What if there’s no isolation

If a large number of people get infected at the same time, it will inevitably lead to a crisis that overwhelms the healthcare system. This kind of crisis isn't what you might imagine—people lining up in orderly queues—but rather a situation where there's no place to line up at all.

If you were a doctor, you'd have two choices today. Option one: see an elderly COVID patient, and he'd give you a house, right by the hospital entrance. Option two: perform heart surgery on a child from a poor family. His parents would be eternally grateful—or it could easily turn into a medical dispute.

Which would you choose?

The total number of doctors is fixed. If patients suddenly flood in, even if they only appear to have coughs and colds, the impact on the existing healthcare system would be far greater than you could ever imagine.

At that point, it wouldn't be just about one or two people struggling to get a hospital bed for childbirth.

When it's just one or two people who can't get a hospital bed, that's a management problem. Management problems can be addressed with penalties and corrections, and at least there's hope for improvement.

But when a true healthcare system collapse hits, how will you solve it? By relying on your sharp-tongued persuasion?

Over the past two years, why have we insisted on a dynamic zero-COVID policy? Why maintain contact tracing and impose lockdowns when necessary? Why?

We've been building a dam with human effort to hold back a catastrophic flood.

Who are we holding it back for? For the vast majority of ordinary people who, when it matters most, simply can't pull out a few million dollars in cash from their pockets.