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Incremental Policy Can’t Keep Up With Exponential Spread
England is significantly expanding Covid-19 restrictions and the U.S. should follow suit
It’s become increasingly clear that we need to vaccinate a lot of people, preserve hospital capacity, and buy time to stop the pandemic. We know that we have an exponentially increasing spread of Covid-19 all over the country, and there will be even more with recent holiday travel and gatherings.
England has announced a new national lockdown due to a surge of cases and hospitalizations related to the new, more transmissible B117 variant. The United States needs to do the same, urgently, before spread overwhelms more parts of the country as it currently has in Los Angeles County.
We need an emergency plan to stop spread with more drastic policy measures. We had authored the framework for such a plan — termed “Smarter Lockdowns” — over the summer. Many of these points still hold today, and we don’t need to call them “lockdowns” because the point is being smart about stopping spread, not restricting people blindly.
We need to implement absolute — not incremental — restrictions on nonessential venues, including restaurants, bars, gyms, and shopping areas. Those businesses will need additional financial protections in the short run. Anything that needs to remain open (grocery stories, pharmacies, public transport, etc.) must operate at regulated capacity with protection, such as PPE and financial relief, for frontline staff. All nonessential businesses and staff that are put on hold should be repurposed toward vaccination efforts if they can and are amenable to helping.
We also need to repurpose places like hotels and dorms for safer and better isolation and quarantine spaces, and we need to financially incentivize people to use them (punitive measures don’t work as well here and tend to become regressive). We need to mandate masking in any indoor public space that remains open.
We also must stop wasting time and energy harassing people about the outdoors, which we should instead be using to our advantage. In places where the weather permits, keep beaches, playgrounds, and parks open. Also implement more creative but safe outdoor socialization venues. The cost…
