Fauci says 'rolling reentry' of US economy possible in May

[Igel]

12. This was something really explicit at the beginning of the whole "lockdown" business.

Whenever restrictions ease, Fauci said, “we know that there will be people who will be getting infected. I mean, that is just reality. “

Flattening the curve wasn't to stop transmission, it was to slow it so that it didn't overwhelm hospitals. That was shouted from every tv and radio. It's not a new thing.


The other seriously important reason to slow it was to tamp down the infection, but a lot of people can't accept having two reasons for a single thing, so you keep it simple. It's nonetheless true that you can't contact trace under current conditions. You have to have staff to talk to the sick person, and send staff out to those locations for the people that are always there (stores, for instance) or test family and those the person interacted with.

You have to do this for a very high percentage of those infected.

You have to have someplace to quarantine those who are infected, and isolate those who *might* be infected but wouldn't show it yet or ever.

Then, for those who test positive at the time and are shedding virus, you contact trace *them*.

You have 300k people infected, you need to have millions of trained public health workers *just* for contact tracing.

We need the numbers down. And we need facilities freed up for isolating the infected but not severely sick.

If it turns out antibodies produced block the virus, then maybe we can have serological testing in place to identify some portion of the population as immune and not in need of being PCR tested. Until there's a vaccine.

If the antibodies produced don't block the virus, we're in a world of hurt and have to hope that it eventually mutates or repeated infections produce immunity.

Or there's the long view. One line of research suggests that a mutation in the human gene controlling part of the immune response is responsible for a portion of the severe COVID-19 cases. Over time that mutation would be driven to extinction. That would reduce the average severity of the disease. (It's a coldly harsh view, but there you go. Nature's got no compassion.)