We don't need "a" exit strategy
Apr. 28th, 2020 08:06 pmPeople have started talking about an exit strategy. Which would be good, but talking about that as one unrelieved concept is bad.
It's never too early to think about when, how, and under what circumstances, quarantine could be relaxed. Before we ever got into lockdown, people were certainly speculating about what would happen after, and we could have had lots of academics and civil servants writing plans.
But how that happens depends very much on what happens beforehand. I'm fairly hopeful on having SOME kind of breakthroughs. We might get a vaccine. We might get reliable antibody tests that can be mass manufactured and change colour on a strip of paper and don't need to be sent back to the lab. We might discover which types of distancing are useful and which don't work as well. All of these would lead to different outcomes.
But all of those lead to different strategies! And honestly, the UK is sufficiently behind other countries that the simplest thing to do is probably just copy what most countries do. And they probably all need to come with a caveat of "almost any relaxation will lead to the disease continuing to spread, does it have tracing and testing to keep it in the dozens, and if it doesn't work, when does lockdown resume?"
The thing I'm objecting to is too many people calling for "an exit strategy" while deliberately avoiding looking at any of the details. Not, "which distancing measures aren't worthwhile and we can discontinue" or "at what point is it relatively safe" or "these are the circumstances where we should lockdown and these are the circumstances where we should relax". But, in effect, "we want to end quarantine and we don't care about the consequences". If you're not willing to say what the consequences are, that's a bad sign for being willing to accept them.
It's never too early to think about when, how, and under what circumstances, quarantine could be relaxed. Before we ever got into lockdown, people were certainly speculating about what would happen after, and we could have had lots of academics and civil servants writing plans.
But how that happens depends very much on what happens beforehand. I'm fairly hopeful on having SOME kind of breakthroughs. We might get a vaccine. We might get reliable antibody tests that can be mass manufactured and change colour on a strip of paper and don't need to be sent back to the lab. We might discover which types of distancing are useful and which don't work as well. All of these would lead to different outcomes.
But all of those lead to different strategies! And honestly, the UK is sufficiently behind other countries that the simplest thing to do is probably just copy what most countries do. And they probably all need to come with a caveat of "almost any relaxation will lead to the disease continuing to spread, does it have tracing and testing to keep it in the dozens, and if it doesn't work, when does lockdown resume?"
The thing I'm objecting to is too many people calling for "an exit strategy" while deliberately avoiding looking at any of the details. Not, "which distancing measures aren't worthwhile and we can discontinue" or "at what point is it relatively safe" or "these are the circumstances where we should lockdown and these are the circumstances where we should relax". But, in effect, "we want to end quarantine and we don't care about the consequences". If you're not willing to say what the consequences are, that's a bad sign for being willing to accept them.