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Comment by adrr | Hacker News Reader

You can start opening things up, it doesn't mean people will go out to eat, get haircuts, visit movie theaters, workout at a gym or travel. As long as the virus is out there and actively spreading, people will voluntarily shelter. Businesses will still go bankrupt as most retail stores and restaurants run at around breakeven in net income. Also there is the liability issue. If we want to get back to normal getting community spread to 0 should be the goal and we need to keep everything locked down to achieve that.

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Is community spread of zero a worthwhile goal? SF still has thousands of people (maybe tens of thousands) coming in and out of the city every day to deliver things, see family, return home, etc. As long as this is still happening (there is no way for SF to prevent this) what is the point of fixating on zero new cases.

Consider two cases:

- On May 15 SF has had no new cases since May 1st. It decides to reopen.

- On May 15 SF has had 150 new cases (ten a day) since May 1st. It decides to reopen.

By June 15th, is the total number of cases any different under these scenarios? In either case, has the city been able to function without having to reclose?

I'm not sure the answer to these - but my instinct is that the situations would be virtually the same.

Community spread of zero is not the goal. The goal is to get the transmission rate below 1. A transmission rate of 1 means no average 1 person infects 1 other person. You need a transmission rate below 1 to start reducing the rate of new infections. Above 1, you have exponential growth. Right now we are hovering around 0.9. To reopen we need a rate of about 0.75. For comparison the lockdowns in Wuhan achieved a rate of 0.3.

Wuhan is a good example why community spread of near 0 is the primary goal. The restaurants have opened but are struggling because people are still afraid of getting sick and have changed their behavior.

White collar jobs will keep telecommuting if there’s a risk of community spread. No hr/leg department wants the liability. The secondary effects are decrease in demand on automobile related businesses like gas stations, servicing. Also decrease in car sales. Also the company ban on business travel which hits airlines, hotels, conferences etc.

I don't follow the example. If people in Wuhan are still avoiding restaurants, it can't be because they haven't reduced community spread enough - the city's reported no new cases for weeks.

It's because people are afraid. Fear is not perfectly rational.

That's my point. Wuhan demonstrates that reducing community spread to 0 has nothing to do with restoring confidence or reducing fear. In a year, I expect the regions aiming for 0 community spread will still be devastated, because they've taught their populace that the coronavirus is the worst thing ever and they must be constantly scared of it.

>> If we want to get back to normal getting community spread to 0 should be the goal and we need to keep everything locked down to achieve that.

Do you know what that will cost both in an acute USD fashion as well as the geopolitical and economic chronic fashion? I'm legitimately interested if you've thought through the externalities of this plan.

Economy will crash even if we open up and 50% of the population can’t participate due to age or having condition like obesity, diabetes or hypertension. People will continue to voluntarily shelter. Only way out of this getting Is community spread to near normal so we whole society can participate. Other countries have achieved this and will dominate economically. We are going to have food shortages because of our lack effort to control the virus.

I have seen many arguments with this same problem:

>Economy will crash even if we open up

This invites us to think of economic crashes as a do-or-don't function. This oversimplifies, and prevents us from thinking through the various degrees of "opening up" we might attempt, and the various kinds of economic harm we will suffer in different scenarios.

>People will continue to voluntarily shelter.

Some people will. Some people already were, for other medical reasons. The question is how many, and how much of an impact this will have (both in terms of controlling the disease spread, and harming people's physical health, emotional health, financial health).

That is ridiculous and impossible. Don't kid yourself thinking that it will go away. It's not going to happen.

Other countries have achieved it. Why can’t the US do it?

Which ones, other than SK the other good example (japan, china, singapore) all turned out to not be testing.

Australia, New Zealand and Taiwan.

Well, not completely eliminated, but it will be eliminated soon enough based on current trends.

Interestingly, all island nations.

Vietnam. Contacts put in hard quarantine (hotel/camp with guards), _contacts of contacts_ put in home quarantine.

Weird. I've never went to a camp or hotel with gaurds before.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/27/asia/new-zealand-elimination-...

Iceland and Taiwan as well.

"getting community spread to 0 should be the goal "

That is no one's goal at this point. To imagine it is would be to completely misunderstand this pandemic and how it is being addressed. The one and only goal is to reduce the rate of the spread, and it has seemingly worked very well.

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