[There are two recommended links below, in bold. As always, please forward this newsletter. — Pete]
Naval Ravikant, a smart Silicon Valley investor with a way of distilling things down to their essence, lays out our three possible paths in 2020:
• Extinguish the fire with therapies & vaccines (unlikely).
• Control the burn via test, trace, isolate, & internal borders. (Most will do testing & tracing but fail at isolation & borders).
• Uncontrolled burn all the way to herd immunity (default).
The first, extinguish the fire, will eventually happen, but most likely not until 2021.
The third, uncontrolled burn, is mostly a way to kill more people. Some will embrace the idea, either out of a misguided dream to “save the economy” (it won’t), or perhaps just because they don’t really care about the people who would die. This would be a sad choice, with unnecessary suffering and death.
The middle way, control the burn, is the smart choice. It will be hard, uncomfortable, confusing, and each of us will wonder at some point or other if all the bother is worth it. It will be, worth it. Trace, test, isolate — it’s our new mantra.
I recommend and endorse this article that wraps up and explains in a little more depth:
“This is what it will take to get us back outside — How to safely ease social distancing while we wait for a covid-19 drug or vaccine” (MIT Technology Review)
It will take one of your three free articles per month at Technology Review. It doesn’t say anything you can’t read elsewhere, but it presents the important stuff cogently as a good review and summary. It helps me to have something like that, as we prepare for the long slog ahead.
In the U.S., we still need to catch up on testing, both for infected people, and people with antibodies (meaning they’re hopefully immune). Figure we want to test most people in the country every 14 days; we need to be able to do 10 or 20 million tests a day. We’re not there yet.
One of the hopeful pieces of news is that smart geeks, and Apple and Google, are building a privacy-preserving way to alert you if you’ve been in close proximity to someone who might have spread COVID-19 to you. It works by having phones share data with each other to be able to tell with other phones they have been near, but without using any GPS, and without sharing any personally identifying information.
Here’s a great comic explainer of how it works:
“Protecting Lives & Liberty — how contact tracing apps can foil both COVID-19 and Big Brother” (Nicky Case)
And a somewhat more in-depth prose explainer:
“How Apple And Google Are Going To Enable Contact Tracing”
Stay safe, stay home as much as you can, take precautions to prevent spreading the virus as much as you can. We’ll get through this thing.