[Goose]

What's the end game of "crushing the curve?"  Everyone back to school with no masks?  Everyone back to bars and indoor dining with no masks?  I don't think that's correct.

Actually, it is pretty much that way in lots of places. Remember that Korea had an outbreak at a club and had to close the bars for a while? The issue is that to do this you have to get the case count real low and you have to be able to contact trace and isolate/quarantine every case that you subsequently do have. You are still going to be operating with a razor thin margin of error, but several nations have managed to do that.

We couldn't do that in the USA because a) we didn't have and did not develop "adequate" contact tracing and tracking capability and b) we never got the number of cases down to the point that what little contact tracking and tacking we did have had a prayer of containing the disease. It may be argued that there are several things about our society that make it impossible to do this. It is probable (IMHO) that even places like Korea will eventually fail. However, if there is a vaccine before that failure happens, there will be no failure. That was ostensibly the plan for the USA as well, but the politicians gave up on that idea really quick. In retrospect, they were probably right. We weren't going to do it anyway. Too bad they didn't just say that. Now we are incrementally approaching full Sweden (with even less compliance) whether we planned it that way or not.

[Goose]

What's the end game of "crushing the curve?"  Everyone back to school with no masks?  Everyone back to bars and indoor dining with no masks?  I don't think that's correct.

Actually, it is pretty much that way in lots of places. Remember that Korea had an outbreak at a club and had to close the bars for a while? The issue is that to do this you have to get the case count real low and you have to be able to contact trace and isolate/quarantine every case that you subsequently do have. You are still going to be operating with a razor thin margin of error, but several nations have managed to do that.

We couldn't do that in the USA because a) we didn't have and did not develop "adequate" contact tracing and tracking capability and b) we never got the number of cases down to the point that what little contact tracking and tacking we did have had a prayer of containing the disease. It may be argued that there are several things about our society that make it impossible to do this. It is probable (IMHO) that even places like Korea will eventually fail. However, if there is a vaccine before that failure happens, there will be no failure. That was ostensibly the plan for the USA as well, but the politicians gave up on that idea really quick. In retrospect, they were probably right. We weren't going to do it anyway. Too bad they didn't just say that. Now we are incrementally approaching full Sweden (with even less compliance) whether we planned it that way or not.