This has been obvious for months -- Romer has been yelling from the rooftops about it -- and yet no major western govt save the Brits have attempted to even try this strategy. Madness.
The per-capita death rate in the UK is one of the worst in the world for this pandemic, and it's higher than the USA's. And they are now into a second lockdown. Whatever their strategy is, it's not working well at all.
It has been effectively eliminated in both Australia and NZ this way. And the impact to the economy is significant but it's turning out to be far less severe than the rest of the world and their on/off again strategy.
This is anything but simple. Vast majority of businesses and people will not be supported if indefinite lockdown continues. The hidden costs of bankrolling an entire country for an indefinite period is much greater than the cost to deploy a persistent, scalable testing framework. The latter is also an investment into the future as this will not be the last pandemic.
Again this isn't some hypothetical exercise. Australia and NZ have just done this and now have basically eliminated COVID-19.
As opposed to manufacturing and distributing 100s of millions of tests each week which is very much an unproven exercise.
And you can fund it exactly the same way you did for the GFC (print money) or WW2 (war bonds).
But compare it to the cost of the US bouncing in/out of lockdowns for the next 9-12 months.
The problem in the US is that you cant pay people enough to change their minds about the politics. They would be, and many in fact are, millionaires and they would still refuse the test. Even if it meant jail time.
These solutions simply don't work in America.
it's not indefinite - it's just long enough to cut down unknown transmission to a managable number for contact tracing to kick in. Then public health measures like masking up and distancing is effective enough afterwards.
Businesses cannot stand uncertainty - a on-off lockdown that they cannot predict is the worst, because they cannot make investment decisions with this sort of huge uncertainty.
Not exactly an order of magnitude difference in population but yet there is a massive difference in the strategies and polices they've deployed. And now UK is a complete mess heading into winter and Australia has effective elimination.
Of course it might help that Australia is actually heading into summer.
Also in many places in Australia it was eliminated well before winter.
From tomorrow we no longer have to wear masks outside unless it gets crowded such that you cannot maintain physical distancing!
If the US or UK wants to, they can certainly make the same sort of lockdown. There are costs to it, but the leadership being incompetent at actually leading, is a bigger roadblock over the cost.
The UK is doing about as well as similarly populous countries nearby. Which is to say, not well at all.