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I hate to suggest that but the only short-term solution that seems to work is large-scale extreme response measures, just like China. Here is evidence why it

by mrb 7y ago

I hate to suggest that but the only short-term solution that seems to work is large-scale extreme response measures, just like China. Here is evidence why it works: new cases/day decreasing dramatically since February: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ESywcEKUwAADhcQ?format=png&name=large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ESywcEKUwAADhcQ?format=png&name=... What China did is a complete shutdown and isolation of whole cities, cancellation of public gatherings, prohibition of attendance at school and work, massive mobilization of health and public health personnel as well as military medical units, and rapid construction of entire hospitals. Wuhan, Iran, Italy have shown us that the health care system simply collapses under the huge number of patients needing hospitalization (20% of infected.) So mobilizing healthcare workers, springing up new "hospitals", and limiting spread with extreme responses is the way to go. Unfortunately I predict that western governments are going to be less likely to suggest, deploy, and enforce such massive quarantines. Quarantines impede on civil liberties, and people in the West are very protective of freedom and liberties. I think the average American will NOT be okay with his government telling him he is only authorized to exit his house to go shopping once a week...

andrewla 7y ago
Why do people point to the China response as being a model response, as though that is easily seen. China has had an order of magnitude more deaths and instances than any other country. While you can point to many factors showing why it is disingenuous to look at those raw numbers without context, it seems to me that the burden of proof is on the other side, to show that the China model is actually effective, because naively it looks like it didn't work out too well.
- mrb 7y ago
  Well, look at this chart which speaks volume about how successful China is in containing the outbreak, with new cases per day decreasing dramatically since February: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ESywcEKUwAADhcQ?format=png&name=large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ESywcEKUwAADhcQ?format=png&name=... And look in particular how cases in other countries are starting to explode since the last week or so. Or look at cumulative deaths (outside China): https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ESyyxfiUMAEwMVa?format=png&name=large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ESyyxfiUMAEwMVa?format=png&name=... The growth follows a perfect exponential curve, which suggests other countries have so far been completely unable to even bend the epidemic curve a little bit. It is obvious given this data that we will see 10k deaths outside China by March 20. I have a perfect track record at making such predictions in the past: https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Azorinaq%20%23PredictionWasCorrect&src=typed_query&f=live https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Azorinaq%20%23PredictionW... (short-term predictions are easy to make, long-term not so much)
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - Seenso 7y ago
    You also have to take into account that China probably took the right actions, but their big failure was in timing them poorly. If they'd implemented travel restrictions before Chinese New Year, we probably wouldn't be talking about a pandemic right now.
    - mbesto 7y ago
      Or, ya know, they coulda just prevented wildlife trade via regulation in the first place.
      - Jommi 7y ago
        Yes, we all know that once regulation steps in, the thing regulated is completely stopped!
        mbesto 7y ago
        Regulation doesn't have to be binary. The point of it isn't to eradicate behavior, just lessen it so the risk can be mitigated and contained. Perhaps I should have said "lessened wildlife trade" to be more specific. Regulation sucks until it saves your life.
    - iforgotpassword 7y ago
      Considering the lack of action, or the very delayed manner in which we, the West, start to put up measures to prevent spread, I very highly doubt so. Consider the incubation time of 5 days avg, 14 days max during which you're already infectious. Even if China had reacted quickly, not trying to cover it up, we still wouldn't have known about that for a while. Even without the Chinese new year, I'm pretty sure given how dense and large Chinese cities are, this would have spread eventually either way. And I doubt the rest of the world would have reacted any different in that alternate reality than now. We still have travel with China and Italy today. Why would that have been any different had China handled that differently? It would have been slower, but it would have spread to other countries, I have no doubt about that.
- yibg 7y ago
  China seems to have done well to contain the virus in Hubei. The other major cities like Beijing and Shanghai, while affected by the containment measures were relatively lightly affected by the virus itself. If we can manage that I’d call it a success.
- iforgotpassword 7y ago
  Because China is a good month ahead of the rest of the world, and is much denser populated in the cities (which are also much larger than ours). The initial cover up didn't help either. Once they instated the lockdown, they could test the backlog of people. That took quitea while. But now the spread has pretty much stopped, while everywhere else on this planet it increases day by day. After the initial cover-up got public, the West couldn't get enough of reporting about it, and how this is the reason it could spread so fast, how irresponsible it was, and how it's typical for evil China. Now we have that virus here, plus two month of knowledge about it, and we're still mostly being reactive instead of proactive. In China's defense, when they tried to cover it up, much less was known about the disease, like it's asymptomatic spread. Now the cards are on the table and we're being ignorant, as if ignoring a problem makes it go away. But hey, when things are getting really really ugly for us, we can still go back to blaming China for their initial cover-up. Watch Italy closely the next days, and compare it to China when they were at a similar stage. It will tell you what's to come in your country too. Another thing that's suspicious about Italy is the high CFR of around 6%. It most likely means they're not doing enough testing, only the severe cases, so the rest wanders around the country happily spreading it further.
  - joe_the_user 7y ago
    Absolutely this summarizes the situation. It's worth noting that South Korea also was able to engage in such mass mobilization. Moreover, if the trends continue for a few weeks, China's not going to have an order of magnitude more death anymore. Italy's high CFR sounds like a health care that's broken far more than the Chinese health care system, a system which essentially isn't taking any specific extreme measures (which would be building more hospitals, importing more health care workers, etc).
