Read on Twitter
1) There've been a lot of short-sighted strategies to fight COVID-19. Many have been talked about a lot. But I think there's always been a fundamental, unanswered question even for the most heralded approaches.
2) People generally regard Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, and (later on) South Korea as examples of success. And so far they have in fact done a great job of minimizing cases while not having to shut down.
3) But it's hard to keep COVID-19 from spreading unless the whole world is suppressing it. HK/Taiwain/Singapore/etc. are seeing this now--after initially controlling it, new visitors brought new cases. They've seen a spike in recent cases, almost all from immigration.
4) This poses a real dilemma. Short term, you can cut down on cases again by cutting off immigration and doing a partial lockdown for a month; this is what they're doing, e.g. https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/southeast-asia/article/3078847/coronavirus-singapore-bans-public-and-private-gatherings
5) But you can only do that for so long. And for those regions in particular, travel is a really important part of the economy. Shutting off immigration for a few weeks and locking down is one thing. But as soon as you lift the bans, you risk re-re-introducting COVID-19.
6) In some sense it sucks and isn't fair--they've done a great job by most standards, but because the rest of the world doesn't have their shit together, they'll keep getting infected over and over again.
7) But it's also probably the reality, and begs the question: what's the end game here?
8) If the end game is that the world successfully kills off COVID-19 in the next few weeks, then great. But if instead the endgame is something like like a drawn-out, year-long dance that's halfway between suppression and flattening the curve, they're in a tough position.
9) Can Hong Kong really make it a year without allowing anyone in from the outside world? What are the costs of that?
10) Lots of people take some strategy, mark it out to a few months, and say it's great, but secretly the strategy is just shifting all of the downsides to the back end of 2020--and if you marked to the end it would look terrible.
11) Any real strategy here has to look not just at the short-term results but also the long-term. How many people will get COVID-19 in the next few years? How many will die? What will the cost be to the country of the response over the lifespan of COVID-19?
12) Some proposed strategies are REALLY bad. A good tip off of that is if they involve COVID-19 being "seasonal", recurring every winter, and causing the world to shut down every year forever; or if they partially but not fully eliminate COVID-19 but don't look long term.
13) In fact, almost _all_ strategies look bad long term. Which is just a way of saying: COVID-19 sucks. Our goal is to choose the least bad option, accepting that it'll still be bad.
14) And whatever strategy we go with should have to answer for _all_ of its costs: life, societal, health, economic, freedom, jobs, etc. And it should have to answer for the whole life-cycle of its costs, not just its short-term ones and punting down the road.
15) One last thing I'll say: I'm a bit disappointed by how quick people are to censor each other here. Whatever we do, we have to do with our eyes wide open.
