Planning for daily life isn’t an experiment that’s carried out in a medical cleanroom where we can observe from afar and make a decision based on scenario planning and well-planned operations. The real world is messy. Dirty data, unpredictable human behavior, panic, and mutations are all vectors you can’t see coming. 

We are now at the point with Covid-19, where statistical models and algorithms don’t help anymore. They were useful in the beginning when we didn’t have a lot of information, and we needed directional guidance. The answers are now in the dirt, on the street, and in the hospital rooms. It’s time for a brute force on the ground response. We saw this approach work in China. It wasn’t pretty, and there will be lasting damage, but that’s the cost of a brute force containment approach. 

Photo by Lucas Vasques on Unsplash