Optimal Strategy for Coronavirus

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Instead of shutting down our society, would it have been superior public policy to test all persons, then to isolate all infected persons?

Meanwhile, to allow the rest of the society to carry on.

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Type: Question • Score: 3 • Views: 2,558 • Replies: 22

[+6] - jespah - 04/23/20201) Not enough tests. 2) It takes a while to test 350 million people. 3) About 30% of the tests throw a false negative.
[+3] - jespah - 04/23/2020Wouldn't shock me. Not to be icky, but I understand it can be detected it fecal matter, and that can potentially tell people in a building that someone is infected, if the outflow is tested. But...
[+3] - jespah - 04/23/2020... and I just said, helpful but imperfect.

@gollum,

1) Not enough tests.
2) It takes a while to test 350 million people.
3) About 30% of the tests throw a false negative.

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I feel like I've got a target on my back. I'm senior citizen, good health, never smoked, little meds, live alone, have been isolating for over 30 days, virus free.

I almost wish I would have gotten it. (lite case)

My friend got it with a 99 temp and slight cough. If the idea of "herd immunity" is ever accepted, he's home free.

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@PUNKEY,

PUNKEY wrote:

I feel like I've got a target on my back. I'm senior citizen, good health, never smoked, little meds, live alone, have been isolating for over 30 days, virus free.

I almost wish I would have gotten it. (lite case)

My friend got it with a 99 temp and slight cough. If the idea of "herd immunity" is ever accepted, he's home free.

Going for 'herd immunity' would involve people transmitting the virus casually without concern for spreading it to those whose health condition makes them more vulnerable.

It's easy as a healthy person with a strong immune system to say, "well I put effort into maintaining my own health and immunity so why should I suffer to protect others who didn't?" but on the other hand, do you want to be part of a network of viral vectors that transmits a relatively lethal virus to someone who is likely to die from it? I don't.

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@jespah,

jespah-

Thank you.

Possibly initial testing could be accomplished by temperature checking each person's forehead.

I wonder why the rate of false negatives is so high and whether it could be brought down.

Might there also be a problem with false positives?

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@gollum,

Wouldn't shock me. Not to be icky, but I understand it can be detected it fecal matter, and that can potentially tell people in a building that someone is infected, if the outflow is tested. But that still means a lot of testing, and in a large apartment building, one person out of a few hundred is helpful but imperfect.

1 Reply

@jespah,

jespah wrote:

Wouldn't shock me. Not to be icky, but I understand it can be detected it fecal matter, and that can potentially tell people in a building that someone is infected, if the outflow is tested. But that still means a lot of testing, and in a large apartment building, one person out of a few hundred is helpful but imperfect.

If you test the sewerage coming out of a building and it tests negative, are you willing to certify that everyone in that building is negative for the virus?

That seems like a recipe for false negatives.

If the building tests positive, on the other hand, you still have to test people individually to see if they've already gotten it or not yet. You can't assume they all have it because their building's outflow tested positive.

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@livinglava,

... and I just said, helpful but imperfect.

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@gollum,

The problem that has been identified with tests is false negatives.

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@jespah,

jespah wrote:

... and I just said, helpful but imperfect.

Helpful in what kind of scenario? I.e. for what exactly?

I'm not saying this as a rhetorical question to hammer down your thoughts.

I'm just trying to think of some situation where testing an entire building/complex/neighborhood would be helpful, and I'm not sure what it could be helpful for.

2 Replies

@livinglava,

livinglava-

I think that the testing needs to be either:

1) Random. (It some of those selected decline the test, then the results will be skewed; or

2) Universal. (Every person must take the test.)

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@livinglava,

For knowing where to focus limited testing resources, for one thing. And potentially for locating asymptomatic carriers.

Again, I repeat, it's imperfect.

Right now, the perfect is the enemy of the good. The medical community needs to find vectors. This is one admittedly imperfect means of doing so.

1 Reply

@jespah,

jespah wrote:

For knowing where to focus limited testing resources, for one thing. And potentially for locating asymptomatic carriers.

Explain your thinking. If you test a building and it tests negative, does that mean people in that building don't need to get tested? If it tests positive, then people should get tested? Why or why not?

Quote:

Again, I repeat, it's imperfect.

You're responding to your assumption that you think I'm criticizing what you said for being 'imperfect.' I don't care about perfection in the least. I am just responding to things I read on line trying to think them through publicly.

Quote:

Right now, the perfect is the enemy of the good. The medical community needs to find vectors. This is one admittedly imperfect means of doing so.

