France and Spain and Italy and the UK and the Netherlands and Belgium (among many others) all have way more per capita new cases than the US does right now. Would you consider these competent developed nations?
I do. Because they are actually working to suppress spread of the virus. Also, 'right now' is pretty important here. The UK only passed the US again in the past fortnight, before that the US was ahead in this metric since March.
Please. Letting a virus spread has never been a good idea when the stakes are this high. The AIDS crisis became a pandemic because Reagan's team ignored it until it became a public health disaster. Measles outbreaks have become rampant thanks to vaccine refusal and an inclination to ignore public health advice. COVID-19 is a coronavirus, and all evidence suggests that it will continue to mutate year after year, rendering vaccines ineffective after a couple of years.
For the vaccines to be effective, it would far better to constrict the disease to a small infected population, so that they could be vaccinated. Otherwise, new strains and quasispecies of the virus will continue to develop every few months, and thwart efforts to treat it much in the same way influenza does. We have barely any effective antivirals against influenza, and require new vaccines every year.
What you are proposing is not doable with contact restrictions. Accepting reality is not a policy that kills people, instead it will save us from a lot of bitterness and unrest.
And yes, I hope that as few people as possible will get sick from COVID-19 and we should try to hold up the spread of the virus and the collapse of our health systems. But the sooner we say goodbye to the illusion of suppressing the virus at this stage of the epidemic, the healthier.
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