    - selectodude 7y ago
      Italy also has a demographic curve skewed heavily older than most other nations. Italy is the 2nd oldest country on earth after Japan.
      - 7y ago
- beaunative 7y ago
  I mean, don't just look at the absolute numbers, arguable China has 1/5 of the world's population. I believe the argument to be made here is that most parts in China, excluding Hubei, has a lot less cases than Korea or Italy, when Korea's population is about 3-4% that of China. In most provinces in China there were 0 deaths. Ideally, European countires like Italty are far further away and should have fewer cases than those regions closer to the epicenter, but reality suggest otherwise.
  - scarmig 7y ago
    Italy, Hubei, and South Korea all happen to have around ~60M people. When talking about China's coronavirus response, the numbers really have to be split up into Hubei and non-Hubei.
- oarabbus_ 7y ago
  > China has had an order of magnitude more deaths and instances than any other country. I don't know if you were being colloquial, but this isn't true. China has 80k, Italy 12k cases and the latter is seeing rapid increases.
- yellowapple 7y ago
  Not to mention that China was pretty slow to properly react (nearly 2 months between the start of the outbreak and the start of Wuhan's quarantine, by which point it had already spread to South Korea and Thailand, and likely to Italy), and even outright suppressed the doctors/whistleblowers who originally publicly raised concern about the virus (which the Supreme People's Court even admitted was a bad idea; you know the PRC government done goofed when they're actually willing to admit they made a mistake). The US should be looking at China as a case study on how not to handle the early stages of a pandemic. Instead it seems like we're making the same mistakes (though thankfully at least some areas are being proactive about e.g. shutting down schools).
  - adinobro 7y ago
    You need to get some better sources. The earliest case was found at the start of December but it wasn't correctly identified till the end (they went back and tested existing patients). It wasn't confirmed as being able to spread person to person until the 17th although there was some evidence that it should have been identified on the 11th. (So a delay of either 5 or 10 days rather than 2 months) The doctor didn't raise public concern. He told a few friends and told them not to tell people. The official announcement was made the following day. If you look at the timetable it is significantly better than the SARs response or the N1H1 response so we seem to be learning and making progress which is good.
    - yellowapple 7y ago
      My sources are the same as Wikipedia's, specifically https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_2019%E2%80%9320_coronavirus_pandemic_in_December_2019_%E2%80%93_January_2020 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_2019%E2%80%932... ----- BEGIN WIKIPEDIA QUOTE ----- (30 December) On 30 December 2019, genetic sequencing report of the pathogen of a patient indicated inaccurately the discovery of Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS coronavirus) in the test result.[15] After receiving the test result, multiple doctors in Wuhan shared the information via internet, including Dr. Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist at Wuhan Central Hospital, who posted a warning to alumni from his medical school class via a WeChat online forum that a cluster of seven patients treating within the ophthalmology department had been unsuccessfully treated for symptoms of viral pneumonia and diagnosed with SARS.[20][21][15] Because these patients did not respond to traditional treatments, they were quarantined in an ER department of the Wuhan Central Hospital.[22] In the WeChat forum, Li posted that this cluster of patients appeared to be infected by SARS. Dr. Li posted a snippet of an RNA analysis finding "SARS coronavirus" and extensive bacteria colonies in a patient's airways according to a chat transcript that he and other chat members later shared online. [...] Dr. Li is widely known for the statement he gave before his death exemplifying how the Chinese government botched the containment of the Wuhan coronavirus, stating "There should be more than one voice in a healthy society."[20] The Chinese National Health Commission announced later that evening that 8 doctors engaging in this WeChat forum had been arrested by Wuhan Police and charged with "llegal acts of fabricating, spreading rumors and disrupting social order."[25] Wuhan medical authorities forbade doctors from making public announcements and ordered them to report cases internally.[26] [...] (31 December) Qu Shiqian, a vendor at the Huanan Seafood Market, said government officials had disinfected the premises on 31 December 2019 and told stallholders to wear masks. Qu said he had only learnt of the pneumonia outbreak from media reports. "Previously I thought they had flu," he said. "It should be not serious. We are fish traders. How can we get infected?"[29] "Chinese state television reported that a team of experts from the National Health Commission had arrived in Wuhan on 31 December 2019 to lead the investigation, while the People's Daily said the exact cause remained unclear and it would be premature to speculate."[28][29][38] Chinese state broadcaster CCTV reported that a team of senior health experts had been dispatched to the city of Wuhan and were reported to be "conducting relevant inspection and verification work."[30] Tao Lina, a public health expert and former official with Shanghai's Centre for disease control and prevention, said, "I think we are [now] quite capable of killing it in the beginning phase, given China's disease control system, emergency handling capacity and clinical medicine support."[29] [...] (1 January) According to the Chinese state-sponsored Xinhua News, the Huanan Seafood Market was closed on 1 January 2020 for "regulation."[22] However, in the Consortium's report of 24 January 2020, it was stated that the Huanan Seafood Market had been closed on 1 January 2020 for "cleaning and disinfection."[36] [...] (2 January) On 2 January, 41 admitted hospital patients in Wuhan, China, were confirmed to have contracted (laboratory-confirmed) the 2019-nCoV (Wuhan coronavirus); 27 (66%) patients had direct exposure to Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market.[8] All 41 patients were subsequently relocated from the hospital they had originally been diagnosed in to the Jinyintan Hospital in Wuhan, China.