[Goose]

That said, there was a "true" shutdown in the EU. And it is now not working for them. For that reason, I can't really accept the idea that a "true shutdown" in the USA would put us in a situation where "Plan A" worked. We might be slightly better off in terms of deaths, but we would be where the EU is now, with community spread and no viable options to continue with plan A.

It would be more accurate to say that the EU's post-shutdown strategy is not working for them. The EU has not been in a shutdown for many months. They are now starting to shut things down again.

Exactly. And that is the problem. The post-shutdown strategy was tracking and tracing a relatively low level number of cases and keeping the number of cases low. That hasn't worked. We in the USA never got our case numbers low enough and never had/developed good enough contact tracing to make it work here. In the EU, they did both, but yet it still didn't work.

It may be in the presence of any significant relaxation of a lockdown, contact tracking and tracing just won't work in some societies. This appears to be the case based on what we see in the EU. Exactly why that happened isn't (yet) clear, but it did.

[Goose]

That said, there was a "true" shutdown in the EU. And it is now not working for them. For that reason, I can't really accept the idea that a "true shutdown" in the USA would put us in a situation where "Plan A" worked. We might be slightly better off in terms of deaths, but we would be where the EU is now, with community spread and no viable options to continue with plan A.

It would be more accurate to say that the EU's post-shutdown strategy is not working for them. The EU has not been in a shutdown for many months. They are now starting to shut things down again.

Exactly. And that is the problem. The post-shutdown strategy was tracking and tracing a relatively low level number of cases and keeping the number of cases low. That hasn't worked. We in the USA never got our case numbers low enough and never had/developed good enough contact tracing to make it work here. In the EU, they did both, but yet it still didn't work.

It may be in the presence of any significant relaxation of a lockdown, contact tracking and tracing just won't work in some societies. This appears to be the case based on what we see in the EU. Exactly why that happened isn't (yet) clear, but it did.