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Comment by MiguelVieira | Hacker News Reader

It feels like Europe and the US only have a few options:

  * Let the virus run its course and accept a huge death count.
  * Continue the lockdowns for months, strangling the economy.
  * Do what's in this article and allow life and the economy to return to normal.
  * Hope for a miracle.

Am I missing something?

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They could find an effective cure that would make managing the disease a lot easier. We could let the disease spread if we had a reliable way of curing people and reducing the death rate to an acceptable level. After all we don't go on lockdown every year during flu season.

Maybe you put that in the "miracle" bullet point but I think that's a bit pessimistic.

That is firmly in the "miracle" bucket.

I believe the UK just ordered millions of antibody tests, that will tell you if you've previously had the virus. If we can confirm that people who previously had it are immune, we should be able to selectively let those back into normal society a lot faster.

That's my understanding, I may be wrong.

Which creates a two-tier society. Those with antibodies get to go about their business, go out to cafes and pubs, get hired for jobs which antibodyless people can't do.

Those who don't have the antibodies are stuck under house arrest, so decide "ahh screw it, I'm going to go and get infected".

Would you rather keep the immune people at home to satisfy some odd urge of "social justice"?

What next? Juden signs on houses?

Those without antibodies can get plasma with antibodies.

https://www.statnews.com/2020/03/05/how-blood-plasma-from-re...

Does the antibody test even exist yet? I was under the impression it doesn't.

The FDA just approved one, and the company says it will ramp up production fast, but as far as I know it's not available in quantity yet.

https://www.biospace.com/article/releases/20-20-bioresponse-...

The FDA has given states the authority to approve antibody tests on their own.

https://globalbiodefense.com/2020/03/16/fda-pandemic-respons...

They're due to arrive in weeks so I assume they do: https://www.cityam.com/millions-of-coronavirus-antibody-test...

It sounds like the politician hopes the tests are "built" in few weeks but the producer has not them yet and I am not sure they will have in "a few weeks" unless he means months

Well that's great news!

The virus doesn't magically teleport from one person to another. Aerosol infection is still somewhat disputed. If adults washed their hands and stopped putting their hands in their mouth and nose like toddlers, their viral load and resulting infection would be less severe. We will all sooner or later get some copies of COVID-19 in our bodies, make sure it's not too much.

Hopefully the panic measures introduced because people are too dumb to understand basic hygiene will be pulled back soon before the economy blows up and we have much bigger problems than a few 100.000 dead people.

perhaps what you are missing is that even lesser measures could have massive impacts,

- do we need to take the temperature of everyone at each hour? almost certainly not. Should you be reporting in from every location? almost certainly not. Should we be treating each other as bioweapons all in the name of "safety"? absolutely not.

- is it good if mobility is reduced? almost certainly it has a massive effect.

I think the right course of action is to give all these measures some time to work. Let's stop adding yet another measure and keep making the ones that exist better.

Epidemiologists need to chill out a bit and stop treating a society as a mathematical model or molecules bouncing around in a container.

Modeling the spread of a virus is insanely complex and all existing models are certainly flawed one way or the other but doing nothing and just see what happens doesn't seem very rational to me. As more data comes in, models improves and we can adjust the response.

I did not advocate "doing nothing" instead I said let's see what the current measures are doing.

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