[jonrimmer]

In this event, the solution will be the creation of a permanent, South Korea and China inspired infrastructure for testing, tracking and constraining infectious citizens by all developed countries. Regardless of the privacy and civil liberty concerns, I think that's where we'll eventually end up, and to your children it will one day seem crazy that a person with an infectious illness was once able to freely walk the streets.

[londons_explore]

Imagine a future where you do a swab test every morning while brushing your teeth. If you had any of thousands of infectious diseases, you're required to stay home. The test would take only 5 minutes, and you get fined if you don't do it, and receive sick pay if you test positive.

I imagine that within a few years of rolling this out, common colds might be a thing of the past, and overall worker productivity higher rather than lower.

[keiferski]

Imagine a future where you do a swab every morning while brushing your teeth and your testosterone and adrenaline levels are evaluated for likelihood of engaging in Anti-Social or Anti-Authority Activity. Individuals with high levels are locked into their apartments and subject to online training courses. Repeated violations result in a visit from the authorities.

Yeah, no thanks. Not every solution to a serious problem needs to be some surveillance state dystopian nightmare.

[lifeisstillgood]

But it needs to be based on good science. As someone in thread said, the false positive rate needs to be staggeringly low. And the false positive for Testosterone -> AntiSocial behaviour is huge - marathon runners to entrepreneurs and weight lifters.

So the idea is good - test people for something bad they will do - but the ability to test reliably for all the bad things is real low. I think we shall just stick to past crime not FutureCrime for now.

And honestly, using "bad authoritarian governments do bad things with good tools so we should not use those tools" does not make a good argument. it just means we need to double down on democracy.

[keiferski]

I don't think it is a good idea or good tool at all. I don't need or want some external authority to tell me if I'm allowed to leave my house. I used the example of "Anti Social" behavior as a joke and I thought that was obvious...but apparently not. The idea is entirely antithetical to a free society.

As someone indicated in another comment, the proper way to do this is through personalized incentives and social encouragement, not through authoritarian state action.

[scotty79]

> I don't need or want some external authority to tell me if I'm allowed to leave my house.

In a world full of Covid19 mutations, some even more lethal than the current one you actually might need external authority to tell you if you can leave the house because you yourself will lack technology to asses the risks involved and your decision making even if you have the information might be very dangerous to other peoples freedoms.

You still might not want that because people's wants are not necessarily reasonable.

[keiferski]

As I said in the original comment:

> Not every solution to a serious problem needs to be some surveillance state dystopian nightmare.

The authoritarian response of shutting everything down, locking people in their homes and instituting all-but-in-name-martial law seems like a massive lack of creativity to me. Plagues are not a new phenomenon. We can come up with better solutions - as Taiwan and Singapore seem to be doing. Throwing away the rights and benefits of a free society should be the last solution.

[Sammi]

There are already a bunch of things you are not allowed to do in a free and democratic society if it is unsafe for other people if you do it.

If there exists a home test that can test you for dangerous infectious diseases, and you are forced to take that in the morning before you go out, then this is comparable to not being allowed to drive while under the influence.

[pishpash]

Sure, but what do you have against a personal in-home test? The information should be available at least to the individual.

[keiferski]

Nothing, as long as it functions more like a pregnancy test and not something that is sending personal data to a corporation/government somewhere.

However, that wasn't the primary idea in the OP, which was specifically about tracking and restricting people based on their test results.

[Dylan16807]

I'm not sure why you invented your own scenario to call bad.

Checking if someone has the flu isn't dystopian. Full sick pay isn't dystopian. You don't even need the fine if that offends you so much.

[Taek]

Open source toothbrush that's not connected to the cloud.

[titzer]

> Not every solution to a serious problem needs to be some surveillance state dystopian nightmare.

I agree. The internet doesn't need to be a surveillance state dystopian nightmare, but the free market brought us that.

[kijin]

Here's a less dystopian variation of your idea.

Everyone has access to those swabs, either for free, included with their health insurance plan, or at a marginal cost. It's not mandatory to use it every day, but there are incentives such as automatic sick pay and discounts on health insurance. On the other hand, there will be serious legal consequences if you test positive, decide to go to work anyway, and end up infecting other people. If it was your employer who told you to come in, your employer bears those consequences instead.

Money speaks louder than common sense. One of the reasons law exists is to tweak the incentive structure so that they align better with common sense.

[scotty79]

I think a lot of people would opt in to this testing just to get a chance of paid free day.

[mxcrossb]

You’d have to have a staggeringly low false positive rate to be able to do this, because you’d basically have no prior, and you’re testing for multiple things.

