SENATE BILL: Extending Quarantines for New Arrivals Act (Passed)

[Pericles]

Testing and tracing are essential, but alone they're not enough. That's the basic idea behind this-if we can't keep the case counts down then our testing and tracing system will soon be overwhelmed. I'm not sure how much capacity we will have anyway, I expect a GM update on this soon.

Anyway, I'm open to arguments for ending it on January 1, 2021 but my preference is March 31. This is because we are more likely to have a vaccine by then, and because on January 1 we might either be in the middle of or about to experience a second wave of the virus. It's pretty unrealistic I think to expect a vaccine this year, it's supposed to be a minimum of 12-18 months before we get one if everything goes right and even that would be pretty unprecedented. If there is a miracle Congress would presumably end it early, I just really fear a scenario where the requirements end prematurely due to congressional inactivity or gridlock. I think the vote on extending the requirements should be scheduled for something more like 2 weeks before the scheduled end as we did with the stimulus, so we are reasonably confident in how things will be by the time of the deadline.

[Pericles]

Well if you really insist I'm ok having it be until the end of the year. But I think we need this in the short-term and it's too big of a risk to take to neglect from putting these requirements in asap. We can't just make positive assumptions and count on those being accurate, many countries have suffered greatly already due to that attitude.