As much as I come to you and your company as subject matter experts for automotive advice, I will continue to go to the WHO and CDC and other subject matter experts for how to navigate a pandemic and how much reopening we can handle without stacking dead bodies on the sidewalks outside of hospitals. I may not like their solution, but I will follow it until such time as there's a better one, and no such thing is on offer in this thread.
The reopening plan offered by Pennsylvania is at least a start upon which further discussion can be based. You want to propose scaling the numbers up or down, do so. Complaining about "tyranny" isn't a plan, and it isn't even tyranny.
You have more faith in those agencies than I do. I lost mine over the last 6 years seeing how they (specifically the WHO and the CDC, but also the FDA and various state health agencies) have utterly mis-handled tobacco harm reduction, and I'm being quite reserved in my wording here.
There are a half dozen states and an entire first world country that did not impose draconian lock-downs. Can you show us the dead bodies stacked outside their hospitals? Can you even show us a significantly higher transmission or fatality rate in those places?
The problem with PA's plan is that it sets benchmarks that likely aren't achievable in sort of reasonable time-frame, nor is achieving them necessary in order to prevent overloading the hospitals.
But if you'd like a different plan, here's
one.
All this will be done bearing in mind the well-understood facts about how it spreads, that it can be spread by asymptomatic carriers, the latency period, and that hospital admissions are a dramatically lagging factor in measuring the spread, and by the time hospitals are even half-full, it means you're screwed in another two or three weeks.
Except the transmission rate had already rolled over before the lock-downs were imposed. In other words, voluntary measures were sufficient. I understand that this was not yet apparent at the time that the lock-downs were imposed, but it is now. Unfortunately, those who imposed them are now unwilling to admit they were wrong; that this level of restriction on people's lives simply wasn't necessary.
Primarily is a long way from exclusively, as more than a few healthcare workers crushed with guilt after they brought it home to their spouses or children, even infants could tell you, a few of whom have died, but let's accept that for the moment. Naturally there will have to be a risk/reward tradeoff somewhere. You can't close the nation to save one life. But let's make it easier.
Of course it's not exclusively, but the number of deaths under age 45 are for all intents and purposes negligible, and those over the age of 75 out-number all the rest.
Oh and thank you for pointing out one of the main vectors of community transmission: Health care workers. This should have been obvious since the nursing home in Kirkland, but somehow we did nothing about it.
Can we agree that the total death toll of 3,000 (rounded up) of the September 11th attacks was a truly grave and serious event worthy of a national response to prevent it from happening again?
A grave and serious event? Absolutely, as is this pandemic. But we over-reacted to both of them. The reaction to 9/11 gave us a surveillance state, the utterly useless TSA, and endless wars that cost trillions of dollars. The reactions to this pandemic are even more egregious, and just like then, people are willing to accept them, to trade their liberty and privacy for a false sense of security.
