[LiquidSky]

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.

[jedberg]

> 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.

[philwelch]

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.

[Marsymars]

There are many unlawful activities that could be solved with cash rewards for people reporting said activities.

[perl4ever]

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.

[sfkdjf9j3j]

For this to work I think you would need a much stricter compliance than what is enforced in restaurant cleanliness.

[SpicyLemonZest]

It doesn't have to be good enough to catch all cases immediately, just good enough that isolated outbreaks can't sustain themselves.

[danenania]

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.

[chatmasta]

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.

[notatoad]

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.

[chatmasta]

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?

[ceejayoz]

That's actually how China handled it. If you test positive, you don't go home - you go to a facility to be quarantined and treated if necessary.

[walterbell]

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.

[zaroth]

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.

[dang]

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.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[zaroth]

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.

[perl4ever]

There are two things that don't make sense to me about your original post.

One is that cash is not a resource. It's even less of a resource when it's not only not metal, but mostly not paper either.

The other is that the flu comparison doesn't make sense to me on multiple levels. Given deaths from COVID at the moment are nearly ten times flu on an annualized basis, given the partial shutdown, obviously they would be more than ten times without the shutdown...but what is even significant about exactly one order of magnitude?

[philwelch]

The store does not permit you to enter and you are asked to go home and self-quarantine.

[chatmasta]

What if you infect someone on your way back?

[macintux]

You’re still in a much better position than we are today, where you’d infect several people in the store, and again the next day, and the next.

[lolc]

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.

[floatingatoll]

You are handed a free mask that serves as warning people to give you space, and you are simultaneously logged as being infected with the CDC.

[walterbell]

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.

https://www.wbur.org/commonhealth/2020/04/03/contact-tracing...

Now is the time to express opinions on these "proposals"..