[8] [...] (3 January) On 3 January 2020, Dr. Li Wenliang, the Wuhan ophthalmologist who had been arrested for spreading false "rumors" on WeChat, was summoned to the Wuhan Public Security Bureau where he was told to sign an official confession and admonition letter promising to cease spreading false "rumors" regarding the coronavirus. In the letter, he was accused of "making false comments" that had "severely disturbed the social order". The letter stated, "We solemnly warn you: If you keep being stubborn, with such impertinence, and continue this illegal activity, you will be brought to justice—is that understood?" Dr. Li signed the confession writing: "Yes, I understand."[21] [...] (4 January) The head of the University of Hong Kong's Centre for Infection, Ho Pak-leung, warned that the city should implement the strictest possible monitoring system for a mystery new viral pneumonia that infected dozens of people on the mainland, as it was highly possible that the illness was spreading from human to human. The microbiologist also warned that there could be a surge in cases during the upcoming Chinese New Year. Ho said he hoped the mainland would release more details as soon as possible about the patients infected with the disease, such as their medical history, to help experts analyse the illness and to allow for more effective preventive measures to be put in place.[43] [...] (7 January) Since the outburst of social media discussion of the mysterious pneumonia outbreak in Wuhan, China, Chinese authorities censored the hashtag #WuhanSARS and were now investigating anyone who was allegedly spreading misleading information about the outbreak on social media.[51] [...] (18 January) On the same day, the Wuhan City government held an annual banquet in the Baibuting community celebrating the Chinese New Year with forty thousand families in attendance despite the officials' knowledge of the spread of the Wuhan coronavirus. They shared meals, plates and ate together.[83] On 21 January 2020 when Wuhan mayor Zhou Xianwang was asked on state television why this banquet was held even after the number of cases had risen to 312 he responded, "The reason why the Baibuting community continued to host the banquet this year was based on the previous judgment that the spread of the epidemic was limited between humans, so there was not enough warning."[26] [...] (21 January) After 300 confirmed diagnoses and 6 deaths, Chinese state media warned lower-level officials not to cover up the spread of a new coronavirus.[40] Officials declared that anyone who concealed new cases would "be nailed on the pillar of shame for eternity", the political body responsible for law and order said. Local Chinese officials initially withheld information about the epidemic from the public. It later vastly under-reported the number of people that had been infected, downplayed the risks and failed to provide timely information that experts say could have saved lives. In its commentary published online on Tuesday January 20, 2020, the Communist Party's Central Political and Legal Commission talked of China having learned a "painful lesson" from the SARS epidemic and called for the public to be kept informed. Deception, it warned, could "turn a controllable natural disaster into a man-made disaster".[40] [...] (28 January) China's Supreme People's Court ruled that whistleblower, Li Wenliang, had not committed the crime of spreading "rumors" when on 30 December 2019 he posted to a WeChat forum for medical school alumni that seven patients under his care appeared to have contracted SARS. In their ruling, the Supreme People's Court stated, "If society had at the time believed those 'rumours', and wore masks, used disinfectant and avoided going to the wildlife market as if there were a SARS outbreak, perhaps it would've meant we could better control the coronavirus today," the court said. "Rumours end when there is openness."[221][222] ----- END WIKIPEDIA QUOTE ----- So: > The earliest case was found at the start of December but it wasn't correctly identified till the end (they went back and tested existing patients). By that timeline, it wasn't even correctly identified by the end of December (though the "rumor" Dr. Li et. al. disseminated about it looking like SARS ended up being pretty close). > It wasn't confirmed as being able to spread person to person until the 17th although there was some evidence that it should have been identified on the 11th. (So a delay of either 5 or 10 days rather than 2 months) There's evidence that it should've been recognized as at least potentially spreading person to person by the 3rd, at the very latest (given that not all cases were connected to the Huanan Seafood Market). > The doctor didn't raise public concern. He told a few friends and told them not to tell people. He told an online forum of his fellow alumni, and he (among others) posted transcripts online, drawing the ire of authorities. > The official announcement was made the following day. Yes, after those "rumors" about SARS forced their hand. > If you look at the timetable it is significantly better than the SARs response or the N1H1 response so we seem to be learning and making progress which is good. True, and that's commendable, but even China admits it done goofed. It's great that (as far as we can tell) they've course-corrected and are getting a handle on things, but let's not gloss over how their kneejerk tendency toward censorship and their casual "well we don't know for sure if it spreads human to human so let's pretend we're all safe" attitude around the outbreak directly contributed to what's now officially a global pandemic.
- tigershark 7y ago
  Let’s see who is really naive in a couple of months.
- Udik 7y ago
  > China has had an order of magnitude more deaths and instances than any other country So far.
hef19898 7y ago
I agree and disagree at the same time. Let me tell you why. Extreme measures without a plan and a data basis will certainly make matters worse. We need a plan, which Western countries have. What is somewhat lacking is the basis to implement it. Aggressive testing of everybody would provide this basis, like South Korea does. Which increases my critique points of the response to a total of two, a viable social media campaign to inform people and prevent panic reactions, which could totally provided and carried by tech companies. So, Google, Twitter, Facebook, if you are listening do something good with your social power! And the aggressive testing of people, everyone, starting with contact persons, people having traveled to risk areas and ultimately everyone. Other than that I am quite satisfied, in Europe at least. The US seem to be a different story.
