[ExI] Closing subways

[Keith Henson]

spike jones via extropy-chat wrote:

> My suggestion is to stop all public mass transit, all buses, taxis,
> trains, subways, everything.  Then, everyone else goes back to work and
> business.  I know that still leaves a lot of people out of work and out of
> luck.  I get that.  I don?t have all the answers.  But I have that one:
> public transit is the bad guy here,

Spike, this is total nonsense.  It's the damn virus, not public
transport that is the bad guy.

Unless a treatment or a vaccine comes along, the only effect of
crowing people together is to speed up how fast the virus burns
through the population.  (Assuming we can't control the infection
spread.)  Right now it is the poor who live and work in crowded places
who are getting hit, but eventually, it will burn through those
segments of the population then move on to upper economic classes.

NYC grew up on public transport.  There is no way to get around public
transport short of abandoning the city.

If we wanted to do something useful, we would be thinking about
inexpensive ways to keep people from inhaling the virus particles.
There are certainly expensive ways to do it, a battery-powered
personal air filter system goes for about $1800.

Keith