Daniel Schmactenberger’s Two-Step Process to Stop the Pandemic
Reprinted with permission from his 3.19.20 Facebook post
[ The original post and comment thread is here. ]
A two step process to stop the pandemic:
- Everyone stay home starting now.
- Get tests to everyone. People who aren’t infected can come off quarantine.
Thats it. Really.
Yes, that is oversimplifying, but that is the critical Pareto response. That would prevent the spike and avert the follow on catastrophes, with the least amount of disruption possible. There is more to it, but in a time of great uncertainty and complexity, clarity and simplicity can be helpful.
I’ll expand those points a little more:
1. Everyone has to physically isolate immediately and adequately. That includes appropriate hygiene and use of PPE (personal protective equipment: masks, gloves, sanitizers, etc.) Yes the President should call for nationwide quarantine. So should Governors and Mayors. Schools closed, events stopped, the whole thing. But since that might take a while and every day is critical, people need to engage in voluntary quarantine now. At this point, this is the only way to stop the spread. Tests aren’t ready in time at scale. Neither are vaccines. Immunity is not clearly established. The only way to prevent the spike is to stop the physical contact that mediates infection. Period. If we don’t do this, then the spike of serious cases will overwhelm the medical system and the cascade of systemic consequences will begin. That gets ugly really fast.
The only people who should not be in quarantine are people who’s jobs mediate critical societal infrastructure: health care workers, prison guards, police, national guards, military, critical utility workers, sanitization engineers, supply chains workers, etc. These people all need PPE/HAZMAT gear and training immediately so they don’t get sick or spread infection. They all need paid so no strikes occur. This will stabilize the societal grid.
Everyone else should stay home, work from home if you can, help if you can, and otherwise chill.
2. Testing. We need to ramp up widespread testing as fast as possible. This is how we come off quarantine. Testing allows us to let healthy people go back to work and school and keep infected people in quarantine until they are no longer contagious. Smart quarantine is how we end total quarantine. We should have started with that but we didn’t. And we don’t have enough tests ready to go straight to that solution now. So we have to do total quarantine first to stop the spread. Then come off quarantine mediated by testing. This can happen relatively quickly. (The details matter of what types of tests but that’s beyond the scope of this note.) We can have most people back to life and work in approximately two months this way. Otherwise, this will be a rolling disaster for a long time.
The next two critical steps:
3. Assess the medical demand bottlenecks and get the supply up-regulated, with triaged logistics, before the ICU spike hits and before hospitals run out of PPE.
4. The government needs to issue a basic economic support package to enable step 1. Which will be much less severe because of step 2.
Thats it. That will prevent the otherwise impending catastrophes. There are about a hundred more steps that matter: work on drug solutions, vaccines and antibody solutions, more research regarding immunity and mutation, protecting against cyber and other forms of attacks during national vulnerability, protect against major geopolitical risks, ensure election integrity, support the rest of the world, homelessness solutions, up-regulate capacity for follow on mutations and future pandemics, improve governance and preparedness for catastrophic risks of all kinds, use this to reboot the global economics system, etc… But right now, it’s really about those first two steps.
(Step 3 needs a lot of help, but it’s in play. And the demand is made radically less based on doing step 1 well. Step 4 is really just to help step 1 happen so it could be considered a sub-step of #1. All the additional things in the last paragraph, are a lot easier to tend to in a functional society than a devastated one. Step 1 can even be seen as buying time to get to Step 2, which is what we should have done in the beginning, and how we need to deal with the next round that comes. Accurate, early, ubiquitous testing, enabling smart quarantine, is how to prevent bugs from breaking countries; it’s a national immune system. Let’s get this dialed in now, and ready before a more lethal strain hits.)
[ The original post and comment thread is here. ]