- lbeltrame 7y ago
  > Other than that I am quite satisfied, in Europe at least. Not in Italy. Our government changed emergency plans at least three times since Sunday and as far as I can tell is not aggressive enough in finding contacts and isolating them. The current trend is just to lock most of the people up and hoping the curve flattens.
  - Udik 7y ago
    Italy seems to me the only western country to have taken decisive action. For once I am actually rather proud of my country. What are the other European countries waiting for?
    - lbeltrame 7y ago
      I'm not proud at all: communication was horrible (what do you think you can accomplish by changing things every few days?), caused panic (it's the fault of those who cause confusion, not of the confused), and it was reluctant in getting a no-red tape team up (even "emergency" supplies of respirators needed to go through the stupid bureaucracy). There is a lot that could've done better than the current approach.
citilife 7y ago
Extreme measures are likely doing more harm than good -- as soon as China loosens them, there will be a flood of cases. You can't eradicate a disease that spreads via the air we breath (and can spread to animals). You can slow it, but much like Influenza you're stuck with it forever now. With that in mind, the larger impact is going to be the lack of medicine, food, etc. that comes from a large-scale heavy response. We are just at the beginning. Push for social distancing, but over the next two years we're just going to have to learn to deal with this. It'll mutate, we'll find ways to mitigate damage and we'll have a large loss of life. Push out higher production of medical equipment and push out the best possible safety gear for healthcare workers. On a personal level, try to stay fit, get lots of rest, and try to quickly take care of any other conditions. Stay home if you are sick (to avoid spreading any illness). That's about the extent we can do. Closing schools, closing offices, shutting down the economy is going to be far more damaging than this disease will be.
- ezioamf 7y ago
  Extreme measures is to slow down the first wave of cases so the number of patients needing medical attention is under the local capacity. Death rate is between 0.6% to 8% depending on how you can treat the patients and that requires that you have enough capacity to handle it. Over time we will have better medicines to reduce the need of ICUs and vaccines and then containment will not be necessary but we will continue to handle it as a seasonal disease.
  - paulmd 7y ago
    https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21149215 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21149215 There are approximately 20 full-service ventilators per 100k population in the united states. Let's say 1% of cases require hospitalization and ventilation. That means we can sustain a sick population of 200 per 100k, or 0.2% at any given time. You underestimate just how unprepared we are for this situation. It is not possible to "bend the curve" enough to keep everyone safe (infected below 2% of the population). Full stop, that little chart from bendthecurve.com with the nice flat blue curve that goes under "medical system capacity" will not happen. That's fantasy. By all means we should do everything we can, the more we can slow the disease the fewer people will die, but the happy fantasy scenarios about everybody washes their hands and doesn't go to the sportsball game and we bend the curve enough that our medical system's capacity will be sufficient is just a fantasy. Further, the lower we reduce the reproduction rate, the longer this crisis will last. This is a crass observation, but if you let it burn through the population it'll be done in a few months. If you really "bend that curve" and substantially decrease reproduction rate, then it'll take correspondingly longer to exhaust its susceptible population. That means sustaining quarantine measures for a longer period of time. Researchers point to Coronavirus peaking around June or July. That means it will remain a serious problem through at least August or September ("peak" doesn't mean it's done, it just means it's slowing down). Interventions will extend that further. We need to consider the possibility that quarantine will be required for an extended period. How will this work if we need to turn our economy off for 6 months? Nine months? A year? Grandparent is probably correct that if China loosens its quarantine measures that it's going to bounce back. And in fact that is a problem that everyone has to consider. https://www.ketv.com/article/unmc-models-suggest-covid-19-cases-in-us-may-peak-between-april-and-june-coronavirus-virus/31339926 https://www.ketv.com/article/unmc-models-suggest-covid-19-ca... https://www.itv.com/news/2020-03-03/coronavirus-government-works-to-make-sure-any-covid-19-epidemic-is-delayed-to-summer-writes-robert-peston/ https://www.itv.com/news/2020-03-03/coronavirus-government-w... https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.12.20022566v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.12.20022566v...
slovenlyrobot 7y ago
> Here is evidence why it works: new cases/day decreasing dramatically since February: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ESywcEKUwAADhcQ?format=png&name=.. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ESywcEKUwAADhcQ?format=png&name=.... Such an impressive single day drop, it's almost like they stopped testing people.. Meanwhile, I recommend relying on vastly more credible and less easily falsified sources to judge how China is recovering. If you trust your eyes, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tf-4zQADLS8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tf-4zQADLS8 If you trust TomTom, https://www.tomtom.com/en_gb/traffic-index/wuhan-traffic https://www.tomtom.com/en_gb/traffic-index/wuhan-traffic
- nl 7y ago
  Isn't that showing how well the shutdown of Wuhan is working? No one has claimed the shutdown is over. If anything that makes the number more believable.
- gravelc 7y ago
  Even if testing completely stopped, presumably an over-strained health system would be obvious and almost impossible to hide. I can see why people are extremely resistant to believing anything the Chinese government says, but there seem to be indicators that don't rely on their statements.
  - marcosdumay 7y ago
    So, how strained exactly are China hospitals? Because I certainly don't know it, and there isn't anybody around here talking about this for some reason (and ok, even if there were, it would be hard to know if they are reliable - and yes, the entire world knows the reason, China prohibited talking about it).
    - scarmig 7y ago
      "China hospitals" is a bit broad. From my perspective in Beijing, at least, the hospitals here are on high alert but not at all strained.
