David Wallace-Wells writes:

We are, finally, beginning to see some real plans from people with the power to enact them. On Tuesday, California governor Gavin Newsom unveiled a sort of road map for a gradual “reopening” of the state — including benchmarks for testing and hospital capacity, and continued social-distancing guidelines and even temperature checks. A handful of serious, sobering national proposals have been put forward by think tanks and the like in the U.S., and the White House has produced a set of guidelines to govern a gradual, region-by-region pullback from full-economy quarantine. In Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel announced a similar blueprint (and gave a memorable illustration of the terrors of exponential growth in a pandemic). Coming alongside news from hot spots like New York that new hospitalizations and even deaths may be plateauing or even declining, the plans are a little flicker of light at the end of the quarantine tunnel. Indeed, over just the last few days, Americans have grown less worried, and more optimistic, about the coronavirus pandemic.

But getting out of the lockdown — and out of your shelter-in-place bunker — is not the beginning of the end of the pandemic. It is only the end of the beginning — the very brief beginning of what seems likely to be an epically long saga of disease, fear, and uncertainty.

There are, practically speaking, three paths out of the coronavirus crisis, to a way of life that resembles the one interrupted by COVID-19. The first is a vaccine. The second is effective treatment for the sick — not just effective at the margin, but so effective that catching the disease becomes a considerably less worrisome prospect for even those with comorbidities. The third is through herd immunity, when enough of the population has acquired COVID-19 antibodies that even with a return to “normal” life, there wouldn’t be enough opportunities for disease transmission for the virus to continue circulating through the population.

You have probably heard quite a lot in the past few weeks about testing — in particular the need to deploy widespread testing and possibly what’s called “contact tracing” alongside it, to identify not just those who are sick but those they’ve been in contact with, as well. But a widespread testing regimen — or those “test and trace” programs — isn’t a path out of the pandemic, only out of lockdown. It doesn’t bring us clear of the disease, it is simply a method of waiting in relative safety and security, allowing us to live somewhat more openly, though still under the ever-present threat of infection, until the arrival of one of the other three end points. [Continue reading…]