Some solutions that already exist, are already in use and could be firmed up:
1. Working from home.
2. Ordering online and getting takeout.
3. Using self checkout.
4. Collaboration and socialization via phone and internet.
You can't get sick if you aren't exposed. People don't get sick due to some random number generator. You have to have a vector.
We already know a great many ways to disrupt the spread. The antidote to a global crisis is not a global solution. It's a local solution.
When Ebola was initially a problem, the epidemic was stopped by African tribal elders, not advanced Western medicine. They told their people "Don't go to the white man's hospital" because you would go for something fixable, like a broken leg, and die of Ebola.
They blockaded the roads and stopped letting outsiders in. They quarantined those who were infected and left food on the doorstep to take care of them.
If the food stopped disappearing, they burned the hut down.
We know a lot about how to stop this. What we currently lack is some means to get people to do all the basic stuff we already know works, like wash your hands, stop touching your face and don't lick your fingers to separate bags.
I'm disappointed in seeing this handwringing, angsting piece at number one. It's not really factual. It's someone being emotional.
It isn't 1918. We have vastly better technology and information these days.
We just have to deploy it and leverage it. This is mostly about shaping culture. The primary question is "How do you get people to voluntarily comply instead of blowing it off as usual?"
The problem isn't the short-term; the problem is the long term. Are you suggesting the entire world work from home and interact only over the internet for the rest of our lives?
One of the biggest questions in this thread is specifically what kind of immunity we can have from the virus. If catching it gives you 10-year immunity, then slowing things down might work. But what if catching it only gives you a 6-month immunity? The only way to stop it would be for the entire world to manage be SARS-CoV-2 free at the same time. Otherwise, we're looking at a situation where the thing might just keep going around the world indefinitely.
Are you suggesting the entire world work from home and interact only over the internet for the rest of our lives?
No, of course not.
But some people who are especially vulnerable can work from home permanently.
We can permanently crack down on things like cashiers licking their fingers to help them open bags.
I have a compromised immune system. The gross behavior of cashiers is one of my single biggest headaches in life. If we recognized how critical a link they are in transmitting disease and took that threat seriously, I imagine people would generally be healthier.
We also can design public bathrooms without doors so you don't have to touch the handle. Walmart has that mastered.
We also can make it more the standard for public bathrooms to have no-touch technology, such as hand dryers and faucets that are motion activated.
We can permanently move to bowing instead of shaking hands. Several older cultures have such practices.
We can more widely adopt the practice of removing our shoes at the front door when we get home rather than tracking dirt all over the house. There are plenty of cultures that do that.
We can move away from wall-to-wall carpeting in most homes in the US. It is not the norm in other countries.
We can move to passive solar design and away from forced air HVAC systems.
I'm suggesting that this isn't a situation where we need to throw our hands up and just be resigned to it being utterly futile. There are many things we can do to reduce the transmission of disease without simply calling a halt to life. And for a professional scientist to suggest otherwise is basically being alarmist because they are stressed out or because the solutions don't fit their mental models of "just pop a pill" or whatever.
They are boring and a lot of them are basically the purview of what housewives historically did. And no one wants to admit housewives did anything of real value.
American culture acts like homemakers and full-time moms are losers and leeches and not actually contributing anything of real value to the economy. A charitable reading of that is that it's a blind spot and people just don't get it.
A less charitable reading is that it's misogynistic BS rooted in intentionally being disrespectful of women and of the value and importance of "women's work" and that people would literally rather die than admit that women's work has real value on par with what important men do, like doctors and scientists. And to whatever degree that is true, the world can now either get over its crap or die due to clinging to it.
A lot of people may die over that. Change tends to occur one funeral at a time because most people stubbornly cling to their ideas and refuse to change.
This can either be an age of enlightenment or a new dark age.
Ain't no big thing. We're all dust in the wind anyway. But the dark path is not the only option.
Those all sound like good ideas[1]. But exactly how will those affect the R0 of the virus if we all keep going to the pub, and the club, and church, and the office, and schools, and concerts, and sporting events? Particularly if we ride the bus and the tube and trains and airplanes to get there?
Fundamentally, not enough to keep it from saturating the population at least once. And if immunity doesn't last long enough for it to die out after that, not enough to keep it from saturating the population over and over.