- 7y ago
semerda 7y ago
Large-scale extreme response measures are a disaster waiting to happen. 1. 38% of nurses have children at school. Shutdown the country and 1/4 of the US healthcare industry will choose their children over work in a blink. We don't want to put any more pressure on the people working in healthcare. 2. 75% of US companies have now a disrupted supply chain. Yes the cons of outsourcing core economic functions like manufacturing drugs, hospital supplies etc... Mass mania followed by ongoing shopping sprees will set in further draining a crippled supply chain. What we need more of is hygiene education (with strict fines) and detailed data about who, where and how they are affected by the virus. Being politically correct in a time where the world is at the brink of chaos is not going to save anyone. Sometimes hard debates need to be had and tight restrictions enforced. It's sort of like the Trolley problem.
dmagee 7y ago
https://www.databrew.cc/posts/covid https://www.databrew.cc/posts/covid Is a really good blog post on the data behind COVID-19. Once countries get to about 150 cases their trajectories are very similar. So far the USA has not been too different to Italy.
skmurphy 7y ago
Singapore offers a compelling counter example entailing enlisting voluntary cooperation, rigorous testing and contact tracing, price controls on masks. I don't think China's fundamentally totalitarian / martial law approach is the place to start. I think Singapore offers a much much better model for dealing with Wuhan Flu.
- 9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago
  But Singapore also backs up its "voluntary cooperation" with a big stick that they're not afraid to use: quarantine order violations including giving false/incomplete information for contact tracing can result in $10,000 fines and 6 months in jail for a first offence, plus cancelling work visas/residency permits for non-citizens: https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/health/100-a-day-for-those-quarantined-severe-penalties-for-people-who-flout-quarantine https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/health/100-a-day-for-... Apparently -- and this is unconfirmed scuttlebutt -- somebody already landed in hot water for neglecting to tell the authorities about their visits to a red light district. (Which, this being Singapore, are both legal and closely regulated.)
  - skmurphy 7y ago
    That's very different from the martial law that was effectively imposed in China. If you don't follow the law in most countries you will subject to sanctions, it's no different in Singapore. Typhoid Mary was subjected to forcible quarantine in the US https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Mallon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Mallon
    - debian3 7y ago
      It’s just that the sanction in Singapore are much more harsh than in the West. When I visited I noticed that fines are about 10 times higher than in Canada for the same offense. And there is no caning as well.
    - jxramos 7y ago
      that's a fascinating historical case, first time I learned of it. Do we know how exactly Mary spread the disease? Was it unwashed hands or saliva or her breath? How is typhoid transmitted exactly?
cashsterling 7y ago
I think you need to be really careful creating statistics out of thin air, like: "20% of infected people require hospitalization". We don't know how many people in a given region are infected... we only know the positive test cases and all percentages are based upon the positive test cases. There is evidence that a lot of people contract the virus and have no symptoms or very mild symptoms. Reported stats out of various countries/egions also do not account for things like the severity of regional air pollution (Wuhan, Tehran, and Milan have BAD air pollution) or the other key statistics, like "do they smoke?" (lot of smokers in China, Italy, and Iran... just saying). Bad air pollution and smoking tears the crap out of the lungs and makes it much easier to contract respiratory infections. Caution and concern are completely warranted.... significant action needs to be taken to protect all of us, especially our elderly and immune suppressed. But we need to be careful about pushing information that causes a descent into panic.
simonh 7y ago
I think I’m retrospect the severity of the lockdown in China will be seen as a mistake. Many of the steps they took were unnecessarily damaging, and realistically It’s only a matter of time before there’s another outbreak over there, in fact it’s probably already happening. There’s just no way to stop this virus, we can only slow it down.
- mercer 7y ago
  From what I understand, 'slowing it down' is really important, so we can't really tell quite yet how necessary the lockdown in China was. Sure, the virus isn't contained and it will probably return. But how many lives were saved or will be saved because the lockdown 'only' slowed things down? Not saying I have a strong opinion on this; I really have no clue. But at least from what I understand even just slowdown might be worth quite a high cost.
  - simonh 7y ago
    Yes, that’s all true. It’s just a matter of the scale of the cost and benefits. Welding people into their apartments seems excessive, I have to wonder how many old or sick people died or suffered unnecessarily as a result.
classified 7y ago
The rest of the world is definitely not fascist enough in handling this. We should pass worldwide control to the Chinese government.

by mrb 7y ago

andrewla 7y ago

Why do people point to the China response as being a model response, as though that is easily seen. China has had an order of magnitude more deaths and instances than any other country. While you can point to many factors showing why it is disingenuous to look at those raw numbers without context, it seems to me that the burden of proof is on the other side, to show that the China model is actually effective, because naively it looks like it didn't work out too well.

mrb 7y ago
Well, look at this chart which speaks volume about how successful China is in containing the outbreak, with new cases per day decreasing dramatically since February: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ESywcEKUwAADhcQ?format=png&name=large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ESywcEKUwAADhcQ?format=png&name=... And look in particular how cases in other countries are starting to explode since the last week or so. Or look at cumulative deaths (outside China): https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ESyyxfiUMAEwMVa?format=png&name=large https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ESyyxfiUMAEwMVa?format=png&name=... The growth follows a perfect exponential curve, which suggests other countries have so far been completely unable to even bend the epidemic curve a little bit. It is obvious given this data that we will see 10k deaths outside China by March 20. I have a perfect track record at making such predictions in the past: https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Azorinaq%20%23PredictionWasCorrect&src=typed_query&f=live https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Azorinaq%20%23PredictionW... (short-term predictions are easy to make, long-term not so much)
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- Seenso 7y ago
  You also have to take into account that China probably took the right actions, but their big failure was in timing them poorly. If they'd implemented travel restrictions before Chinese New Year, we probably wouldn't be talking about a pandemic right now.
