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In a new @NiskanenCenter piece endorsing @HarvardEthics Roadmap to Pandemic Resilience, I try to draw out a few points that don't get enough attention. https://www.niskanencenter.org/a-massive-surge-in-testing-is-the-only-way-to-safely-restore-our-liberty-and-economy/
First, mass social distancing is a catastrophe for the economy BECAUSE it's a catastrophe for the liberties healthy economies depend on. But the injury to our basic rights & freedoms hurts us personally & culturally, irrespective of the knock-on economic damage. We aren't free.
However, the egregious violations of liberty entailed by mass social distancing were only necessary because of failure to move quickly enough to contain the spread of infection by rapidly ramping up testing, contact tracing, and targeted isolation.
And now there's no safe, speedy way back to a semblance of normal social and economic life without a MASSIVE push to produce and distribute tests and trace contacts of positive cases, who need to be temporarily isolated with support. That's what the Roadmap shows us how to do.
But isn't the surveillance/regulation of a mass-testing regime and the need to certify people as safe to work some kind of authoritarian nightmare? No. But mass social isolation is. We're living it. Mass testing would be FAR less oppressive. It's our only non-apocalyptic way out!
There's lots of magical thinking going around that there simply MUST BE a relatively costless way to re-open the country and return to the way things were. Or that the experts are freaking out for no good reason and that everything will be fine if we all agree that it's fine.
Mass social distancing, as damaging as it is to our liberty and economy, is the only thing holding the virus at bay. Getting tens of thousands more people killed and heading straight back into lockdowns leaves us right back where we were, but with lots of us missing and damaged.
But we can't just stay in quarantine hell until we can all get vaccinated. First of all, we shouldn't have to live this way, and compliance will just go to crap if this goes on too long. Second, by V-Day, the compounding economic damage will be Thanos-level devastating.
There's really no non-dystopian way to SAFELY, SWIFTLY, and PERMANENTLY restore our economy and freedom other than to stand up a huge testing regime on the double. Doing the Roadmap, or something like it RIGHT NOW is our very best bet to get free, stay alive, and not go hungry.
So maybe, you know, DO IT?
Educate yourself great patriot citizen! https://twitter.com/HarvardEthics/status/1252649549165977607
