How European countries are planning to end their lockdowns
A sustainable exit strategy: Managing uncertainty, minimising harm
By: Tony Blair Institute for Global Change
Testing and tracing is not enough?
According to John Cochrane there are many questions that need to be answered before lockdowns are lifted:
- With confidentiality rules protecting everyone’s health information, how can people who test positive be forced to quarantine especially if they face economic hardship?
- As for tracing, who wants to tell someone from the government every person they’ve met in the last two weeks? Knowing the government is likely to quarantine them and ask more questions?
- Will there be blanket travel bans or data-driven nuanced travel bans?
An effective public health response needs a detailed, competent bureaucracy, temporary relief from thousands of privacy regulations — and swift assurance that those privacies are reinstated when it’s over — and enforcement in order to something useful with the tests. I doubt Americans will put up with the enforcement.
Ready to reopen?
By: John Cochrane – Stanford University
Tracing: a matter of trust
A recent Chicago Booth-Kellogg School Financial Trust survey conducted on 1000 Americans found that:
- 55 percent of the people are unwilling to be tracked by the government even if this results in two additional months of lockdown;
- Only 30 percent of the respondents trust the US federal government, and those people are much more likely to accept to be tracked.
Most importantly, the government has to tell Americans the truth: we have already lost the privacy we are longing to protect. We lost it when we blindly signed all the terms of use that Facebook, Google, Apple, and many other digital platforms have put in front of us. We are already tracked, listened to, spied in every instant of our lives to allow digital ads to target us more accurately. Why shouldn’t we want to be tracked to save lives and the economy?
Back to Work? The Political Preparation for “Phase 2” of the Pandemic Is a Matter of Trust
By: Efraim Benmelech, Paola Sapienza, Luigi Zingales – Northwestern University, University of Chicago