How is "the perfect the enemy of the good?" Why does the medical community need to find vectors? Do they think that they can really trace every person who has come into contact with someone who has tested positive?

Social-distancing and minimizing going out reduce the opportunities for the virus to be transmitted, but you could still get it from touching something at a supermarket, or touching your mail, or from food you eat, etc.

The social-distancing and other precautions are probably reducing the total quantities of contact situations by huge amounts, but there are still huge quantity of contact situations through which the virus can be transmitted.

Let's say before the lockdowns and social-distancing there were a billion potential contact-transmission interactions per person and now there are a million. A million is a huge improvement over a billion, but it's still too many to keep track of.

Some employees of various businesses are being reported in the news so people who shop at that store can go get tested if they want, but of course you never know if it's fake news geared toward getting customers of that store to pay for testing. There are always business interests that skew/spin things in the interest of making money.

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@jespah,

jespah wrote:

1) Not enough tests.
2) It takes a while to test 350 million people.
3) About 30% of the tests throw a false negative.

And not everyone is going to cooperate with testing. Especially conservatives/conspiratory theorists who think the pandemic is a hoax and they themselves are asymptomatic.

2 Replies

@tsarstepan,

tsarstepan wrote:

jespah wrote:

1) Not enough tests.
2) It takes a while to test 350 million people.
3) About 30% of the tests throw a false negative.

And not everyone is going to cooperate with testing. Especially conservatives/conspiratory theorists who think the pandemic is a hoax and they themselves are asymptomatic.

Or they might just not want to waste money on a test when they could get infected later the same afternoon after testing negative.

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@tsarstepan,

Maybe the optimal strategy for responding to a serious epidemic is for liberals and conservatives to stop fighting each other. That would involve people dropping their nasty political squabbles working together, listening to each other and compromising.

When one side (in this case liberals) uses the crisis to bash the other side... it makes it much harder for people to agree and to listen to each other.

(In other words... we are screwed)

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@maxdancona,

maxdancona wrote:

Maybe the optimal strategy for responding to a serious epidemic is for liberals and conservatives to stop fighting each other. That would involve people dropping their nasty political squabbles working together, listening to each other and compromising.

(If so... we are screwed)

As noble a thing to say as that is, how would political cooperation change anything?

The transmission of the virus has to be slowed to make time for vaccines to be tested and ultimately used by people whose health and immunity isn't strong enough to survive the virus.

The only thing government has to do is figure out the obstacles to people living/working safely from home (mostly) and solve those.

It is not government's job to solve everything for the people, though. It is their job to come up with solutions and only consult government where they can't work things out on their own.

E.g. you don't go to court over every dispute you have with everyone. Instead, you work out mutually-agreed-upon solutions wherever possible, seek third-party advice to help where you can't work things out on your own, and only as a last resort go to court.

1 Reply

@livinglava,

Public Health depends on being unified as a society. Public Health officials need to be able to talk to everyone (not just just one side), and they need their message to be respectful to everyone to make their message as broad a possible.

Right now our country is split politically 55% to 45%. If 45% of people think you are aiming your message specifically against them (rather than giving a broad message for the good of all Americans)... you are failing.

I think the partisan bickering should stop (at least when it comes to coronavirus response).

1 Reply

@maxdancona,

maxdancona-

Excellent point

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@maxdancona,

maxdancona wrote:

Public Health depends on being unified as a society. Public Health officials need to be able to talk to everyone (not just just one side), and they need their message to be respectful to everyone to make their message as broad a possible.

Right now our country is split politically 55% to 45%. If 45% of people think you are aiming your message specifically against them (rather than giving a broad message for the good of all Americans)... you are failing.

I think the partisan bickering should stop (at least when it comes to coronavirus response).

You say things like this when you're wanting to lord over society with totalitarian control.

There's always going to be conflict of opinion between those who believe that obedience to central authority is necessary for a good society and those who believe that people should be able to responsibly govern themselves with their own authority.

In reality, neither actually happens or works. If central authority attempts to subjugate everyone, they defy authority. If self-governance by liberty is trusted as a mechanism for effective decentralized control, the people fail to use their liberty responsibly and problems come about that way.

We can try to reduce the transmission of the virus and succeed to a great extent, but there is not going to be perfection. Nevertheless, the impossibility of achieving perfection is no reason to give up on trying to curtail the spread of the virus.

If I know you, you just want chaos to happen so everyone who's going to get the virus and die does so you can go out dancing again. You care more about your own lust for social/sexual contact than you do about all the people who are going to die when they contract the virus.

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Optimal Strategy for Coronavirus

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