On: COVID-19
Episode: N/A
Date: May 15 2020
Background: Economist.
Key Subjects:
- Finding a sustainable, less costly strategy to reduce virus transmission.
- Suppression: lock-down is very costly (economic costs not sustainable).
- Mitigation: transmission is very slow (> 1 year for the virus to spread through population).
- Long-term high level of costs can undermine democratic system, rule of law.
- Immediate fiscal costs, reduced economic activity, mental burden, hardship.
- Alternative reasonably low-cost strategy: wide-spread testing.
- Better information -> better behavior (no infection: work, infection: isolation).
- Incentivize: production, testing and post-test behavior (rewards, lotteries, etc.)
- Testing infrastructure to provide protection from future viruses as well.
- Issues: reliability of tests, supply chain, chain of custody, scaling up, frequency of testing.
- Most people (not all) will do the right thing.
- If you just let people know information, they generally will do things and it turns out okay.
- Don’t rush vaccination.
- If it doesn’t go well, risk losing consensus on other mandatory vaccinations.