  - mbesto 7y ago
    Or, ya know, they coulda just prevented wildlife trade via regulation in the first place.
    - Jommi 7y ago
      Yes, we all know that once regulation steps in, the thing regulated is completely stopped!
      - mbesto 7y ago
        Regulation doesn't have to be binary. The point of it isn't to eradicate behavior, just lessen it so the risk can be mitigated and contained. Perhaps I should have said "lessened wildlife trade" to be more specific. Regulation sucks until it saves your life.
  - iforgotpassword 7y ago
    Considering the lack of action, or the very delayed manner in which we, the West, start to put up measures to prevent spread, I very highly doubt so. Consider the incubation time of 5 days avg, 14 days max during which you're already infectious. Even if China had reacted quickly, not trying to cover it up, we still wouldn't have known about that for a while. Even without the Chinese new year, I'm pretty sure given how dense and large Chinese cities are, this would have spread eventually either way. And I doubt the rest of the world would have reacted any different in that alternate reality than now. We still have travel with China and Italy today. Why would that have been any different had China handled that differently? It would have been slower, but it would have spread to other countries, I have no doubt about that.
yibg 7y ago
China seems to have done well to contain the virus in Hubei. The other major cities like Beijing and Shanghai, while affected by the containment measures were relatively lightly affected by the virus itself. If we can manage that I’d call it a success.
iforgotpassword 7y ago
Because China is a good month ahead of the rest of the world, and is much denser populated in the cities (which are also much larger than ours). The initial cover up didn't help either. Once they instated the lockdown, they could test the backlog of people. That took quitea while. But now the spread has pretty much stopped, while everywhere else on this planet it increases day by day. After the initial cover-up got public, the West couldn't get enough of reporting about it, and how this is the reason it could spread so fast, how irresponsible it was, and how it's typical for evil China. Now we have that virus here, plus two month of knowledge about it, and we're still mostly being reactive instead of proactive. In China's defense, when they tried to cover it up, much less was known about the disease, like it's asymptomatic spread. Now the cards are on the table and we're being ignorant, as if ignoring a problem makes it go away. But hey, when things are getting really really ugly for us, we can still go back to blaming China for their initial cover-up. Watch Italy closely the next days, and compare it to China when they were at a similar stage. It will tell you what's to come in your country too. Another thing that's suspicious about Italy is the high CFR of around 6%. It most likely means they're not doing enough testing, only the severe cases, so the rest wanders around the country happily spreading it further.
- joe_the_user 7y ago
  Absolutely this summarizes the situation. It's worth noting that South Korea also was able to engage in such mass mobilization. Moreover, if the trends continue for a few weeks, China's not going to have an order of magnitude more death anymore. Italy's high CFR sounds like a health care that's broken far more than the Chinese health care system, a system which essentially isn't taking any specific extreme measures (which would be building more hospitals, importing more health care workers, etc).
  - selectodude 7y ago
    Italy also has a demographic curve skewed heavily older than most other nations. Italy is the 2nd oldest country on earth after Japan.
    - 7y ago
beaunative 7y ago
I mean, don't just look at the absolute numbers, arguable China has 1/5 of the world's population. I believe the argument to be made here is that most parts in China, excluding Hubei, has a lot less cases than Korea or Italy, when Korea's population is about 3-4% that of China. In most provinces in China there were 0 deaths. Ideally, European countires like Italty are far further away and should have fewer cases than those regions closer to the epicenter, but reality suggest otherwise.
- scarmig 7y ago
  Italy, Hubei, and South Korea all happen to have around ~60M people. When talking about China's coronavirus response, the numbers really have to be split up into Hubei and non-Hubei.
oarabbus_ 7y ago
> China has had an order of magnitude more deaths and instances than any other country. I don't know if you were being colloquial, but this isn't true. China has 80k, Italy 12k cases and the latter is seeing rapid increases.
yellowapple 7y ago
Not to mention that China was pretty slow to properly react (nearly 2 months between the start of the outbreak and the start of Wuhan's quarantine, by which point it had already spread to South Korea and Thailand, and likely to Italy), and even outright suppressed the doctors/whistleblowers who originally publicly raised concern about the virus (which the Supreme People's Court even admitted was a bad idea; you know the PRC government done goofed when they're actually willing to admit they made a mistake). The US should be looking at China as a case study on how not to handle the early stages of a pandemic. Instead it seems like we're making the same mistakes (though thankfully at least some areas are being proactive about e.g. shutting down schools).
- adinobro 7y ago
  You need to get some better sources. The earliest case was found at the start of December but it wasn't correctly identified till the end (they went back and tested existing patients). It wasn't confirmed as being able to spread person to person until the 17th although there was some evidence that it should have been identified on the 11th. (So a delay of either 5 or 10 days rather than 2 months) The doctor didn't raise public concern. He told a few friends and told them not to tell people. The official announcement was made the following day. If you look at the timetable it is significantly better than the SARs response or the N1H1 response so we seem to be learning and making progress which is good.
