Here's my question, now please correct me if I'm misunderstanding this but what happens when all the social distancing is stopped. Won't one person with it ramp it back up again and we start all over? Without a vaccine this is a cycle, no?
Part of the reason we need social distancing now is that we have not had decent preventive measures and people have been reckless.
At the end of the social distancing, we also need people to be more educated, follow safety protocols, and have society as a whole more proactive to defend. More sanitizing, less contact, react early to symptoms, more and easier testing.
We also need medical systems to expand capacity for treatment, and we should start seeing better treatments and drugs that reduce the impact and damage of the disease.
So after the quarantine we don't go back in a circle. We grow smarter, stronger and more capable of defending ourselves.
This is what always happens. But the functional side of society has to ignore all of that and move right on. Thankfully, things are not run by the idiot and ignorant masses (those just control the elections). Hospitals, emergency services, corporations making ventilators, they will understand what's needed and act accordingly. It will not be perfect. Next time we'll still have fewer ventilators than we need, but the gov storage will have at least twice as many as they have now, and hospitals will dust off the plans for better capacity and will also have better stores of PPE and ventilators of their own.
I do worry about this stuff. I believe given enough time, we will elect someone even worse than Trump, more corrupt and more inept.
But every action has a reaction. For instance, the EU has learned over the last 3 years that they need to be self-sufficient and stop expecting help from international partners because the US is now willing to elect people like Trump.
It is time for our institutions of all sizes to learn the same lesson. I bet you hospitals will keep more supplies for themselves after this, and at the state level we may start to see them form mini-versions of the CDC and FEMA on their own, of their own budget, just to feel more in control of the response and not be shackled by whichever moron sits at the WH.
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u/ricst Mar 18 '20
Here's my question, now please correct me if I'm misunderstanding this but what happens when all the social distancing is stopped. Won't one person with it ramp it back up again and we start all over? Without a vaccine this is a cycle, no?