They're infected, but are they contagious? How contagious?
> The only way to eliminate the disease would have been to lockdown for a while, identify all 'forever infected' people and imprison them for life, and close your borders to outsiders forever.
It seems like you could identify them and then treat them so they wouldn't need to be locked up forever, but there'd be no reason to close your borders as long as you quarantined and tested everyone on entry.
Given that, over a long period, this has shown up in two but hasn’t shown up in other sewer systems that are also being tested, I think we have strong (albeit indirect) evidence of the contagiousness.
> The only way to eliminate the disease would have been to lockdown for a while, identify all 'forever infected' people and imprison them for life, and close your borders to outsiders forever.
It seems like you could identify them and then treat them so they wouldn't need to be locked up forever, but there'd be no reason to close your borders as long as you quarantined and tested everyone on entry.