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Old 16th Apr 2020, 09:00
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From what I read from the expert reports, Corona is here to stay and it will be pretty much impossible to prevent infections 100%. Right now all countries efforts are towards squashing the pandemic, and this is done by trying to reduce R (the measure of infectiousness/transferability of the virus) to as near as zero as possible. Which seems to work: At least in the countries that have implemented an effective lockdown strategy, the virus is on the way back.

Once we've reached a level where the healthcare industry is able to deal with the number of infections in their normal course of operations, some measures can be relaxed a little. At a grand scale, we are going to have to accept that people will become infected, but we need to keep R below 1 to make sure it doesn't become another epidemic. So it will be a careful dance between anti-infection measures, and resuming normal human interactions. What measures to drop and what measures to keep will take quite some experimentation and different countries will try different experiments. And some countries will go too far in their relaxation and will have to go back to lockdown for a few weeks. (Just today I read an article about some researchers that found that we might need seven or eight two-to-three week lockdown periods from now until the end of 2021 to keep the virus under control, but in between these lockdown periods we can resume normal life.)

Like Richard said, technology will likely play a huge part in the exit strategy. The ultimate goal AFAIC should be some sort of personal risk tracking app, where an app continuously checks your activities and increases or decreases your personal risk score by a certain amount based on that activity. So if you interact closely with someone who has a high risk score, your risk score increases as well. Or if you go to a mass event with loads of people with low risk scores, your risk score increases as well. And maybe if your risk score gets above a certain number, you've got to take measures like personal quarantine until your risk score drops again. In fact, for certain types of activities the authorities may set a maximum risk score: You cannot participate if your risk score is higher than X.

So if you decide to sit in a confined cockpit with an instructor for a while, then you have to accept that your risk score increases a bit. For which you may have to compensate by not going to the pub in the evenings. Conversely, instructors may elect only to teach students with a risk score lower than a certain number.

But we're nowhere close to a system like that. There's all sorts of technical, ethical, statistical, legal and privacy issues to work out. Not to mention not knowing enough about the transferability of the virus to come up with an effective statistical model that would be the basis of such an app.
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