  - yellowapple 7y ago
    My sources are the same as Wikipedia's, specifically https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_2019%E2%80%9320_coronavirus_pandemic_in_December_2019_%E2%80%93_January_2020 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_2019%E2%80%932... ----- BEGIN WIKIPEDIA QUOTE ----- (30 December) On 30 December 2019, genetic sequencing report of the pathogen of a patient indicated inaccurately the discovery of Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS coronavirus) in the test result.[15] After receiving the test result, multiple doctors in Wuhan shared the information via internet, including Dr. Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist at Wuhan Central Hospital, who posted a warning to alumni from his medical school class via a WeChat online forum that a cluster of seven patients treating within the ophthalmology department had been unsuccessfully treated for symptoms of viral pneumonia and diagnosed with SARS.[20][21][15] Because these patients did not respond to traditional treatments, they were quarantined in an ER department of the Wuhan Central Hospital.[22] In the WeChat forum, Li posted that this cluster of patients appeared to be infected by SARS. Dr. Li posted a snippet of an RNA analysis finding "SARS coronavirus" and extensive bacteria colonies in a patient's airways according to a chat transcript that he and other chat members later shared online. [...] Dr. Li is widely known for the statement he gave before his death exemplifying how the Chinese government botched the containment of the Wuhan coronavirus, stating "There should be more than one voice in a healthy society."[20] The Chinese National Health Commission announced later that evening that 8 doctors engaging in this WeChat forum had been arrested by Wuhan Police and charged with "llegal acts of fabricating, spreading rumors and disrupting social order."[25] Wuhan medical authorities forbade doctors from making public announcements and ordered them to report cases internally.[26] [...] (31 December) Qu Shiqian, a vendor at the Huanan Seafood Market, said government officials had disinfected the premises on 31 December 2019 and told stallholders to wear masks. Qu said he had only learnt of the pneumonia outbreak from media reports. "Previously I thought they had flu," he said. "It should be not serious. We are fish traders. How can we get infected?"[29] "Chinese state television reported that a team of experts from the National Health Commission had arrived in Wuhan on 31 December 2019 to lead the investigation, while the People's Daily said the exact cause remained unclear and it would be premature to speculate."[28][29][38] Chinese state broadcaster CCTV reported that a team of senior health experts had been dispatched to the city of Wuhan and were reported to be "conducting relevant inspection and verification work."[30] Tao Lina, a public health expert and former official with Shanghai's Centre for disease control and prevention, said, "I think we are [now] quite capable of killing it in the beginning phase, given China's disease control system, emergency handling capacity and clinical medicine support."[29] [...] (1 January) According to the Chinese state-sponsored Xinhua News, the Huanan Seafood Market was closed on 1 January 2020 for "regulation."[22] However, in the Consortium's report of 24 January 2020, it was stated that the Huanan Seafood Market had been closed on 1 January 2020 for "cleaning and disinfection."[36] [...] (2 January) On 2 January, 41 admitted hospital patients in Wuhan, China, were confirmed to have contracted (laboratory-confirmed) the 2019-nCoV (Wuhan coronavirus); 27 (66%) patients had direct exposure to Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market.[8] All 41 patients were subsequently relocated from the hospital they had originally been diagnosed in to the Jinyintan Hospital in Wuhan, China.[8] [...] (3 January) On 3 January 2020, Dr. Li Wenliang, the Wuhan ophthalmologist who had been arrested for spreading false "rumors" on WeChat, was summoned to the Wuhan Public Security Bureau where he was told to sign an official confession and admonition letter promising to cease spreading false "rumors" regarding the coronavirus. In the letter, he was accused of "making false comments" that had "severely disturbed the social order". The letter stated, "We solemnly warn you: If you keep being stubborn, with such impertinence, and continue this illegal activity, you will be brought to justice—is that understood?" Dr. Li signed the confession writing: "Yes, I understand."[21] [...] (4 January) The head of the University of Hong Kong's Centre for Infection, Ho Pak-leung, warned that the city should implement the strictest possible monitoring system for a mystery new viral pneumonia that infected dozens of people on the mainland, as it was highly possible that the illness was spreading from human to human. The microbiologist also warned that there could be a surge in cases during the upcoming Chinese New Year. Ho said he hoped the mainland would release more details as soon as possible about the patients infected with the disease, such as their medical history, to help experts analyse the illness and to allow for more effective preventive measures to be put in place.[43] [...] (7 January) Since the outburst of social media discussion of the mysterious pneumonia outbreak in Wuhan, China, Chinese authorities censored the hashtag #WuhanSARS and were now investigating anyone who was allegedly spreading misleading information about the outbreak on social media.[51] [...] (18 January) On the same day, the Wuhan City government held an annual banquet in the Baibuting community celebrating the Chinese New Year with forty thousand families in attendance despite the officials' knowledge of the spread of the Wuhan coronavirus. They shared meals, plates and ate together.[83] On 21 January 2020 when Wuhan mayor Zhou Xianwang was asked on state television why this banquet was held even after the number of cases had risen to 312 he responded, "The reason why the Baibuting community continued to host the banquet this year was based on the previous judgment that the spread of the epidemic was limited between humans, so there was not enough warning."[26] [...] (21 January) After 300 confirmed diagnoses and 6 deaths, Chinese state media warned lower-level officials not to cover up the spread of a new coronavirus.