Which isn't to say we shouldn't do all the things you suggest. But simply slowing things down isn't our ultimate goal. Going back to some semblance or normalcy is our ultimate goal: Perhaps with tiles instead of carpet and bowing instead of shaking hands, sure, but not everyone holed up in their homes permanently. And towards that goal, there's not a clear path.
[1] Except for "move to passive solar design", which I didn't really understand.
Passive solar design relies on things like absorbing heat from the sun and storing the heat in structures with thermal mass instead of burning fuel and forcing air flow to try to heat the home.
It actually results in a more comfortable home and higher quality of life. It's more environmentally friendly. It's more sustainable. And it doesn't actively promote sick building syndrome.
Please note that Legionnaire's Disease was originally transmitted by the air conditioning system where it was growing. I hate forced air heat with a passion.
I currently live in a hundred year old building with a radiator in my unit and it's a huge improvement over most living arrangements I've ever had.
Normalcy:
For someone in the 1800s, there's absolutely nothing normal about airplane flights, much less for ordinary individuals. There's nothing normal about computers. There's nothing normal about the internet.
These things are all basically magic for someone from 150 years ago and we take it all for granted and feel like our lives are being utterly ruined if someone suggests we should maybe curtail our use.
I have a form of cystic fibrosis. I've made a lot of the changes I'm talking about.
I'm a social creature. I would love to have a "normal" life. The way I live didn't come naturally at all. It was a shotgun wedding.
But it was better than the way I had and I am no longer in constant, excruciating pain and I'm no longer on boat loads of drugs and I generally sleep better, I'm more productive and I'm happier.
I don't have a whole lot of sympathy for the world's worship of some arbitrary concept of normal. Life routinely adapts or dies.
The people telling me that making permanent changes to our current lifestyle in order to not die is some unthinkable and harsh burden may well be among the dead in the near future. And the ones who remain can choose to adapt or die in the next round.
It doesn't much matter to me. I already live the life of a germaphobe thanks to my genetic disorder. And I long ago gave up on ever being taken seriously, cared about, etc. So I have enough anger, bitterness and baggage over the past decade of being treated terribly by the world at large that I will be perfectly happy to see some folks go and I've got a mental list of "Hey, universe, maybe you can make sure Coronavirus gets these people soon. Thanks."
But go ahead and cling desperately to your ideas about some "normal" life and how amazingly important that is. Maybe someone will mourn the loss of people doing that. But it won't be me.
You have a good day. This is probably not a conversation worth pursuing.
> We can more widely adopt the practice of removing our shoes at the front door when we get home rather than tracking dirt all over the house. There are plenty of cultures that do that.
Including American and Canadian cultures. Every home I've been in across Canada and the northern US has practiced this. Granted, most of the many people I know are descendants of people from the nordic countries, but is it common for people to wear shoes in the house?
Not really. The delivery riders, Uber drivers, couriers and postal workers that bring you all that stuff you can order online like food and goods. The people that work maintaining the cables for your ISP (and the technicians in their data centers) that let you work from home in the first place. The people that clean your streets. Ambulance drivers. Taxi drivers. Cooks. The people that collect your garbage. The people that maintain your cities. These are all just off the top of my head.
Really think hard about it; it's pretty easy to take a whole bunch of stuff for granted especially when you work in high-tech areas. I'm extremely fortunate that I can work from home, but what if my fridge breaks down or I just run out of milk and my Internet happens to be down?
My point is that each delivery rider can do his job without getting within 6 feet of any other person during his shift. They do come closer but their job can be easily changed so that they don't.
Uber drivers are entirely other thing. Maybe driving people should be only allowed if you have a car that has completely separate spaces for the driver and the rider and where spece for the rider can be fully vented and disinfected after each rider, which maybe again should be mandatory.
A lot of people can't do their essential jobs remotely. But very few of them can't do those jobs not in groups and not in contact with other people.
The world before covid looked how it looked not out of necessity, but just because we didn't have to pay attention to some things.
Have you considered that most normal human beings require social interaction with others to maintain mental health. Solitary confinement is considered torture by many for a reason. In addition, digital forms of social interaction are obviously not subsitutes for physical interaction, especially considering the harmful effects social media and dating apps already have on mental health. I definitely wouldn't want to live in a world where Zuckerberg and co. control all my social interaction with others.
