That's why I think testing at the door is the more straightforward way to start. We can reopen factories, office buildings, even shopping malls, but no one gets in without passing the screen.
This test takes 10 minutes. That is probably still too long to implement at the doors for most places. It will end up creating a bottleneck of people waiting to enter the building and another avenue to spread the virus. Making the inside of the mall safe from the virus isn't going to matter if everyone is exposed to the virus while waiting in the 30 minute line to get into the mall.
The article is suggesting daily testing and used "testing at the door" as an example.
Wouldn't it stand to reason that you could be tested once per day, in the parking lot to a mall or some other shopping establishment, and thereafter _verify_ that you had been tested that day for the remainder of your commercial transactions?
Thinking in those terms, 10 minutes per day is not so great of an imposition. We could formalize it and create drive-through test centers where you drive up, spit into the tube, have a bar code on your phone scanned, and drive off. On your way to the mall you get a text message with your results. Everywhere else you visit that day scans your phone upon entry and confirms that you've been tested.
You can't just ignore people who don't travel by car. The hardest hit place in the country in New York City. Most New Yorkers don't own cars and many go months at a time without entering one. And even outside of cities, it is still classist to only allow people with cars to reenter society.
The system also becomes much more complex and requires a bigger infrastructure if you aren't literally testing people at the door. How do you verify someone has had a test today? In your bar code idea, can the bar code be faked? Is there some centralized database behind the system that tracks who tests positive? Is that database politically feasible? Some comments here are already objecting to that idea.
A solution that works outside of the vicinity of New York, would still allow at least 47 other states to open up.
As for checking who has a test, simply give colored stickers. If someone wants to “beat” the system, so be it. Social disapproval and common sense will keep most people honest.
New York City isn't the only place in which car ownership is low. What about Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, DC, etc? If your plan for reopening the nation doesn't include reopening our cities, it isn't a real plan for reopening the nation.
You need a plan for people who want to beat the system because they present a huge danger. The whole idea behind this system is to allow the people inside the secured bubble to return to normal behavior. They aren't going to be wearing masks, social distancing, or taking other precautionary measures. Therefore one person acting inappropriately could present a huge problem for the people on the inside. Keep in mind there are still people who think this entire thing is a conspiracy and that COVID-19 is no worse than the flu. You have to consider what happens with people like that who might not participate in this system in good faith.
I wouldn’t plan on reopening the nation, since it was never closed from the top down to begin with. Individual states, and in many cases cities and counties, made the decision and continue even now to enforce rules different from one another.
Hawaii is an island, thousands of miles away from the rest of the USA, so why shouldn’t it open on a different schedule?
Even China, ground zero for the crisis, close and reopened different providences, districts, and even neighborhoods independently.
You could probably use an app or just get their mobile phone number. It seems likely to me based on reading a lot of case studies that this virus is largely spread through talking, yelling, and singing. If we tell people not to talk for 10 minutes while they wait for their result, it could work if you could get people to comply.
But that just moves the compliance and logistics problem back one step. Who's doing this massive amount of testing? If it's the government, you'd need armies of workers spread out everywhere. If it's the owners of these buildings, who checks to ensure compliance?
Imagine trying to enforce this on every non-residential building in, say, NYC. It would be practically impossible.
> If it's the owners of these buildings, who checks to ensure compliance?
Who checks to make sure every restaurant follows the standards of cleanliness? They have inspectors who (theoretically) show up randomly, so it ensures most places comply voluntarily, because the cost of getting caught is very high.
A combination of random inspections and steep fines would solve the compliance problem.
Edit: I just had another idea. Offer cash rewards to people who can prove they they weren't tested when entering a public place (which the business pays for via fines). You'd have people running around trying to find missed testing for the cash reward.
To your point, many businesses and facilities implement safety measures because they fear civil liability for preventable damages. I don’t think that’s likely in this case but if you can get most businesses and facilities to be mostly compliant most of the time, that might be enough.
There are many that are. Don't people get rewards for reporting malfeasance to the SEC, or ADA violations? I'm sure I've read about that, as well as about how some people think it's a questionable system. But privatization of enforcement of some regulations is a thing.
It doesn’t need perfect compliance to push down the R0 significantly. Lockdowns in the US are mostly not being strictly enforced, but enough people are complying to have a major impact.
