who will get sick are also the innocent friends and family of those who suspend their understanding of cause and effect.
Yup, if the advocates for opening society were just risking their own lives, I'd be in favor of letting them have the risk, but they are putting others at risk. It's like letting people drive drunk.
There certainly were many potential issues that could have been disastrous such as legacy Fortran, COBOL, and other code at financial institutions, but the vendors alerted folks years before and provided solutions, but a lot of it was over-hyped. Particularly the PC part involving spreadsheets.
In a lot of areas it was overhyped in large part because the reporters delivering the news didn't really understand the problem. I work mostly in C and C++ and it was a non-issue in everything I worked with, but I have a friend who was a COBOL programmer and she made a mint in the last couple of years of the 90s. There were quite a few ancient control systems that had code that hadn't been touched in decades that needed to be reviewed and fixed.
I don't think there is an actual plan.
I have not heard of any study that would show masks and gloves are enough. Maybe in theory quite good, but in practice? It's like making a dangerous experiment with no controls or safeguards in place, unless you keep testing everyone.
8 people is more than enough to start a spread in an environment with Rt > 1. What I see in videos is counter to the idea that there are only few interactions.
And for example nobody is providing numbers about how many of the thousands of workers are using public transportation or busses, ride sharing, etc. Because the proponents don't really care, they are biased over their ears, and that's a likely cause of failure.
Another problem I saw yesterday when I did the shopping. The market I frequent started a mandatory mask policy and close to 3/4 of the people in the store just stopped social distancing. The last time I had been there they didn't have a mandatory mask policy and people social distanced quite well.
Psychologically a lot of people will participate in riskier behavior if they think x protects them. Safety leaves their mind because they are now "protected".
Someone posted something from Trevor Bedford on Twitter yesterday where he was saying the curve is going to plateau instead of go down. I figured that was going to happen from the start. The curves we were all shown at the start of this showed two scenarios, a sharp peak where hospital resources were exceeded or a longer, flatter curve where we stay below hospital peak capacity. The phrase everyone has been chanting for 2 months is "flatten the curve". A long plateau is what a flattened curve looks like.
Nationally I don't think we're going to see a flattened curve for long. With some states opening back up, cases are going to start going back up and the curve will go back up again. Parts of the country will plateau or start to decline slowly but other parts are going to have outbreaks like New York had.
The honest epidemiologists are making the point that a widely available vaccine is still a year or more out even if one or more of the current candidates proves viable. Vaccines take time to make and scaling up production takes time. The yearly flu vaccine has the strains of flu epidemiologists think will be the heavy hitters in the next flu season when they are planning the vaccine a year in advance. It takes most of a year to make enough to vaccines each year. And that's an established production process.
With a vaccine on the distant horizon, herd immunity is the only realistic option. But it has to be done in a way that doesn't overwhelm the hospitals because at that point a lot of people die who could have survived. But the cruel calculus is you need to let people get sick and let some die to get to herd immunity. Throwing open the doors and going back to normal will be a disaster as hospitals in those regions get overwhelmed.
But letting people out a bit more will allow the virus to spread more, but will also move us towards herd immunity.
Herd immunity only works if having the virus and getting over it leaves a person with immunity for at least some time. A lot of noise has been made about the few who got over it who later tested positive again. The South Koreans found a relative few people who still tested positive and think it was debris left in their system that hadn't been cleared out yet.
Something both my SO and I experienced that I haven't seen discussed anywhere is that this thing can relapse easily in the week or two after you get over it. In both our cases we let ourselves get too tired within a week of getting over it and started to feel it come back. In our cases we both made sure to get some extra sleep and it went away quickly. I experienced that a couple of times with the flu as a small kid, getting too active too soon and it relapsed on me. Once pretty severely. At least some of the reinfections may just be people relapsing.
In any case all this assumes immunity after infection for the vast majority of people for some period of time. It's reasonable. Most people develop immunity to viruses they have had for at least a while, and for some viruses the immunity is permanent.
If we don't get immunity from having COVID, then we're screwed. A vaccine will be impossible because that's the mechanism they use to make someone immune and people will just keep getting reinfected. Our only hope at that point will be antivirals and there will likely be side effects. I strongly doubt people who have had it don't have immunity (though there may be a relative few who don't for some unknown reason). Occam's Razor says that people who get over this will have immunity for at least a while.
Because of the massive screw ups with testing, we're flying mostly blind here. We need widespread active virus tests and widespread antibody tests. Both of which are accurate. We need to cull the counterfeit tests from the market ASAP. This relies on competent governing top to bottom, which we don't have right now. If we had an idea of how many people had gotten over the virus and how many were currently infected, leaders could make educated decisions about opening up the economy. Right now most leaders in the US are blind to how many active infections are out there and how many have likely immunity.
To get the economy going again we should also have some kind of certification system for people who test positive for the antibody. Germany is planning on doing it. This would give those who had the virus and are unemployed opportunities to get back to work doing jobs that are more risky for people who haven't had the virus.
