The Coronavirus

[Warren Dew]

(05-24-2020, 01:05 PM)sbarrera Wrote: Seems the lockdown measure are more neccessary in the hot zone, and should be continued.

I don't think it's obvious that the measures that are currently failing to control the number of cases in the "hot zone" are the ones that should be continued.

I live in an urban suburb of Boston, a hot area of a hot zone.  We had a fairly severe shutdown with people basically going to grocery and drug stores and nowhere else.  This reduced travel and should have reduced the viral reproduction rate R by a factor of 10, but the actual result of a new case reduction that's extremely gradual showed a reduction in R by a factor of 3 at most.  Something is going on beyond the shutdown.

Possibilities include a very high R on the subway system, which remained open, or transmission by some other vector, like food or something, or an external driver, like people travelling from New York.  We don't know what it was, but we need to find out, because we need for the interventions to become more effective, rather than just resorting to the ones that are most draconian but are of limited effectiveness.

I'm hoping masks will help, but masks will only address the same tranmission vectors that we thought we were already addressing.