Archived Facebook Coronavirus Posts: March 18th

[I'm transitioning a bunch of Facebook posts I made on the Coronavirus to my blog.  This was from March 18th]

A lot of people are now asking, what's the end game here? How long is extreme social distancing going to need to be applied?

I think there are two answers here. One would be a *final* answer, and I don't think anyone knows the this yet because we're not sure about how effective our chosen isolation tactics will be yet. But I don't think this means we have to decide, right away, on extreme *and* long term isolation. I believe there are some very concrete goals we can aim for during an *initial* extreme social distancing period. This would give us, not an end game per se, but an end game for the first period of this event, after which we can re-evaluate and adjust. So the following are my suggested goals for the first month of our semi-quarantined life in Europe and the United States.

1. More data. The most up-to-date data and the best analyses of this data has been painting a very grim picture of the upcoming year. However, many people aren't satisfied with this data and disagree with or outright disbelieve the interpretations of this data. But even with rather extreme social isolation for a month, we're going to continue to get a lot more data on the behavior of this virus around the world. I think a month of social isolation will provide the time for a lot more data to roll in. So we can believe the experts for a month and act as if the very dire predictions are correct, but then call for a re-examination of the data at the end of this period.

2. More testing. So far, the best model for reducing spread of covid-19 with the least amount of social and economic impact has been South Korea, and their strategy centers around extremely aggressive testing. The President should use whatever emergency powers are necessary to cut through whatever bureaucratic red tape still exists around getting massive amounts of tests available to the public. Further, we ought to do whatever we can to develop a good *antibody* test, as opposed to the current antigen test. When we are able to support easy testing for whomever wants it, up to a reasonable percentage of the entire population, then we will better equipped to deal with hunting and destroying this infection without needing as extreme an amount of social isolation.

3. A social media app for tracing infections developed by a trusted source. Part of South Korea's strategy is aggressive *tracking* of people, so that when one develops an infection, they can go ahead an warn a bunch of other people who have been in the same area to get tested. This sort of big-brother overseeing isn't likely to fly well in the States, so I think we need an op-in, anonymized version for the liberty lovers of the West. If not an app, then instead we need some other policies to enable us to track and contain the virus in the wild.

4. A lot more ICU resources. We should engage in a WWII, "build an airforce from scratch" style emergency manufacturing campaign to dramatically increase our ICU capacity: buildings (modular structures, temporarily commandeered hotels, etc.), PPE, ventillators, etc. Similarly, we should recruit heavily from the medical field and train up massive amounts of new people in the specific techniques required to care for ARDS while in an infectious environment.

The primary justification for extreme social distancing is that we don't have the ICU capacity to treat all the sick people we expect in a short period of time if this disease acts as expected. So, let's increase that capacity. We need to do that by a rather insane number (maybe 50 times existing capacity?)--but that sounds cheaper to me than shutting down the entire economy for 18 months while we wait for a vaccine. So let's get on this!

5. Research progress on non-vaccine medicines. It will take 12-18 months to develop a vaccine, we're told. However, a standard shortcut to finding working medicines without such a lengthy set of trial periods is to search for existing medications that have already been FDA approved and to see if they have some effectiveness against the disease you are fighting. We already have a number of interesting candidates in various stages of testing, the most interesting one to me being the combination of zinc and chloraquine. There are also some antivirals from the HIV world that might show up.

I don't know if it's reasonable to hope for results on this front in just a month, but whatever we can do to accelerate this process would be great. It's possible we could find a set of medications that have a real impact on the disease severity in just a month.

So those are my ideas. Anyone else have something they'd like to add?