4 ms·
Containment was already impossible when news first broke in the west in late January. At that point the virus had already escaped not just Wuhan, but China. W
by nostrademons 7y ago
Containment was already impossible when news first broke in the west in late January. At that point the virus had already escaped not just Wuhan, but China. With airborne spread, r0 of 3-5, asymptomatic carriers, and ~2 weeks between infection and when it becomes severe enough to warrant medical treatment, it's virtually impossible to trace all infections. All it takes is one getting through screening and you have a massive epidemic - that seems to be what happened in Italy. Epidemiologists have estimated that it's been circulating in the Seattle area since at least mid-January - that was about 10 days before any news of it hit Western media.
For some reason people tend not to react well when told "You will get it. Guaranteed. There's nothing you can do about it. If you're young and healthy you have about a 1 in 500 chance of dying from it; if you're old and sick it could be as much as 1 in 4." It may not be that your doctor thinks it's OK when old people die, just that it's inevitable, and it's not worth worrying about inevitable things.
- gus_massa 7y agoI agree. Another point is that the doctor probably know about the dead rate of the flu, that is lower but not much lower https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza#Prognosis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influenza#Prognosis (There is a vaccine for the flu, it will not help against corvid-19, but this may be a bad year to get a bad flu while the hospital is full of covid-19 patients.)
- eveningcoffee 7y agoI think it is very stretching to say that <1% is not much lower than 8-14% (depending on the age bracket).
- gus_massa 7y agoIt's 8-14% of the cases that are confirmed by a special analysis in the lab, so it's a 8-14% of the cases that are bad enough to justify the cost of the analysis. In general population for the same age slots, it is probably (hopefully) much lower.
- eveningcoffee 7y agoI think if people really think that all human life should be valued then every country would have implemented measures similar to China. I thought first that it is incompetence but apparently it is possibly just matter of values.
- nostrademons 7y agoChina doesn't value human life - if they did they would never let air pollution in Wuhan get to the point where a good day is like the Bay Area when all of California is on fire, or have opened their arms to Phillip Morris such that > 50% of Chinese men are smokers. China values political survival, and they know that if dead bodies are piling up on the streets, the days of the regime are numbered. That's why you see all these harsh quarantines now. Eventually they'll drop the quarantines, the coronavirus will re-infect China (because that's what viruses do), and about 20M people will die, quietly.
- eveningcoffee 7y agoI do not agree or disagree but I have thought that what strategy the Chinese have in mind. They took very hard measures to contain the virus inside China but they did not close the borders to not let it spread out of the China. Do they plan to close the borders now to keep the virus out of China as this would be politically more acceptable for them? Because if there is pandemic then also they should be expected to have it again, or they will use some measures to keep it happening?
- csomar 7y agoI'm not sure I agree. China has successfully contained the virus despite being the source of the virus. Containment takes an extra-ordinary effort but it's feasible. I think the question is: Do you want to contain this and potentially stop the economy or do you want to let the elderly die. The west definitively pick the latter.