US is currently spending 1 MILLION dollars to prevent 1 Coronavirus death! (Patreon)

Sometimes its really REALLY hard to watch these car wrecks in slow motion. The simple reality is the coronavirus is just as contagious as it was when it was first discovered, and maybe only a few percent of Americans have actually had the virus. This means the hazard of the virus spreading through the whole population is largely unchanged. How can you then talk of reopening the country as if nothing had happened?  

The wild spread rate of the virus doubles about every 3 days. In about 2 weeks it will have increased by at least a factor of 10. Spending trillions of dollars merely to reduce the numbers of new daily infected from tens of thousands to thousands is pointless when if you reopen you lose all those gains in about 2 weeks. 

There are limited tools to fight a virus. An vaccine would be nice, but wont realistically be available for another year. Quarantine works, but cripples the country if you do it for too long. The only remaining tool is aggressive virus testing and tracking and tracing virus cases. Every country should be pouring resources into creating this infrastructure. In the US however there seems to be the most tepid interest in creating such systems.

Quarantine is only worth the price if you have a game plan afterwards. If you have no plan for afterwards, you paid a massive amount of money for merely a 1 month pause in the spread of the virus.

Stay safe!!

Phil