Containment has already failed. That's why COVID-19 was declared pandemic.
Governments, and their public health employees in particular, should be switching to management, mitigation, triage, and treatment now. The assumption is that everybody will get it. The goal now is to ensure that a person occupying an ICU beds will be treated and recovered by the time the next patient needs to be admitted into it.
Issuing more extensive travel bans now are driving in the rear-view mirror instead of keeping eyes on the road ahead. It's already here, and spreading in the community.
First priority is viable testing. You can't manage what you can't detect.
Then it's like controlling a nuclear chain reaction with irregularly-shaped fuel in a randomly-configured reactor. You want to eventually consume all the dangerously radioactive fuel, but you don't want a runaway reaction and core meltdown either. So you stick control rods and moderator fluids and neutron reflectors in as needed to control the rate of the reaction, based on your monitoring, and just keep doing it until all the unreacted fuel is gone. And the whole time, people are dropping dead from the radiation. But then the reaction finally burns itself out, and you can breathe easy again, then reflect upon your failures to revise your plans for the next one.
The federal response has already failed. Now is the time for lots of smart people, who can adapt quickly, to implement ad hoc measures at the local level, based on local conditions, and draw on their public health emergency budgets, that hopefully weren't cut or raided already, and their preparedness efforts, that hopefully actually exist.
Governments, and their public health employees in particular, should be switching to management, mitigation, triage, and treatment now. The assumption is that everybody will get it. The goal now is to ensure that a person occupying an ICU beds will be treated and recovered by the time the next patient needs to be admitted into it.
Issuing more extensive travel bans now are driving in the rear-view mirror instead of keeping eyes on the road ahead. It's already here, and spreading in the community.
First priority is viable testing. You can't manage what you can't detect.
Then it's like controlling a nuclear chain reaction with irregularly-shaped fuel in a randomly-configured reactor. You want to eventually consume all the dangerously radioactive fuel, but you don't want a runaway reaction and core meltdown either. So you stick control rods and moderator fluids and neutron reflectors in as needed to control the rate of the reaction, based on your monitoring, and just keep doing it until all the unreacted fuel is gone. And the whole time, people are dropping dead from the radiation. But then the reaction finally burns itself out, and you can breathe easy again, then reflect upon your failures to revise your plans for the next one.
The federal response has already failed. Now is the time for lots of smart people, who can adapt quickly, to implement ad hoc measures at the local level, based on local conditions, and draw on their public health emergency budgets, that hopefully weren't cut or raided already, and their preparedness efforts, that hopefully actually exist.