- I ask a parent commenter who has asserted that society should still be preventing transmission of a highly infectious virus if they know of a system that could actually achieve that;
- A few commenters invoke China's approach (whilst conceding it was excessively draconian), others insist that it's not about preventing transmission, just slowing it, conveniently avoiding confronting the fact that the original point was about prevention, and even if it wasn't, slowing spread still means infection is inevitable;
- Nobody suggests an approach that would have been effective or palatable;
- Many hours later, a new commenter slides in to point out that it really is literally possible to keep kicking a can down a road forever, as if this is either true in practice, consistent with the rhetorical point of that metaphor, or relevant to the point at hand.
I'll ask the central question again: can anyone describe a system that would have (a) been effective at preventing spread of the virus, and (b) resulted in a society that anyone wanted to continue living in, or that could even function at all?
More testing would have been worthwhile.
Supporting isolation from households would have been worthwhile.
Improving ventilation is probably worth the cost.
And on and on.
The question is: how can spread of this virus be completely prevented, so that nobody gets infected? This is clearly what the root commenter and the XKCD cartoon they shared are asserting should be happening.
Methods that just slow the inevitable are clearly sidestepping the point. And methods that make society into a dystopian nightmare may be technically argument-winning but not practical and thus make lame contributions to the discussion.
Testing, ventilation, supported isolation are fine; we’ve had and still have some of those measures in Australia, and I agree it’s helpful to slow spread and protect those most vulnerable for a while. I’ve been fine with that happening here. But that’s not the primary topic of this discussion.
Please stop with the ad-homs and side-stepping and address the point.
you literally can as long as you keep on kicking and you keep road in front of you.