Maggie's Farm

We now know, with certainty, that we must reopen the economy.

Simply put while the various "lockdown" policies have produced a monstrous reduction in economic activity and likely removed an average of 90% or more of interpersonal contacts from the potential transmission space it's not going to do the job.

It has produced change. It has dropped R0 to about 1.5-1.6, more or less. Interestingly enough it dropped it to there irrespective of where you started from; CA never was materially above 2.0, NY nearly touched 3.0, and the national average was right near 2.5. Some of this may be due to testing suppression (if you change testing criteria it looks like your R0 moved when it didn't) but some is also likely due to population density and public transportation networks. It's also likely some is due to environmental factors (e.g. climate), although that's unproved. Not that the reason matters, when you get down to it.

But we all, irrespective of the approach, wind up in the same place, incidentally, where Sweden is and has been despite not forcibly locking down their economy -- that is, urging rather than ordering people to comply.

Materially more than another half-point of R0 reduction, which is what you'd need to drop it under 1.0, isn't going to happen. It's just not. Yet that's what has to happen in order to actually have cases decrease. That, or herd immunity has to be reached, which for a 1.5 R0 is about 33% of the population.

Unfortunately as soon as you release the constraints, even if you wait in lockdown until you reach 33% which would take about 8-9 months at R0 = 1.5, which we could not maintain without destroying the entire economy of the United States and likely the government as well you're back to needing 66% immunity and the geometric detonation you feared happens anyway.

. . . We now know that the health care system is spreading this virus and is a major vector source. Italy has admitted it.

. . . In addition half of all people with the virus have no symptoms at all and thus no way to know they were infected and potentially spreading it. Contact tracing is worthless with a virus that behaves this way because if I'm symptomatic, gave it to two people who you can trace but one of them gave it to someone else and both of them are asymptomatic, a 25% chance, there is no way to know who the second person is. This will happen often enough that even extremely aggressive and intrusive measures will not succeed.

Further, I am convinced that spread by health-care workers, including those who never become symptomatic, is where the detonations are coming from -- and there are a few "very light" areas right now where I've had such reports that I predict in 7-10 days have a high risk of exploding. If any of them do it will prove beyond any reasonable doubt that the health care systems are spreading this bug back into the community on a geometric basis.