I have a compromised immune system. I have a close relationship to my two adult sons who still live with me. I don't like strangers touching me.
Historically, humans lived in small, close-knit family units or small villages. The human mind is optimized to deal with a social group of about 150 people, not a city of thousands.
A lot of our loneliness and similar problems could be largely resolved if we returned to a pattern of small, close-knit communities as our norm and we could improve germ control at the same time.
It's a general human norm that most cultures promote a long-term, monogamous relationship as the standard. Sex is vastly less dangerous if two people are only intimate with each other and neither of them sleeps around.
Reducing casual social contact in no way means we simply can't get our social needs met. It can mean the opposite. It can mean a return to meaningful social bonds instead of casual hookups from grinder.
Social interaction doesn't require breathing the same air. Internet is wonderful place of bustling social interaction. I'm doing way more social interaction with you just by writing this comment than I usually do by going outside and apparently Zuckerberg has no say in it.
Solitary confinement is a torture not because of the solitary part. It's because of the boredom part. How unpleasent do you think would be solitary confinement for nearly all people if it was done in a library with internet access and netflix account instead of small dark empty cell?
It's not the same thing though. We know that there are chemical responses for things such as touch and other physical interactions. You don't get that online. It's a vastly different thing.
There are vastly more chemical responses to having sex and yet most of us don't do it casually with large group random people, only with the the closest ones and often with one any given period of life.
Touch could be also culturally restricted to closest family with ill effects milder than caused by mild infections you get through that, let alone ncov19.
Some human cultures are less touchy some more. All survive.
Chemical responses to anything less than touch are way less documented and I suspect easily replicated with good quality audio-video connection.
Annoyingly, this got disrupted in my area. I was hoping to do all ordering online instead of cherry picking some of the things like before. Unfortunately the shop is overrun by customers so all staff are busy. On top of that, because of many items are out of stock, online orders have been disabled. I'm really disappointed in those decisions - not only we have more people waiting in lines in the same area, you're not allowed to order even the fresh produce which is not missing. It changed a 5min pickup into 30min shopping + 15min checkout wait.
The local Little Caesar's has too little business at the moment to keep pizzas on hand "hot and ready." This means if you go in, you have to wait while they cook it, potentially exposing you to infection.
Meanwhile, their "pizza portal" sits completely unused. You could theoretically order online and pick up without interacting with anyone.
I suggested this on the local Reddit for my area. I got snarkily asked when I became the manager of the local Little Caesar's.
We have the technology. We just aren't using it to solve this.
This is going to last all year, and possibly much longer and most jobs can't be done from home. We're simply not set up to educate kids from home. Hence the economic hit the blog is talking about. Just because many of us have tech jobs we can do from home, doesn't mean that's a viable option for enough people for it to make a major difference.
Washing hands and not touching our faces will slow it down, not stop it. There are numerous recorded cases on transmission with no physical contact, and virus concentrations in throats and saliva are ridiculously high. This is an aerosol disease, you get it just by breathing and many of the masks out there aren't very effective against it. That's why so many health care workers are getting it. Yes we should do these things, but they won't solve the problem, only slow it down a bit and the guy writing that post knows it.
1. Working from home.
2. Ordering online and getting takeout.
3. Using self checkout.
4. Collaboration and socialization via phone and internet.
You can't get sick if you aren't exposed. People don't get sick due to some random number generator. You have to have a vector.
We already know a great many ways to disrupt the spread. The antidote to a global crisis is not a global solution. It's a local solution.
When Ebola was initially a problem, the epidemic was stopped by African tribal elders, not advanced Western medicine. They told their people "Don't go to the white man's hospital" because you would go for something fixable, like a broken leg, and die of Ebola.
They blockaded the roads and stopped letting outsiders in. They quarantined those who were infected and left food on the doorstep to take care of them.
If the food stopped disappearing, they burned the hut down.
We know a lot about how to stop this. What we currently lack is some means to get people to do all the basic stuff we already know works, like wash your hands, stop touching your face and don't lick your fingers to separate bags.
I'm disappointed in seeing this handwringing, angsting piece at number one. It's not really factual. It's someone being emotional.
It isn't 1918. We have vastly better technology and information these days.
We just have to deploy it and leverage it. This is mostly about shaping culture. The primary question is "How do you get people to voluntarily comply instead of blowing it off as usual?"