Of course we’re not at or even near herd immunity. But as I wrote in the post in #3: “As more people contract mild cases and become immune, any disease becomes at least somewhat more difficult to spread as it becomes more difficult for the virus to find new victims – and that starts to happen even before herd immunity develops.”

That is one of the reasons curves often flatten over time for diseases, even without special social distancing. The real question is how long it takes and what the toll is in the meantime.

The costs of continuing the draconian rules at some point becomes much greater than the cost of the disease itself if those rules are removed. It is tricky to decide when that is, but I think it’s soon, and even sooner in states that are mostly rural. And it’s not either/or; people will continue to adopt some extra measures without cutting off economic life so utterly.

As far as contact tracing goes, of course we’re past containment through contact tracing. But it’s still being done and still has benefit. It is definitely part of Fauci’s plan.

Sort of true.

The real immediate driver is the limitation of the medical infrastructure, labor, and supplies to handle the surge load, coupled with the uncertainty around many aspects of the virus, given its potential large scale impact.

It does buy time to build capacity in these areas, as well as work on understanding the virus better, developing vaccines and more effective treatments.
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“flattening the curve doesn’t eliminate deaths, it just spreads them out.”

Sort of true. Actually, the number of TOTAL deaths would be much, much higher if the medical system was overloaded – including deaths from those who would normally been saved in a regular emergency.

So, it is not a 1 for 1 as implied by this quote from Joe – not sure he meant it this way, but cannot tell from the quote.
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Don’t have the link, but “herd immunity” for Covid-19 is estimated at 60%. Even if in the right ballpark, we are far from that today.

To further complicate things, some recent studies out of South Korea suggests that there is some possible re-infections on a few people previously determined to have recovered from the Coronavirus.

If this is possible, at an unknown but high enough rate, it may make partial opening far riskier than many are assuming.
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There is also a statistical analysis out that identifies the normal monthly volume of deaths in NYC vs reported Coronavirus deaths in March, vs TOTAL known deaths in March.

There is a huge delta between TOTAL deaths and reported Coronavirus deaths that are not accounted for by normal monthly deaths. The last spike was in Sept 2001, and this TOTAL is multiples of that.

So, we may be getting a much more “positive” reporting of Covid-19 deaths than is actually the case. Part of the “fog of war” uncertainty aspect to this.
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“It helps to have quicker and more widespread testing, which we now have but didn’t have in the earlier stages of the pandemic.”

One HUGE pre-requisite for opening back up, even just partially, is the ability to test on a scale several orders magnitude than we have now.

We’ve passed the point of contact tracing being practical and managable, as the scale is too high – we are now over 25K new cases a day and it is still growing at too fast a pace. And, we are unlikely to adopt technology solutions en masse that could assist, but would violate our privacy.

We need tests that will give extremely reliable results within minutes. This will allow multiple organizations to identify people who have it (e.g. entering mass transit, schools, office buildings) and, probably most importantly, for people to test at home before they even go out.

Even then, people will still need to take precautions (e.g. masks, gloves, reduced travel) until we are past this thing.

But it will go a long way to getting us close to “normal” again.

Opening up before that point is very likely to cause a second wave. And that wave could well rival or exceed the current one.

https://bongino.com/poll-finds-media-created-massive-partisan-divide-on-hydroxychloroquine/

https://babylonbee.com/news/government-issues-new-directive-telling-everyone-to-jump-off-a-bridge

The antibody tests weren’t available until March 1985. IIRC, by 1986, public health officialdom were estimating that about 1/2 of the male homosexual / bisexual population were infected. I recently read of a retrospective examination of a set of blood samples taken from male homosexuals in Manhattan under treatment for hepatitis. Fully a quarter of the samples were HIV+. The blood samples were drawn in 1980.

The thing about contact tracing is that the people whose contacts you can most readily trace are the people least likely to be infected.

While we’re at it. About 4.6% of all deaths each year are attributable to lung cancer among people with a history of cigarette smoking. Roughly 35% of the adult population has such a history. So, about 13% of current and former smokers can be expected to be felled by this. The annual death toll from emphysema is about half that for lung cancer, so perhaps 20% of those with a history of tobacco use can be expected to be felled by one of these.

About 15,000 people die of AIDS generated ailments every year. North of 60% are male homosexuals / bisexuals. IOW, roughly 15% of those of that subculture who shuffle off every year do so consequent to HIV infection.

There was a physician in Massachusetts (and ENT specialist, IIRC) who pointed out the consequences of sodomy for personal and public health in an intra-office memorandum. As a consequence he was removed from the attending list at four area hospitals.

Contact tracing for AIDS, meaning also HIV-positive. Even decades ago (I wrote the paper in the 90s), people with a lifestyle that might lead to AIDS would sometimes (or even often) get tested without having symptoms and would discover their HIV-positive status. The time between infection and HIV-positive status was ordinarily just months.

Whatever the calculated RO of SARS, it was not spread by casual contact and it was only spread when symptoms were quite severe. That makes it a very very different disease than COVID.

Also, regarding RO:

R0 is not a biological constant for a pathogen as it is also affected by other factors such as environmental conditions and the behaviour of the infected population. Furthermore R0 values are usually estimated from mathematical models, and the estimated values are dependent on the model used and values of other parameters. Thus values given in the literature only make sense in the given context and it is recommended not to use obsolete values or compare values based on different models. R0 does not by itself give an estimate of how fast an infection spreads in the population…

When calculated from mathematical models, particularly ordinary differential equations, what is often claimed to be R0 is, in fact, simply a threshold, not the average number of secondary infections. There are many methods used to derive such a threshold from a mathematical model, but few of them always give the true value of R0. This is particularly problematic if there are intermediate vectors between hosts, such as malaria.

What these thresholds will do is determine whether a disease will die out (if R0 < 1) or whether it may become epidemic (if R0 > 1), but they generally cannot compare different diseases.