Conversation

5) But you can only do that for so long. And for those regions in particular, travel is a really important part of the economy. Shutting off immigration for a few weeks and locking down is one thing. But as soon as you lift the bans, you risk re-re-introducting COVID-19.

6) In some sense it sucks and isn't fair--they've done a great job by most standards, but because the rest of the world doesn't have their shit together, they'll keep getting infected over and over again.

7) But it's also probably the reality, and begs the question: what's the end game here?

8) If the end game is that the world successfully kills off COVID-19 in the next few weeks, then great. But if instead the endgame is something like like a drawn-out, year-long dance that's halfway between suppression and flattening the curve, they're in a tough position.

9) Can Hong Kong really make it a year without allowing anyone in from the outside world? What are the costs of that?

10) Lots of people take some strategy, mark it out to a few months, and say it's great, but secretly the strategy is just shifting all of the downsides to the back end of 2020--and if you marked to the end it would look terrible.

11) Any real strategy here has to look not just at the short-term results but also the long-term. How many people will get COVID-19 in the next few years? How many will die? What will the cost be to the country of the response over the lifespan of COVID-19?

12) Some proposed strategies are REALLY bad. A good tip off of that is if they involve COVID-19 being "seasonal", recurring every winter, and causing the world to shut down every year forever; or if they partially but not fully eliminate COVID-19 but don't look long term.

13) In fact, almost _all_ strategies look bad long term. Which is just a way of saying: COVID-19 sucks. Our goal is to choose the least bad option, accepting that it'll still be bad.