Hmm.
The last thing any country needs is to reopen schools and businesses only to be forced to close them again because of a resurgence"
There's a certain, very qualified, sense in which I think that's
wrong. (Possibly not the sense they meant it; so I'm going for
clarity.)
It is certainly true that, by implementing social distancing and shelter-in-place, we are buying ourselves time.
But, time for what? Well, several things. Items 1-5, to be sure:
1. expand, train, and deploy your health care and public health workforce
2. implement a system to find every suspected case at the community level
3. rump up production capacity and availability of testing
4. identify, adapt, and equipt facilities you will use to treat patients
5. develop a clear plan and process to quarantine contacts
But we have to remember that a severe depression, if we're dumb enough to talk ourselves into one, will indirectly kill hundreds of thousands of persons annually. Economic downturns hurt. Unemployment really hurts. The memorable movie quote about this is here:
...between 2min 25sec and 2min 57sec. (The exact number may not be correct; there's no way to know; but it's something like that, something in that order of magnitude.)
If we go back to work, we kill people via coronavirus.
If we don't go back to work, we kill people via economic damage that's every bit as deadly, but not as visibly measurable.
So it's a balancing act. But we're operating on incomplete data, right? This means that decision-makers (and please, folks, remember, that's going to be state governors more than feds, since the latter are too distant from facts-on-the-ground) will sometimes guess too high, and other times guess too low. They're going to constantly guess wrong, either way, and then adjust week-by-week.
It will be safe
in the aggregate, for healthy, fit persons from 20 to 35 years-of-age to re-enter public and start socializing, provided they only socialize with persons in that same group, and are not living with persons of less-safe groups.
By "safe in the aggregate" I mean: Some 0.1% of those people will get it and die; but the rest will be keeping the economy from crashing and indirectly killing a thousand times as many. It sucks, but that's the truth.
So this is where the balancing act gets tricky. Is 20-years-old the correct low end? Is 35 the correct high end? I don't know.
How soon do you start allowing such select groups back in? I don't know.
The state and local officials will make judgment calls. Some will be too optimistic, some will be too pessimistic.
The result is that some of them will get resurgences, and close down again.
That's what we should expect if they are playing the game as well as it can be played, since they can't play it perfectly on the first try with inadequate information.
If we
don't see that, here and there, it means everyone's erring on the side of caution ...which sounds great until you remember all the indirect "hidden" deaths that'll cause over the next year.
There is no nice, convenient, pat answer here. It's an imperfect world.
That's the sense in which I disagree that "the last" thing we need is...yadda, yadda.
We want to not see
much of that, it's true.
But if we don't see it happen here and there, then the whole country's probably killing more people than necessary.
P.S. I don't suppose there's any way I can say the above ^^^ and not have someone want to jump down my esophagus with their hair on fire. Sorry to stir up a hornet's nest. But I felt it important to state, however baldly, that we're comparing one death count against another. Everybody agrees you don't give up lives for dollars. But everybody should also agree that economic crashes don't just cost dollars, but also lives.
Still, remember: Testing will be increasing daily. Serum antibody tests will start to show folk who've already had it and recovered. THOSE folks are safe to go back to work...and it's NOT safe (economically) for them not to. Age ranges (like the straw-man suggestion I offered above) are just an inaccurate proxy or substitute for what we really want, which is: "Tell me who it's safe to send back, and get them back in public as fast as possible." The serum-antibody tests will be the gold standard...at least, within a given year, before the virus mutates enough to reinfect.
So, as the original WHO statement said: We're buying time.
I could foresee an app which allows doctors to register patients as having been tested and found to have had COVID-19 and recovered. They could then get an app with a QR code which could be scanned at bars, workplaces, etc., to allow them back into public.
Will it happen? Depends on how fast the timeline plays out. We might all be back to work before someone even comes up with such an app.