Distanced

I went for a walk today, as maintaining one's exercise regimen is permissible under Governor Inslee's "Stay Home, Stay Healthy" order and the last thing I need is to put on weight. Things were, of course, quite a bit quieter than "normal," but downtown wasn't quite the ghost town that one would expect. This is in large part, I suspect, due to the number of new apartments that have gone in recently, so now there is a pretty sizable population in downtown Bothell that wasn't there a few years ago.

Still, one wonders what the place will look like when everything is said and done. To allow commercial life to resume is going to require that testing for COVID-19 become both widely available and ubiquitous. Contrary to some media reports that I've come across, distancing, in and of itself, cannot directly suppress the virus. Without some other way of either providing mass immunity or carefully tracking cases, community mitigation strategies (otherwise known as nonpharmaceutical interventions) can only buy time to develop pharmaceutical interventions, such as a vaccine. And while I think that society can sustain the current measures for some time, if the only option is waiting until a vaccine can go into mass production and distribution, that might be a problem.

I say might, because I don't have enough information to say anything else. I presume someone does, but I haven't had the time to sift through everything to find it.