What it will take to lift stay-at-home orders?

Imagine you're locked in a house that's on fire. You've got no water, but there's an open window.

If you close the window, you can slow the flow of oxygen to the fire, reducing its spread. But eventually you also suffocate.

So as a short term strategy, that may work. You can deal with low oxygen briefly if it keeps the flames down long enough for the fire brigade to arrive.

If you open the window before they show up, you can breathe for a moment, but you'll also burn alive. So, that's not ideal.

For this strategy to succeed, the fire brigade has to actually show up, in time, to hose down the house.

If you open the window before they arrive, the flames get out of hand and you burn.

If the fire brigade shows up too late, you suffocate.

The fire brigade we need today is a national test/trace/quarantine/isolate strategy; a national plan to reinforce hospitals; protections for high-risk populations; and strengthened disease surveillance.

Until that's in place, our only tool is (economic) oxygen deprivation.

So the proper question is not - when can we open the window?

It's - is the fire brigade on the way?

People saying "turn the economy back on" are in effect saying "let's burn ourselves alive to avoid suffocating."

Neither option is viable.

If you want to restore oxygen to the economy, you should be pressing the government to build a way to safely do that.

And this is what hugely worries me about the state of US preparedness. The fire brigade we need is not being built.

The federal government is issuing plans for how to safely restore the flow of oxygen, rather than figuring out how they're going to deploy the fire brigade.

The longer they delay that, or push it to the states, the longer the we face only suffocation or incineration.