Thread by @balajis

Quarantine theater?

It appears the US right now is doing half-ass TSA-ish things.

Rather than a short, sharp, universal lockdown it is taking huge economic damage without the full health benefit. If we're doing this, we need to do it like Asia or Israel would do it.

Measuring success requires:

1) massive diagnostics capability for the foreseeable future
2) centralized site to collect these stats

We need (1) because this is an infectious disease, so people will need to be retested many times. We need (2) to get a scoreboard.

US government dysfunction means we'll need to do this the hard way: the decentralized response.

Testing is ramping now that it's finally outside the FDA/CDC bottleneck (see below).

Our general mental model must be: the state will mess it up, so we need to monitor & decentralize

Here's what the decentralized response means:

1) Figure out how to collect shadow stats on something the state is messing up
2) For example, @trvrb showed huge underdiagnosis in WA through sequence analysis
3) Then develop a decentralized response (eg UW testing) to compensate

Basically, every single number/assertion coming out of city, state, federal governments (& media outlets quoting them) must be checked somehow. Some tools:

- Waze-style crowdsourcing of patient symptoms
- Analysis of viral strain sequence data
- Pooling of lab test provider data

To return to the original post, every city or state should have some database of event permits, some list of upcoming events.

Split this up by 50 states, have one volunteer for each in charge of event monitoring, and have that person coordinate N people tweeting at governor.