Thread by @wretchardthecat

Information as a way out of the lockdown labyrinth. "Where you can find it, you can isolate and contain it."

telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/03/2…

The world is lumpy. You cannot speak of a disease -- or immunity -- as if it were uniformly distributed through a population. Lockdowns are a way of surfacing information but you have to act on that data to localize and prosecute the contact.

What lockdowns do is force the carriers into immobility. After a time the symptomatics reveal the presence of the disease so the medical system can attack it. But waiting for symptoms is slow. If a test can "ping" the virus it can go much faster.

This is why generalizing from instance state to the global state can be misleading. The threat is described most accurately by a 3D surface not a 2D graph. Tests are societies active sensors.