The COVID-19 pandemic

[ijmorlan]

If it becomes necessary, it will probably be possible.

Note that the Ezra Ave. party wasn’t just small this year — as far as I can tell from reports, it didn’t happen. My impression is the police didn’t even turn away that many people. Why? Because enough people got a clue to make a difference. Similarly, if we really got to the point where the only safe option would be for everybody to stay home unless they are specifically authorized, it would be because people were dying from the disease and almost everybody would understand that it was necessary and would trust the recommendation from the medical officer.

I don’t know what is going to happen, but if it turns out that the current state will continue for many months then I would prefer to have a short period of time during which we would ensure that everybody is stocked up, then a 3-4 week period of time during which literally nobody leaves the house except as specifically authorized by the emergency authorities (so roughly speaking emergency services, utilities, and patients going to the hospital). Theoretically, this should be a foolproof method of stopping the disease: current cases would go through whatever is going to happen, and there would be essentially no new cases. After 3-4 weeks anybody who was infected would be over it, one way or the other.

I don't think that's realistic for a lot of reasons. I think that the list of people whose roles are essential is much longer than that- there are many government services that can't be paused, and plenty of manufacturing and private sector services that needs to continue. Among them, it would be impossible to eliminate contagion entirely, and so this period would probably need to last longer than three or four weeks.

I agree it would be very difficult. Without getting into a detailed discussion it’s hard to really evaluate what the list of services needs to be, but I don’t see why we need anything other than hospitals, pharmacies, and utilities (electricity, water/sewer, gas, internet) for the short time to starve out the pandemic. Is there anything I’m missing? Note that I’m not denying the importance of other services — long term, even “frivolous” stuff like movie theatres or sporting events are important collectively — but I think most things can pause for a few weeks for something this important.

Here are a few important things that I’m pretty sure can stop for a month:

– haircuts/manicure/etc.
– restaurants
– garbage collection/street cleaning
– most any office job (although these can mostly be done from home anyway, so may not need to stop)
– manufacturing (with proper preparation)
– construction
– clothes shopping
– dentists (except for ER referrals)
– airlines (except for medevac and similar)
– real estate (both sales and transactions)

Even if we're just talking about bare necessities, how long would it take us to undertake distribution of three to four weeks (or longer) worth to every household? Who would organize that, and carry it out?

This is very difficult. People who are middle-class and above are already able to stock up; but there are a lot of people who simply cannot, and of course our stores and their distribution channels can’t really handle everybody buying a month’s supply over the course of a week. So it is a very complicated logistical problem.

You are right to point out the difficulty of this. It probably is more complicated than I think, even though I think it would be very difficult. And I am no epidemiologist, so I don’t know if it would really make enough of a difference to be worth the extreme effort. But I think there is at least a chance that it might be the right approach.

We’re already way past anything I’ve ever experienced. Just a few years ago the University of Waterloo was criticized for staying open on a WLU/Conestoga College/WRDSB snow day. Now we’ve cancelled all in-person academic activity for the rest of this term and the entire Spring term, including Spring final examinations. I sincerely hope that by the time August with its examination season rolls around, this will look like an absurd overreaction. Sadly I’m not particularly hopeful that this will actually turn out to be the case.