A bit of a long read but interesting and thoughtful. Thanks!

The problem with containment/quarantine (as with border enforcement of all kinds) is that all borders are inevitably porous. Outside a lab environment, there ain’t no such thing as an hermetic seal. So containment is only ever partially successful; it’s not physically, socially, or economically possible to turn the whole world into a cleanroom. At some point the immediate, transient benefits of containment cross over into diminishing returns… and someone (who, I wonder) will decide that it isn’t worth keeping half the world in lockdown for a year. Agree with the author that it may be difficult to come to consensus on that point, and the disagreements could get nasty.

Interesting that S Korea’s government responded so pro-actively and competently that they never needed the whole containment (self-isolate, social-distancing, fear-mongering) strategy.

Much of the Official Strategy (except in a sane country like SK) plays on fear and “stranger danger”, and hafta say I don’t like the bits of the human hind- and mid-brain that are being stimulated by the official pronouncements; the fear of the Stranger as Contaminated, of the Other as carrier of disease, is very ancient and can become quite terrible in humans. That age-old pattern — given its historical track record — frightens me more than the virus, actually.