NYS has ~ 1000 new Covid hospitalizations a day. That works out to ~ 200 deaths a day, and using a 1% IFR it implies ~ 20,000 new infections a day. If contract tracing leads to e.g. 50 contacts per infection then the plan is to apply 14 day quarantines on 1M people a day.
SAH has failed in NYS, and barring other successful measures this test,trace and quarantine strategy just amounts to another somewhat worse SAH outcome.
It is possible that the 14 days is modified/reduceable by the improved testing involving prioritization for those exposed. If contacts were priority retested at 5? days (if the science supports a particular day) then that be helpful. This presumes 24 hr test results, very accurate testing and a functional method of prioritizing testing (yes some heavy lifting).
I think this is somewhat pessimistic. It probably is 10-20k new infections per day (20% of people are hopefully immune now, so that may cut down the undercount). I think contact tracing is not going to identify that many close contacts in the current regime, or even the first phase of reopening.
That being said, I think it IS important for NYC to wait a bit longer before relaxing restrictions. The curve is rapidly decaying (much more rapidly than it will decay elsewhere, probably due to the partial herd immunity), so even waiting another week or two should dramatically reduce the heat of the infection.
They just need to stand up their contact tracing teams and phase them in, starting immediately. And then in a couple or three weeks they can consider phasing open some new businesses.
We'll see how it goes.
Would opening factories and other similiar low-interaction businesses that can control the spacing between employees, really significantly add to the spread?
t's about the sensibility of keeping low-risk businesses closed, while permitting high-risk ones to remain open,
The thing is, the factory is NOT a low-risk business. There are 10k people there. If there's an outbreak, that's basically 10k people immediately who will need to be quarantined. We've seen what happens in the meat packing factories. We can't just assume that's happening only because of the meat saws and meat grinding and aerosolization, and poor practices.
So yeah, I think it would have significant impact. And again, there are likely 10-20 employees in that factory who are in mortal danger (and we can't identify them all). It's a bad look (and bad practice!) to have employees die on the job!
They need to have testing in place at the factory doors, and go above and beyond in various other ways, to establish an environment that really should be "safe".
There are a lot of companies pondering this problem right now. It's not an easy one to solve. But I think it can be solved, and it will be solved.
The other thing that helps is an additional two weeks of cool-down of community transmission. Once the public health department has identified the patterns of transmission (which will be easier the larger their workforce and the lower the caseload), there will be more visibility and ability to track down people before they start new fires.
But that cool-down alone isn't going to be enough to ensure no outbreaks at the factory. That requires a system that is correct & robust
by design. Not just some temperature monitoring and gloves and masks for everyone.
