Quote:
Originally Posted by housenuts
Anyone doing couple lockdown? Where you and your friends, who live within a few blocks, both agree to self-isolate and see no one else, but you'll still see each other?
Not necessarily couples, but my wife and I have been discussing the possibility of reaching out to a very small number of friends to essentially make a pact that if we are all super diligent about our own quarantining, that in 2 weeks time if we're all still asymptomatic, we 100% don't have it since that's the extent of that period, so we can hang.
But in the past 48 hours since bringing up the idea, we're less and less about it. Just because we know we're going to have to leave the house occasionally, and even if we're super careful it's not 100%. So we wouldn't be sure if it resets the 2 weeks.
Like, I hadn't been around other people for 5 days but then this morning, I had to go to CVS and was pretty darn careful, but careful enough that I can still consider myself in Day 5 of my superquarantine, or should I reset it to day 1 just to be safe?
I wish we had the ability to quantify just how much we raise our chances of catching it for something like a very careful trip to CVS or the grocery store, or every time you order delivery. Of course that's futilely impossible because we have such little data right now.
Also, we'd really be putting in a lot of trust in the other friends and I just don't think it's worth it.
My wife is a teacher and the way she's looking at it is that if the Gov't decided to close the schools for the purposes of trying to mitigate this thing, then she has an obligation to hold up her end and just lock it down, and not try to figure out loopholes and ways to cut corners.
She's right.
Quick stats question though:
We're sitting at around 20k confirmed cases right now. Obviously it's way more but we don't know how many, but the estimates are that it could be 10x that, right? Let's even go nuts and say actual cases are 500k right now.
That's about 1 in 600 Americans. Shouldn't it stand to reason that if all the states follow CA's example (as some did yesterday) over the next 3 or 4 days, we are now talking about 1-2 million cases.
If people overall adhere to the quarantine guidelines, shouldn't we be able to snuff this thing out if at the start of the quarantine only 1 in 200 people have it?
Like during the first couple of weeks, the only people that would be getting it at that time would be the other members of the family that those who were positive were living with. And let's face it, it's going to be a near guarantee that if one person in the household has it, everyone's going to get it.
But then after those first couple weeks, there would be a drastic reduction in new cases. And the longest cases are 5 weeks total (up to 2 weeks asymptomatic, then it takes up to 3 weeks to get out of your system).
So if we just locked it the **** down for 7-8 weeks, the only lingering cases would be from the rare cases of people catching it at grocery stores, delivery, etc.
I'm sure I'm being overly optimistic about the chances of success. For one, I'm assuming a high % of cooperation by the public at large to make it happen, and this is an u unprecedented social experiment we're about to embark on. Who the **** knows what's going to happen?!
But are there other factors I'm not considering in that hypothetical?
It just seems like a super strict quarantine for 6-8 weeks should on paper be enough to keep this thing from not increasing past 10% of the US population getting it.
Thoughts?
Also, I'm more and more nervous about having to go get groceries again. It just would seem that the check out employees have got to be like 90% to have it, since all day long they're handling products that all of the customers have been touching. And then they're handling all of the food you're buying. Just feels so risky.
FML. I'm not very OCD irl but this is really bringing out the Howard Hughes out of me. Should be walking around in tissue box shoes by mid-April.