A Virus Methodology.

The government are doing their best, poor things, which isn’t great because they think they have to govern, and governing means, “We must tell the imbecilic wretches what to do. Without us it would be chaos.” Well it is chaos and the imbecilic wretches are doing a fine job thank you very much.

Lets pretend the public are intelligent (which we are) and we’re prepared to do what’s needed to beat this virus. (which we have proved) OK we all know our local area and could exist in a defined area of streets containing say2,000 people, like a postcode. That’s 30,000 areas country wide. The government defines these areas and says from a certain date, say 1^st May, you must be prepared to not go outside your area for 14 days whilst maintaining your current lockdown conditions. Each area includes a shop or depot, chemist and doctor. This defines two levels of quarantine, households (1 to~4) and areas (2,000). In the 14 day period individuals must notify symptoms. Areas with no symptoms are assumed clean and in areas showing symptoms all individuals are tested and carriers extracted. The household quarantine will identify those possibly contaminated, and any possible cross contamination outside it explored. These two levels of quarantine provide an overall manageable number of areas each containing locally manageable household units. Under the current lockdown conditions the roughly twenty million household units each able to cross contaminate in undefined ways is chaotic, and with limited testing it will remain chaotic. The second level of isolation identifies carriers within boundaries and focuses action where it’s needed. If in the first round 50% of areas are clean and carriers identified in the other 50% extracted, in the next 14 days there would probably be another 30% clean. We are relatively quickly focusing on 20% of the population, or 6,000 areas. After 6 weeks the virus is definable and limited to say 5% of the population or 1,500 areas. With the government and the public in these areas focused on eradication the virus has nowhere to go. All the while experts are gaining data, the government is dealing in manageable numbers and the public are included and active in the process. Our limited capacity to test individuals is focused where it can do most good.

If this was actioned 1^st week in March we’d be 7 weeks in and dealing with less than 5% of the population and maybe two weeks away from eradication. As it is we have 3 more weeks and will still only have the curves of tested cases and deaths to go on.
These numbers are plucked out of the air but it defines a possible methodology far better than what we’re currently doing.