Philosophy is the (surprisingly fertile) dowager empress of the sciences.
Physics may be the king, and Math the queen, but they always seem to be grinding their teeth and wishing that old biddy Philosophy would just finally die one day, and hand over the last her her powers, and she never really does.
I scrolled to the bottom of the discussion, and have been scrolling up... THIS article is the best article on the subject I've read so far (including cited comparisons to other situations that are similar but slightly different) and I regret that I have but one upvote to give it.
I would argue that "the general public" paying a lot of attention to covid isn't THAT important.
The public's inattention on the topic of covid might almost be a blessing for key policy makers whose jurisdiction encompasses entire epidemiologically dense networks of people.
There are very few "epidemiologically coherent entities" in the western hemisphere that have the coordination capacity to solve covid, and "the ~328 million people in America" is not such an entity.
Sprawling metro areas (often crossing state boundaries) would need to form a new layer of government, that rivals many states, that covers entire physical metropolitan geographies, which we can't do quickly enough, so they might become green zones later in the process, if ever?
Rural counties? Perhaps small cities with urban growth boundaries AND a single municipal government? Incorporated towns with a single mayor. Possibly universities (depending on their capacity for epidemiological isolation)?
University re-opening committees of non-commuter-campuses MIGHT have the capacity and incentive to prevent their dorms from becoming plague zones. My current best hope is that some examples of this will arise in the next month or two at a small scale, and then (if we are lucky) they'll function as a templates for scaled up versions of the same thing in 2021.
Zeph Landau's guest post on Scott Aaronson's blog is the best US-college-centric policy document I know of regarding (1) the practical challenges around pooled screening, and (2) how to navigate these challenges.