Worth discussing, but it would take months to deploy the level of testing required. You’d need to test a significant fraction of the entire US population every day. Say 30%, which is probably too low. So we need 100 million tests per day? That’s many months away, as is the miraculous (and privacy issue laden) database you’re talking about. By then, this will all be over and millions dead if we just let it run unchecked. We’re buying time to be able to actually implement something like that. It can’t happen in a matter of days or weeks.
Focusing on positive or negative is the wrong focus, we need to test for immunity. Those who are immune can contract the virus again in a year, but will do so without symptoms, according to older studies for similar viruses.
And most importantly, those with immunity can go on to lead a normal life and participate in the economy.
People can be contagious before symptoms. And that’s also a very different strategy than testing everyone before they go into work each day. You’ll miss the vast majority of people if you just test people with symptoms.
Neither country took the middle ground compared to where the US was when we finally started reacting.
South Korea has been aggressively testing, contact chasing, and quarantining from day 1. Look at their number of tests per capita compared to ours.
China did indeed shut down the entire economy for months for provinces containing 900M people iirc. In barely hit provinces they have teams of thousands of people doing aggressive testing, contact tracing, and quarantine.
The number of new cases in South Korea has started to increase again, and they keep getting new clusters unlinked to any known cases: https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-health-coronavirus-southko... I suspect that they're going to have to give up on the tracing and testing approach in the next few weeks.
Stopping every transmission isn’t necessary. We just need some way to drive R < 1.
China’s approach (lots of temperature taking, testing everyone with a fever) might not eradicate the disease here, but it could keep it manageable until a vaccine is deployed.
