If I understand it right, in a “perfect universe” if every person was able to stay home for 14 days and also perfectly avoided infecting anyone then the virus would effectively have died off. The 14 day’s might not be the exact time required but it illustrates a concept. We of course can’t uphold that perfect universe. So we’re stuck using that technique to slow it’s roll enough that it won’t overwhelm and kill like 3% of 7 billion people in addition to the usual attrition rate.
14 days probably not but with perfect isolation per household for 1-2 months it is possible. so assuming we can keep all services running unattended for that period of time (electricity, water, internet) and that each household somehow stocks up the bare minimum essentials for that period and finally somehow enforce the curfew without potentially exposing the police to the virus its doable.
BUT.. not going to happen, this can't even happen perfectly in China where the government can get away with a lot more than any western nation.
It would be longer than that. At 14 days, some people would just start exhibiting symptoms. However those can be mild enough to disregard. I believe recovery would still take another week. Then multiply that by the number of people with whom you cohabitate. And that assumes you didn’t go food shopping or collect your mail.
I live in Spain. We've been in full quarantine at home for about two weeks today. The cases are still raising, and so are the deaths.
I think the two week mark is the bare minimum, ideally you would have two weeks for symptoms to surface, then additional time until you're healthy and then two weeks more. So one month and a bit more.
Which, seems to be the way we're going, as the quarantine here is seemingly continuing.
Today is the first day in which confirmed cases have grown less than the previous day (6 vs 8 thousands) if we can trust the official numbers.
Seven or eight days after first symptoms infected people either get much worse or not, then some die in the few next days.
So we could see the same death rate of 800, or even a little worse, for the next week or two, that would double the current 6,500 toll. Then it would slow down, but I believe it's too optimist to set the limit in two more weeks to end the quarantine. With more masks and tests maybe we could start working selectively.
I'm visiting Spain, staying on La Palma in the Canary Islands, and today was Day 16 of quarantine for me. I had to leave the house to return my rental car. It was so nice to get out of the house just for a little while! Here's a pic I took on the way back to the airport.
I feel you, I had pneumonia two weeks before the lockdown, so been one month at home now, as I've been self-isolating. Good thing you managed to get out for a while, be careful of the police who fines people on sight and stay away from others.
The office that rented me the car closed, and I was not able to get in touch with them. I called the US Embassy and they were able to help me arrange for the car's return. They're main tip was to make sure I had a copy of the rental agreement with me.
It’s interesting to think about how many other viruses would perish if there were no new hosts for them to live in. Maybe we should start doing this every year as a sort of cleansing of viruses? 3 weeks in February - quarantine weeks. Every year.
It's definitely something we should put a marker on to come back to. Three weeks is a lot, and the full extent of measures here just isn't feasible outside of a pandemic. But if we come back in a year and realize there's been a significant impact on overall disease burden, maybe we should mandate a 2 week block of national holiday for all nonessential businesses.
I wonder if you could do it as a kind of near universal social and economic time-out? Let's say it starts on a Sunday night and is to last for two weeks.
What happens is that everything starting Monday is pushed back two weeks. Stock markets close. Non-essential workers stay home. Non-essentially businesses close.
During the two weeks, government pays for everyone's utilities, food, rent, and so on, both for people and companies.
The idea is to as much as possible pause the normal economy for a couple of weeks, and then resume it hopefully pretty much right where it left off, with the government seeing to everyone's needs during the economic pause.
Do this once a year as a readiness exercise, probably trying to time it around when that year's flu season is getting serious so that it may also help reduce the intensity of flu season.
Over the years, the government should over fund this to build up a cushion, so that whenever the next pandemic comes around they have enough to do longer than a two week pause if necessary.
I am not a microbiologist, but I'm not confident that this "three week annual quarantine" even works in an ideal world, much less the imperfect world that we actually live in.
Is it a guarantee that 100.0000000000% of the population will eliminate the virus with their own immune system in three weeks? If one or two people with poor immune systems carry around the virus for one day past the quarantine then we we would very quickly have gotten back to where we started.
It's also implausible to quarantine everyone for the same three week period. Are we just supposed to let anyone with a major health crisis die at home if it happens mid-quarantine? What would we do about the millions of people who require round the clock care in nursing facilities, etc.?
Additionally, I'm willing to bet that if we dedicated 5.8% of worldwide GDP (21 days out of 365) to fighting viruses, the results would be much more successful and less invasive.
