update Yellowstone/Grand Teton Closed

Overall a good article. I agree with the author that we need to drop the hammer now.

The description about how S Korea and Singapore contained this is a good one but it misses the point I think about the legal and cultural differences between those places and he US/Western Europe. One is that in East Asian countries ppl are very accustomed to wearing masks. You see it all the time there. The other is the acceptance of access and publication of information there that western societies view as an invasion of privacy. Practically everyone in S Korea and Singapore have smart phones and the governments have broad access to the location and contact information in those phones. That’s what they mostly used to trace and supress the virus. I doubt that the cultural and legal frameworks in the West can allow those techniques to be adopted quickly enough. Unless we do, the “dance” won’t work for us like it’s doing in East Asia.

On the optimistic side is the point that the mutation rate of corinaviruses is significantly lower than the flu. As I understand it, the more RNA base pairs the more likely that viral mutations will fail to be viable, slowing down the mutation rate. Coronaviruses are much more complex than the flu, having around 30000 base pairs vs 14000 for influenza. So so far while there are several strains of SARS-CoV-2 out there none of them are radically different. That should help with the whole vaccine development thing.

As offgrid suggests, no work, no food.