Yesterday I read an excellent article by Tomas Pueyo titled, “Coronavirus: The Hammer and the Dance.” It is pretty long, but it is the best single thought piece I have seen on what to do about the coronavirus problem. Pueyo is the author of an alarmist article on the severity of the coronavirus a week ago that went viral and gained him a large audience. I hope this article gets as many reads as the previous one.

The main thrust of the piece is an outline of a plan for dealing with the problem, one that is similar to what I have argued in some comments here. (That, of course, is what makes him so wise.) His basic strategy, indicated by his title “The Hammer and the Dance,” is to implement immediately a lockdown (the Hammer) in the short term, to last only a few weeks, followed by some more relaxed strategy (the Dance) modeled after the efforts of countries like South Korea and Singapore. The short term lockdown, similar to what California has recently imposed, would be implemented not because it is a good idea in itself (he thinks it is not), but because we are at present so woefully unprepared to do anything more moderate, such as widespread testing, and quarantining and tracing the social contacts of identified cases. Exactly what the “Dance” would consist of is something we would have to figure out; he is necessarily vague about this, since we as yet know so little about what we’re fighting. Still, I find his strategy hopeful, and it is the most sensible program I have yet seen.