Thread by @vineetbhola90

Friday evening in a pandemic: Time for a philosphical story.
Once a king and his army get lost in a desert. Everyone is tired and thirsty and they find a muddy pond in the desert. Some want to drink water desperately, others are concerned about contaminations in the water
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The King has to make a decision to either
- Allow everyone to drink the water so that no one dies out of thirst. But some may die if the water is contaminated
- Ask the army to carry on their search for clear water. But some may die out of thirst.
What would you choose?
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No option is easy and people will die in both the options, right?
Wrong!!!
I don't know the psychological term for this but this is an artificial constraint you have put on your thought process because I asked you to choose from the two options.
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Tell me honestly did you even consider that they can use some clothes to filter the water? Or any other 3rd option?
This is exactly the situation right now of #COVID19 pandemic.
Our leaders assumed that we have only 2 options:
1. Herd immunity
2. Strict lockdowns
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Not many are talking about
-Multi level contact tracing
-Faster trace-test-isolation
- Increasing the test capacity
Germany has brought down daily cases from 30,000(Dec) to 10,000(Feb) in almost 2 months lockdown and now they are using only 50% of their test capacity! Why?
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I purposedly didn't mention vaccines above, because they are analogous to reinforcement from a 2nd battalion who might take some time(6 months to maybe an year) to find our lost army. And they might get countered by enemies(mutations that escape vaccines)
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Similarly about opening or closing the schools.
What about:
- Taking measures to make them safe like masks and ventilations
- parallel online classes if needed
- quarantine for whole family when a classmate is positive
- tracking devices for kids
- closing when Incidence >10
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