> We could also just use social distancing to eradicate it. Not a mix of half measures, real lock downs and tracing and quarantines. It would vanish in a puff of coordinated effort.
It's a big world. You may lock down a city. That's easy(ish). A country is harder, but do-able for one with either a strong central government or strong social cohesion. But the whole world? All two hundred plus countries? And if any one country fails, if the borders aren't 100% tight, it can get out. That leaves you with tracing and quarantines in the countries that had eradicated it, which is do-able if it doesn't cross the border too frequently.
Is Afghanistan going to fully lock down? Is Yemen? Syria? How many countries are going to fail? How many countries do we have to quarantine every single visitor, and for how long?
The vaccine may get us out of this. Social distancing without the vaccine might be kind of workable, if everything goes right, but it would leave us in less-than-ideal circumstances for a very long time.
I suppose my point is that we are choosing the path (collectively anyway) where we deal with it forever. We have effective tools, but we don't want to use them because it's hard.
It's a big world. You may lock down a city. That's easy(ish). A country is harder, but do-able for one with either a strong central government or strong social cohesion. But the whole world? All two hundred plus countries? And if any one country fails, if the borders aren't 100% tight, it can get out. That leaves you with tracing and quarantines in the countries that had eradicated it, which is do-able if it doesn't cross the border too frequently.
Is Afghanistan going to fully lock down? Is Yemen? Syria? How many countries are going to fail? How many countries do we have to quarantine every single visitor, and for how long?
The vaccine may get us out of this. Social distancing without the vaccine might be kind of workable, if everything goes right, but it would leave us in less-than-ideal circumstances for a very long time.