March 21: More on "flattening the curve"

I'd like to add a few points to my "what happens after we flatten the curve" post (I actually try to keep my posts reasonably short). Wuhan is already there and from Italian news I see that they are already slowly opening up the economy, but it's not yet clear to me what restrictions are still in place. One extremely important advantage of a return to 0 or very few cases is that "contact tracing" becomes possible again. That means that we can go back to quarantining a few infected and carriers as opposed to the entire population, which is essentially what's happening now. My understanding is that the Chinese have been very aggressive with that. We can certainly learn... and hopefully by the time we get to that point there will be enough tests around to be able to do the contact tracing we failed to do the first time around. A Chinese delegation is now in Italy "scolding" the Italian government for not being tough enough... The question is whether a western democracy steeped in a culture of personal freedom, like in Europe and here, can accept all the measures they implemented in China.... even at the cost of more lives lost. We'll see. I will have a deep insight in how Italy will handle this, when they finally get to that point (or even now, if they decide that what they are doing is not enough to get there). We here are much more similar to Italy than China. One thing I think is sure: it will be a long term game, but if we buy time, the medical system will be better equipped to cope with emergencies and new effective drugs will hopefully become available, overall decreasing the death rate. How much of our "previous life" we'll be able get back to and how soon, remains an open question. The final real "back to normal" solution will be when we either have a vaccine or most of the population will have become infected (and have recovered.... or died). if we are really lucky this virus will be seasonal, giving us a good chunk of time to catch up, but I have not yet seen any indication of this.

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