Thread by @wolftivy

So how do we beat infectious disease? It's not with hospitals. Hospitals at best take the edge off, a bit. It's a virus. What can they do? Nothing, until you're choking on pink froth. And even then, there is little they can do.

Maybe we'll get some miracle drug or miracle vaccine. But these things seem like an ideological cope, not how infectious disease actually gets beaten. We like the story of shiny modern technology that lets us change nothing about how we live. What if it's fake?

What actually works to beat infectious disease?

1) Hygiene. Masks. Plumbing. Handwashing. Calibrating your disgust sensitivity. Social distancing during outbreaks. Cleaning public surfaces, using better materials. Waving instead of handshakes.

2) Diagnostics. Fever checkpoints. Mass disease testing. Probabilistic diagnosis based on symptoms. More testing. Identify and characterize the extent of infection.

3) Quarantine. When someone tests positive or gets diagnosed, get them away from everyone else. Halt the further spread of their disease. Maybe at home alone, maybe centralized in quarantine wards. Whatever is necessary. Yes, stigmatize being sick, because that's how germs work.

3b) Red zone, green zones. When a particular place is overrun with a disease, don't let people in or out. When a place is clear, don't let people in from uncontrolled areas without testing. HT @balajis

4) Contact tracing. When you find a case, aggressively chase down who they might have had contact with, and test them too. The positive case gives you information to focus the search. Use it.

That's it. Those are the tools you use to fight disease. If we actually employ those tools, we can wipe out not just this pandemic, but the flu et al besides.

Note effective disease control contradicts two powerful ideologies: "Modern Medicine" and "Individual Freedom/Privacy".

Everyone is talking about the "freedom" aspect. I want us to challenge the idea of "medicine" as we understand it as well.

Everyone is acting like a gigantic entrenched cartel that consumes 20% of our industrial capacity couldn't possibly be misleading us about its necessity and efficacy.

Let's be a bit more critical of that narrative.

@robinhanson claims health care does approximately nothing, but people consume it to signal that they care, and that they have done what they can. If you don't consume health care, that's a point of social shame. That's not rational consumption. That's ideology.

"Modern medicine" is an ideology. It assures us that health is mostly about advanced technologies that conveniently can only be provided by their entrenched bureaucracy, and absolutely don't require any social or lifestyle change.

The real story is very different.