New York State yesterday had more than 10 000 cases of COVID 19. The whole of the United States had 20 000.
This is going to be interesting.
The mayor of Austin has issued new rules whereby retailers (with their maximum 10 people limit) as well as essential businesses like supermarkets will have to force social distancing between customers, not just employees. The suggestion is to force people in line to place a full length supermarket cart between themselves and the next person inside and outside the shop. Or have floor markings to instruct people where to stand or walk.
I'm living in a dystopian science fiction novel.
That means that the line of people being "throttled" into the supermarket will get much longer and for the life of me I don't know how you will police people, especially in the poorer more marginalized (ie ghetto) areas of Austin. Placing markers on the pavement and throttling people in and out of the supermarket is fine but ridiculous to implement, and often impossible.
Waiting in line for food in supermarkets for extended periods, right next to people who may be infected works entirely against distancing, and so does travelling by bus or mass transit (in my case 30 minutes per ride in a closed space) . These are the remaining points of infection.This happened all of last week. THIS IS NOT ENOUGH. And the mayor of Austin just realized that....
I'm just one frozen bag of chicken away from completing a 42-day ration. It's cold and raining outside. And at this point, I wish the mayor would just issue martial law, and everybody stayed home (no mass transportation no customers waiting outside supermarkets). Last week we had an "only essential business operation" type rule, but supermarkets were just "throttling" lines of people, small businesses like retail with less than 10 people in the perimeter of their business were allowed to operate, same for food industry but restricted to take-out and home delivery only (all dining areas and exterior tables closed) , and pharmacies were the most restricted, they have already forced distancing between patients because the assumption is that COVID cases WILL walk into pharmacies, for obvious reasons..
But we could actually clean COVID off the streets now. The sooner individual cities and states stop *all motion of people*, the better the outcome, because those who are sick will emerge in their own homes, where they are supposed to be - off the street, and we can start dealing with the problem.
Much talk has been done about 40 to 70 percent of the people getting sick no matter what we do. It's true, it will happen, but there is no limit to how long we can delay getting sick or how few cases you can force within city limits or state/province /territory limits. The virus lives on surfaces for less than 7 days. The incubation period is 7-14 days. The illness can be cleared within 5 weeks, survival /death is determined within a similar period, and the peak of the curve in cases withing ansarea with full social isolation is estimated to be around 7 weeks.
The obvious thing to do is stop all motion of people until those who will get sick do so, and every household can be cleared or quarantined accordingly. The illness cycle is not that long, and a 7 week quarantine would do the trick with the initial 2- week incubation period and 5 week illness cycle already folded in. That is very easy to do everywhere right now in cities with "low" (eg less than 100) cases
The period also allows authorities to clean up the streets, and take care of the homeless. Once that quarantine has expired, you'll be able to expand the perimeter of the quarantine from individual homes to a radius of burrough or even city limit, allowing people inside that radius to resume some semblance of life, but strictly enforcing a shut border policy, closing off roads and jailing people crossing into city limits from outside the cleared zone. During the Spanish Flu, small cities in the US implemented similar tactics with success. But it required the isolation of a "clean city" from the rest of the world. Sounds draconian, but it's actually much easier than what we're doing right now, and it will be much less expensive in the long run.
Eventually you could expand the perimeter to the whole country, following the same rule. At that point it's an atypical border / immigration control (I know, the wet dream of some politicians just became a reality)