[londons_explore]

If a false positive results in someone staying home and getting paid, one can easily work out the economic cost of that. Then it becomes a simple economics problem - how much should the government spend on improving the test to regain a bit of productivity.

A false negative (someone going about their day despite being infectious) is just the status quo, and has served us well for centuries.

[sokoloff]

I would expect a gaming system to emerge (to force positive test results when people wanted time off without suffering any consequences). Done well, that might be the most valuable purely wasteful invention ever created.

[lolc]

Where I live, it's common for people to just call in and stay home for the day when they are sick. They don't need to game a device or convince a doctor. There is some trust. Maybe this could be tried elswhere?

[sokoloff]

When the money comes from the employer, there is incentive to root out and eliminate significant fraud. When the money comes from the sky/government, there is much less.

We have a nice wooden fence that was (properly) built around/over the roots of a city-owner tree. The city later removed the tree and the fence now looked dumb where it had been trimmed around the roots. A neighbor stopped by and advised me that I should call the city and have them pay to replace that section of fence. Said it shouldn’t be my responsibility to pay for it. I asked her if she thought it was her responsibility to pay for it. “Of course not; that’s ridiculous!” “Well, that’s why I’m not asking the city to pay for it...”

[lenkite]

Imagine a future in which employers can also gain history to such health data and ensure jobs are given to the people of superior health. Such means will be necessary for economic health and progress of human civilisation. Marriage prospects, political and administration posts, etc can all leverage advantage from such a better policy.

[discodave]

Sounds like Gattica :)

[pas]

GATTACA. :)

Easy to remember that there's no I in it, because the letters are the letters used in our DNA. (guanine, adenine, thymine, and cytosine)

[discodave]

In my head I had the right spelling! Somehow it didn't make it out.

[kijin]

Not even the strongest proponent of civil liberty would allow a person to walk down the street shooting bullets in every direction. It's not hard to imagine that spewing viruses all over the place will be treated just the same in a society with knowledge of modern epidemiology. Your rights ends where they begin to impinge on those of others.

We do need a better standard of privacy, though, than what South Korea is currently offering to the unfortunate souls who are infected. The tracking data is supposedly anonymized, but nobody gives any thought to the fact that anonymized data from multiple sources can be easily combined to de-anonymize them.

[nickysielicki]

No way. You’re not giving Americans enough credit.

[titzer]

> I think that's where we'll eventually end up,

Until the first economic downturn, when the ruling party throws it all out the window, cuts taxes, and cuts interest rates. And the rich people will eat it up.

[ekianjo]

> tracking and constraining infectious citizens by all developed countries.

That would be ridiculous if you get to millions of people infected, because that would effectively destroy all economic activity. Even during the 1918-1919 epidemic with high mortality rates people did not stop going to work. Our strategy to isolate ourselves is fine if it's short term but it can't continue more than a few months.

[jonrimmer]

Tracking and testing doesn't destroy economic activity. Complete lock-downs, as we're seeing in China, Italy, Spain and soon elsewhere do. But it does let you get a grip on the situation when you have millions infected.

However you're right that you can't maintain that long term, so what's the off-ramp? South Korea has proved you can do mass testing and tracking which, combined with voluntary and state-enforced control of movement, lets you keep infections at a low level. What I'm contending is that, if the situation is bad enough, all countries that can will implement similar controls, and those controls will a permanent situation, not a temporary one. People will still be able to go to work, just not if they're potentially sick or infectious.

[andybak]

Just to counter the impression that the whole of China is in lockdown: https://twitter.com/DanielFalush/status/1239049733974433798

You can still go clubbing in Shanghai with certain restrictions.

[kijin]

South Korea has also shown that restrictions on movement don't need to be particularly draconian. The subway in Seoul is still packed with people every day, but I haven't heard of any mass infection related to the subway. Everyone cleans their hands and wears face masks, so it's okay to be out and about. Oh, and there's a clean bathroom in every subway station.

[davidgould]

> Oh, and there's a clean bathroom in every subway station.

So this will never work in the United States.

Snark aside, every time I ride a BART elevator with a pool of piss on the floor I wonder about this country. Somehow the idea of someone peeing without paying is so offensive that we would rather stand in piss than provide public facilities.

[londons_explore]

If you can make it fine grained enough so people are only isolated for a few days around their personal most infectious time, productivity losses would be minimal.

The productivity loss only happens when testing is inaccurate and entire communities are told to stay home for months just because it's hard to identify exactly who is coughing out germs each day.

[vladvasiliu]

As a sibling said, this is already where we are in Europe.

But if we had a system such as this, we could have prevented the first patients from spreading it around, and so we wouldn't have had to have millions of people stay at home.