I think economic incentives are also fairly well aligned here. If tests are widespread, a significant segment of the market is likely to prefer locations that are testing to those that don’t, just like the market tends to prefer clean restaurants to unsanitary ones.
Now imagine going out shopping, you’re stopped at the door, and you test positive. What happens then? The government puts you in a car and sends you... back to your apartment? Sounds like a dystopian nightmare, to be honest.
we're in the middle of a pandemic. at some point you've got to accept that dystopia is here, and the dystopian things that are happening are realistic ways of dealing with the situtuation.
you can't reject solutions because they sound dystopian unless you've got better, non-dystopian solutions. and everybody has to stay in their homes at all times and all non-essential services are shut down is not a less dystopian solution.
Fair enough. But I hope that line of reasoning has limits. After all, it would be safer to send everyone by truck to a quarantine camp instead of back to their apartment where they might infect their neighbors in the lobby, wouldn’t it?
That's been proposed
in the northeast US (MA, NY, NJ, CT, RI). Hotels would be used for mandatory quarantine. Tests and contact tracing (manually, then smartphone) would determine who gets isolated.
The flu comes every year, and it’s not even a order of magnitude less fatal. Maybe COVID will come back every year too.
What “solution” are you looking for to solve this relatively small share of “death from natural causes” that we call COVID? How much damage should we inflict upon ourselves in this moral quandary?
How many people should die because we’re willing to spend trillions of dollars due to our innate fear of a virus rather than our innate fear of much much bigger problems, like poverty or starvation?
Why can we muster so much energy in this case, and so little on much bigger problems? My theory is that you can’t catch hunger on the subway, you can’t catch underprivilege from a doorknob, and you can’t catch climate change from shaking hands with constituents.
There’s a lot wrong with our planet, it’s too bad we’ll all go bankrupt and unemployed chasing such a trifling disease as COVID when there were actual real problems we could have solved with mountains of cash that large, rather that burning the cash in effigy for modest to no effect once COVID has run its course.
Can you please stop posting in the flamewar style to HN? This sort of rhetoric and polemic destroys curious conversation, which is what the site exists for.
It seemed in-kind with the “dystopia is here” rhetoric, but I understand answering in the same vein doesn’t make things better.
If I could still edit the comment, I would replace the first “you” with “we”, as none of the comment is meant to be directed personally at OP.
The dystopia we have is purely one of our own creation. One which TFA seems to not only welcome with open arms, but seeks to capitalize upon. It’s really quite sad.
I'm weirded out by this binary thinking arguing against masks or testing. It's like the people who say that helmets don't prevent all injuries, which they conclude means one shouldn't be wearing one. Except that where helmets are only individual protection, measures against infection are affective at a population level, where you profit from others' actions.
Not only you, but everyone who was recently within six feet of you as determined by contact tracing (manual now, bluetooth later). If you don't live alone, you go to a mandatory isolation center, possibly a designated hotel. Kids can be separated from parents.
The cheap flight was what made this epidemic a pandemic.
We can continue lockdown until everyone who has got it has recovered and is no longer infected. This is a matter of weeks and we are mostly there.
Once we get to no new cases per week for a couple of weeks then we can end the lockdown and get on with our lives.
To prevent reinfection then anyone that flies in gets quarantined unless they come from a plague free country. The same applies to other border crossings, e.g. ferries and roads.
This approach works with rabies in the UK and with other historical plagues. No widespread daily testing is needed this way just the health service testing we have now.
This approach is the only realistic option using what we can do now. However there is little talk of quarantine being used for those that fly. Quarantine means forty days.
Paul, I posted this is part of another comment also, but for places like shopping malls, testers could also test people while they're in the parking lot.
No lines to spread the disease, and better throughput if you're testing many cars simultaneously rather than whoever is at the front of the line. (Although I suppose many people could be tested near the front of the line too.)
Frankly this is the idea that a software guy comes up with. It’s like you translated the idea of checking every API request for malicious payload to a real-world situation and left out the 99.997% of the parts that make the problem hard. It’s like assuming the existence of a teleporter.
What door? You mean my front door? I'm not letting anyone in, and I'm not leaving either. What are you going to do, call the cops to kick in the doors to test me?