[ed. I'm cutting to the chase here and just posting the author's conclusions (you can read the whole article at the link). If you're unaquainted with Rationalist thinking, I urge you to check out LessWrong. It's not easy reading. And if you decide it's not for you, that's ok too.]
Over time, people get better at reducing risk while not sacrificing too much to do so. Masks get worn and improved in type and quality, delivery services scale, people stop acting like 6.1 feet is safe and 5.9 feet will kill you (seriously, this one stings every time), companies implement temperature checks and new workplace designs, the people who aren’t with the program learn the program, and so on. Testing will expand eventually, including by corporations supplying for their employees. People who are immune are placed in exposed positions increasingly with antibody testing, and even those without testing in those positions have mostly been infected anyway at this point if they have been unable to take good precautions.
There is pushing back from people sick of distancing and who need to go work and earn a living, but they mostly do so in sensible ways. There’s some risk of crazy town if things are handled badly. So far only Michigan and Ohio show signs of it I’ve heard about, which is likely because Ohio reacted so well that people don’t get why they had to, and Michigan reacted poorly and people are mad about the implementation details being terrible.
Some areas are not set up to handle things well. In those areas, things get briefly bad, but they also burn out relatively quickly. Can’t handle it translates into particular groups being unable to handle things or choosing not to, so those groups burn through infections until they’re handling it.
I do think that there’s a lot of slack for private agents to step up and help a lot more, but it’s currently illegal to do so. When there is need of it, it will happen. Corporations and individual people have come out of all this looking really good.
Trump will continue to do his best to screw things up, and it will continue to screw things up, but I expect this to not be in ways that matter that much in the big picture. The real damage done was already done early on. He’s done an admirable job of not trying to actually do things, except for some banditry and piracy involving medical equipment. Could have been a lot worse. He briefly flirted with saying he had absolute authority, but backed down as is his pattern before we started once again saying “The United States are” and I don’t expect him to try again in a serious way.
We “reopen” the country in places in mid-May and others in June or July, but that doesn’t mean open. It means people are free to do what they want. Schools mostly or entirely won’t reopen this semester, so places that ‘open’ will still be largely closed slash in the new normal as we adjust. Mostly things shut down because private citizens and corporations shut them down, and they’ll reopen the same way. If Cuomo “reopened” New York I doubt much of anything would actually change the next few weeks.
Likely by end of year we’ve found a treatment protocol that makes this all a lot less deadly. I’m guessing combining the stuff we’ve already found that works and tossing the parts that doesn’t would do a lot.
The supply chain looks like it’s straining in places, and needs deregulation of the food supply so people can pivot to residential provision faster. My guess is things get somewhat worse for a bit, then this is allowed to happen slash people find workarounds as some restaurants become de facto grocery stores. When it gets bad we’ll figure it out quickly.
Eventually there’s a vaccine and it all finally ends.
What would I bet on right now, as one commentator asked? I don’t really want to bet on such matters, especially I don’t feel good about betting on more people dying. But certainly I’d bet against the things I think are essentially can’t happens, given reasonable odds. More detail is needed to know what else I would do; trading is very context dependent.
by Zvi, LessWrong | Read more:
[ed. Also want to link to the original Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team report (pdf) that did so much to finally get governments and politicians to wake up to the severity of the crisis.]
[ed. Also want to link to the original Imperial College COVID-19 Response Team report (pdf) that did so much to finally get governments and politicians to wake up to the severity of the crisis.]
