Quarantining of the sick and all incoming travelers works. It’s worked for centuries. Testing and contact-tracing makes that strategy work even better. And South Korea has shown better than anybody how a government can execute that testing and contact-tracing in the modern era to be very effective, including use of cell phone location data to track where an infected person has been and test others in that area. And, yes, quarantined infected people do not and should not have the same rights as everyone else to their freedom of movement or privacy.
I agree it would have been great if we could have done what South Korea did. Unfortunately the best time for that strategy was in January when the first CV cases started arriving in the US. We missed our window of opportunity. Now we simply have too many cases for that to be practical.
There is no reason to quarantine the healthy or the entire population. Enforcing it is an absurd waste of resources. And it’s an incredible drain on an economy that turns a health crisis into an economic crisis unnecessarily.
The problem with quarantining just the elderly and the sick is that complete isolation is impossible. Have you checked the wait times for Amazon's grocery delivery? More than 3 days for a loaf of bread. So the at-risk folks will need to leave their homes for groceries if nothing else. The more people are out and about the more likely Granny is to catch CV at the grocery store. There is also the fact that while CV is extremely unlikely to kill a healthy young person many young CV patients still require hospitalization.
https://www.upi.com/Health_News/2020/03/19/One-in-five-people-under-44-with-COVID-19-experiences-severe-illness/4691584633025/
If our ICUs become overloaded the fatality rate will go up because people who would have survived with proper medical care won't get it. The economy will crash anyway because the dead do not spend money. A recession is coming regardless of what we do now so we might as well choose the option that doesn't involve overloading our ICUs. If there is one secular thing I have faith in it is the ability of the American economy to recover, even rebound, once the restrictions are lifted. There is no recovery from death.
This is a sign of a coddled people, a people cowed by fear, a people who are unwilling to assume any risks or sacrifice for the greater good of their country.
As a healthy 30 year old I am not afraid of dying of the CV because I know I have a better chance of being struck by lightning. I have already lost a fair amount of money in the stock market and been furloughed from my job. Nevertheless if that's what it takes to maintain our health care system and stop me from becoming an asymptomatic carrier to those who are not so blessed with youth and health so be it. You may not agree with my decision but I don't think you can say I'm doing it out of fear or that I'm unwilling to sacrifice for the greater good.
It’s also an attack on basic freedoms. The government should put all the advice and recommendations it can to tell people how to protect themselves. It has done that for centuries. But when it starts forcing everyone to follow them, it turns into a nanny police state on an unprecedented level.
Of course there must be a balance between individual rights and the greater good. The traditional balance between these 2 has been "Your right to stick your arm out ends where my nose begins." You have the right to endanger your own life. You do not have the right to spread infectious disease like a modern-day Typhoid Mary. Unfortunately many carriers of CV display no symptoms for up to 14 days so it is not enough just to quarantine people displaying obvious symptoms.
I think that it’s still practical to use the South Korean strategy outside of New York. New York needs a geographical quarantine strategy now. No one in or out of the city.
The government, charities or volunteers can organize to drop off groceries for the elderly. That is a sensible place for resources to go if we’re going to spend $2 trillion dollars on the current strategy. I do not understand how you think it’s feasible for everybody to be quarantined from everybody else somehow, but you don’t think a much smaller segment of the population can quarantine themselves under Plan B. That’s not logical.
Quarantining the entire country isn’t practical or feasible and doesn’t make a lot of sense. The expense of it gets more astronomical with every passing day yet we are not being given an exit strategy to get back to normal.
Reading about the 1918 Spanish Flu, it actually mutated into a second deadlier form, but people who had had the first form were still immune to the second. So one city that had a huge outbreak of the first form ended up having one of the lowest overall death totals because they were immune to the second, deadlier form in large numbers.
The idea that the current shutdown strategy is logical or healthy is nothing that can be proven. If what happened to the Spanish Flu happens to this one, this strategy could prove disastrous. We have a huge opportunity to allow young people to get this disease in a harmless form and get immunity to it. Then if it mutates or comes back later, they will be protected themselves and also create herd immunity to protect others. Since none of us can predict the future, a less restrictive strategy is just as likely to be the best one as a complete shutdown strategy.
What we are seeing in the current strategy is classic, one-level thinking. Governors are using the most basic, layman’s thinking to put out a simplistic strategy that seems obvious but may be completely wrong when deeper thinking is applied. What I’ve seen so far in the media is them struggling to show evidence that the shutdown strategy is working at all even though their liberal antennae are in love with the strict government controls.