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Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield
Locking down to eliminate is impossible. Sooner or later, you have to open up again. There will be deaths. Lots and lots of deaths. There's just no way around that. NZ is a test case in this sort of thinking. If a vaccine comes to markets and it works within the next year, NZ will be able to acquire it and will have avoided many deaths. If a vaccine does not work, NZ will be left with a nasty choice:
1. Open and deal (with the disadvantage of being farther behind other nations that have at least theoretically started acquiring herd immunity);
2. Become a hermit state
There is no hide until it's safe way out of this thing. I don't know why people insist that's an option. Live your life, take precautions to keep yourself and others safe, and hope you don't have a bad result if you happen to acquire it.
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How are we this far into this and still this unsophisticated in our thinking? You lock down to control community spread, then reopen with testing and contact tracing (ETA: I left out isolating those who may have been exposed) so that you have minimal continual spread. New Zealand and Australia are examples. They can't keep it out entirely, but they have tiny fraction of the cases of places like the US who have done next to nothing.
ETA: Nowhere is on a meaningful path to herd immunity, which we still don't know is even possible. This virus seems to fit in a spot where it's not transmissible enough to quickly spread through the population and not deadly enough to burn itself out. Dr. Osterholm has been suggesting that we may need to think about this as more like HIV than influenza (i.e., so transmissible that it peaks and then dies down because there are no more people to infect) for awhile. That means continuing efforts to manage the spread until there is a vaccine.
We missed out opportunity for that to mean mostly open with masks, temperature screens, testing, tracing and isolation, because we didn't take it seriously for month when we had the chance.
