I Have a Plan for That!

One of the questions that must be answered is; what next. We have to make certain assumptions.

1. It will take 12-18 months to get a vaccine and distribute it. Worse if we rely on the Government. Remember the CDC.

2. We cannot just do nothing everywhere for that period. First it would kill the economy and second it makes no sense, Government Doc excluded.

3. We must have the ability to test on a large scale on an ongoing basis.

4. Right now only about 0.6 %% of the people are or have been infected. So why punish the other 99.4 %!

5. Solution, simple lay out a plan to get back to work. Carefully.

Now the problem is simple. We do the following:

1. Recognize that there are 3000 counties in the US

2. Recognize that there are 330,000,000 people

3. That means on average there are 110,000 people per county. Yes I know this is just an average so we can adjust accordingly.

4. We then need to do 500 tests per week per county to get a reasonable confidence interval for the tests. This number of tests will yield an assurance that we have some compliance of prevalence.

5. Set the prevalence compliance to say 0.6 % Frankly you can choose whatever you like.

6. If a county is in compliance with a 95% confidence interval then they can stay open until next test.

7. If not then mitigation is needed, namely some form of shut down.

8. This process lasts until we get to 80% immunized when Herd Immunity kicks in.

9. Each community knows their score so no surprises.

Now where did we get this? Simple, from basic statistics we have a confidence interval for a binomial test in large numbers as:

 Then we would get confidence intervals at 0.6% as follows:

The algorithm then looks as follows:

Namely we have a simple feed back algorithm where each county knows its status as described above. Any county in compliance remains open. Otherwise we enter mitigation, namely stay at home orders as we have been doing. The information must be publicly available and totally transparent. I know it is difficult when the Government is involved but let's try.

This plan opens up most likely a few thousand counties in a week. If they people wash their hands etc it can remain open. If not, then they are at home until the number returns to the acceptable limit.

This plan is simple, readily understood like baseball scores, and everyone knows where they are. It also puts the country back to work based upon facts, simple facts.