Coming out of lockdown

This got buried as a response to a response, but I think it may be more broadly useful.

I absolutely want people to be able to get back to work. Having millions of Americans out of work, many with no health insurance, unable to pay the rent or buy food is horrible, and the impact will last years.

In March there were a lot of things that we didn’t know about COVID — there still are but we’ve learned some things.

1. Some people can have it and never show any symptoms. Others can have it but not show symptoms for a long period (5–14 days?). Both of those groups are infectious.
2. There was a lot of confusion early on about the value of masks. In particular, we didn’t distinguish the use of a mask to protect me from the use to protect you. The N95 masks are needed by health care workers because they are in close contact with infectious patients constantly and must be able to protect themselves. Since I’m not a health care worker I don’t need that level of protection. I wear a mask because I might be infectious and I don’t want to infect you.
3. A number of places told people to use social distancing initially. In some cases, people did that, but in many places, they didn’t. The move to a stronger ‘stay home’ policy was done because the first orders weren’t working well.
4. Many (most) people don’t deal with exponential growth much. We tend to think of things like “I added 2 more clients this month” or “the longer commute is costing me 20% more in gas”.
5. With COVID we’ve seen the number of infections doubling every 3 days — continually. If we think that we’ve gotten rid of it in our town/state, and we missed 100 people, in 2 weeks we’ll have 3,200 infections. Another 2 weeks and we’ll have 100,000.
6. We need to be able to test and contact trace to keep that from happening. As soon as we find a hot spot we can jump on it, isolate everyone who does have COVID, and find the other folks who might have it and test them.
7. If I know that I have it I’ll stay home rather than give it to anyone else. I assume that you’ll do the same. If I’m not sure then I’ll wear a mask and keep my distance, and if you do the same thing we can do a pretty good job of protecting one another.
8. One reason testing is so important now is to understand how prevalent it is in our community. If I have no idea if the number of infected is 1% or 50%, then it’s really hard for me to understand how risky it is to reopen. If I know the number and can see it going down then I’m a lot more comfortable going out.
9. We’ve paid a horrible price in deaths and effects of this stuff. We’ve paid a horrible price in our economy. To my mind the worst thing we could do right now is to rush out before we have a handle on this in such a way that 4 weeks from now we’re back to a 3 day doubling period, more deaths, and the economy in shambles.
10. I’m not a patient guy at all. I usually am pretty much full throttle. I think right now for me to give in to my impatience would be unwise.