[Goose]

Well, there's a fourth option, and it is one that we seem to have pursued.  Make general efforts at social distancing, imperfect mask usage, open what we can, but stop opening when things get out of hand, and more or less give up on trying to truly drive the infection under control.  We have implicitly decided that as a country we are ok with 500 to 1000 of our countrymen dying every day.

BC

I think you are correct regarding our "strategy". I would modulate it a bit by saying the politicians probably intended to use testing and contact tracing but then realized that would require enforcement. They aren't willing to do that. Ditto for masking. Ditto for social distancing. We ask people to comply and take what we get.

I think the number of our countrymen dying every day is regarded as inevitable no matter what we do by the public at large. That position isn't totally illogical. The idea of staying "shut down" until we have a vaccine isn't economically acceptable to the public. As long as we don't overload our health care system to the point we can't give high quality care to everybody, the COVID-19 deaths are regarded as unavoidable. Those people were going to get COVID-19 eventually anyway, so now is as good a time as any.

The obvious problem with this "strategy" is that as case loads increase the health care system WILL become overloaded and "extra" people will die due to unavailability of care. We need to stay just short of that. How that is actually going to play out is anybodies guess, but it sounds awfully unstable to me. Once you are "over the top" there is no obvious way to pull back. It would require people recognizing the problem and actually doing what they are unwilling to do before the fact. Give me odds.

[Goose]

Well, there's a fourth option, and it is one that we seem to have pursued.  Make general efforts at social distancing, imperfect mask usage, open what we can, but stop opening when things get out of hand, and more or less give up on trying to truly drive the infection under control.  We have implicitly decided that as a country we are ok with 500 to 1000 of our countrymen dying every day.

BC

I think you are correct regarding our "strategy". I would modulate it a bit by saying the politicians probably intended to use testing and contact tracing but then realized that would require enforcement. They aren't willing to do that. Ditto for masking. Ditto for social distancing. We ask people to comply and take what we get.

I think the number of our countrymen dying every day is regarded as inevitable no matter what we do by the public at large. That position isn't totally illogical. The idea of staying "shut down" until we have a vaccine isn't economically acceptable to the public. As long as we don't overload our health care system to the point we can't give high quality care to everybody, the COVID-19 deaths are regarded as unavoidable. Those people were going to get COVID-19 eventually anyway, so now is as good a time as any.

The obvious problem with this "strategy" is that as case loads increase the health care system WILL become overloaded and "extra" people will die due to unavailability of care. We need to stay just short of that. How that is actually going to play out is anybodies guess, but it sounds awfully unstable to me. Once you are "over the top" there is no obvious way to pull back. It would require people recognizing the problem and actually doing what they are unwilling to do before the fact. Give me odds.