[40] Officials declared that anyone who concealed new cases would "be nailed on the pillar of shame for eternity", the political body responsible for law and order said. Local Chinese officials initially withheld information about the epidemic from the public. It later vastly under-reported the number of people that had been infected, downplayed the risks and failed to provide timely information that experts say could have saved lives. In its commentary published online on Tuesday January 20, 2020, the Communist Party's Central Political and Legal Commission talked of China having learned a "painful lesson" from the SARS epidemic and called for the public to be kept informed. Deception, it warned, could "turn a controllable natural disaster into a man-made disaster".[40] [...] (28 January) China's Supreme People's Court ruled that whistleblower, Li Wenliang, had not committed the crime of spreading "rumors" when on 30 December 2019 he posted to a WeChat forum for medical school alumni that seven patients under his care appeared to have contracted SARS. In their ruling, the Supreme People's Court stated, "If society had at the time believed those 'rumours', and wore masks, used disinfectant and avoided going to the wildlife market as if there were a SARS outbreak, perhaps it would've meant we could better control the coronavirus today," the court said. "Rumours end when there is openness."[221][222] ----- END WIKIPEDIA QUOTE ----- So: > The earliest case was found at the start of December but it wasn't correctly identified till the end (they went back and tested existing patients). By that timeline, it wasn't even correctly identified by the end of December (though the "rumor" Dr. Li et. al. disseminated about it looking like SARS ended up being pretty close). > It wasn't confirmed as being able to spread person to person until the 17th although there was some evidence that it should have been identified on the 11th. (So a delay of either 5 or 10 days rather than 2 months) There's evidence that it should've been recognized as at least potentially spreading person to person by the 3rd, at the very latest (given that not all cases were connected to the Huanan Seafood Market). > The doctor didn't raise public concern. He told a few friends and told them not to tell people. He told an online forum of his fellow alumni, and he (among others) posted transcripts online, drawing the ire of authorities. > The official announcement was made the following day. Yes, after those "rumors" about SARS forced their hand. > If you look at the timetable it is significantly better than the SARs response or the N1H1 response so we seem to be learning and making progress which is good. True, and that's commendable, but even China admits it done goofed. It's great that (as far as we can tell) they've course-corrected and are getting a handle on things, but let's not gloss over how their kneejerk tendency toward censorship and their casual "well we don't know for sure if it spreads human to human so let's pretend we're all safe" attitude around the outbreak directly contributed to what's now officially a global pandemic.
tigershark 7y ago
Let’s see who is really naive in a couple of months.
Udik 7y ago
> China has had an order of magnitude more deaths and instances than any other country So far.

hef19898 7y ago

I agree and disagree at the same time. Let me tell you why. Extreme measures without a plan and a data basis will certainly make matters worse. We need a plan, which Western countries have. What is somewhat lacking is the basis to implement it. Aggressive testing of everybody would provide this basis, like South Korea does. Which increases my critique points of the response to a total of two, a viable social media campaign to inform people and prevent panic reactions, which could totally provided and carried by tech companies. So, Google, Twitter, Facebook, if you are listening do something good with your social power! And the aggressive testing of people, everyone, starting with contact persons, people having traveled to risk areas and ultimately everyone. Other than that I am quite satisfied, in Europe at least. The US seem to be a different story.

lbeltrame 7y ago
> Other than that I am quite satisfied, in Europe at least. Not in Italy. Our government changed emergency plans at least three times since Sunday and as far as I can tell is not aggressive enough in finding contacts and isolating them. The current trend is just to lock most of the people up and hoping the curve flattens.
- Udik 7y ago
  Italy seems to me the only western country to have taken decisive action. For once I am actually rather proud of my country. What are the other European countries waiting for?
  - lbeltrame 7y ago
    I'm not proud at all: communication was horrible (what do you think you can accomplish by changing things every few days?), caused panic (it's the fault of those who cause confusion, not of the confused), and it was reluctant in getting a no-red tape team up (even "emergency" supplies of respirators needed to go through the stupid bureaucracy). There is a lot that could've done better than the current approach.

citilife 7y ago

Extreme measures are likely doing more harm than good -- as soon as China loosens them, there will be a flood of cases. You can't eradicate a disease that spreads via the air we breath (and can spread to animals). You can slow it, but much like Influenza you're stuck with it forever now. With that in mind, the larger impact is going to be the lack of medicine, food, etc. that comes from a large-scale heavy response. We are just at the beginning. Push for social distancing, but over the next two years we're just going to have to learn to deal with this. It'll mutate, we'll find ways to mitigate damage and we'll have a large loss of life. Push out higher production of medical equipment and push out the best possible safety gear for healthcare workers. On a personal level, try to stay fit, get lots of rest, and try to quickly take care of any other conditions. Stay home if you are sick (to avoid spreading any illness). That's about the extent we can do. Closing schools, closing offices, shutting down the economy is going to be far more damaging than this disease will be.

ezioamf 7y ago
Extreme measures is to slow down the first wave of cases so the number of patients needing medical attention is under the local capacity. Death rate is between 0.6% to 8% depending on how you can treat the patients and that requires that you have enough capacity to handle it. Over time we will have better medicines to reduce the need of ICUs and vaccines and then containment will not be necessary but we will continue to handle it as a seasonal disease.
- paulmd 7y ago
  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21149215 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21149215 There are approximately 20 full-service ventilators per 100k population in the united states. Let's say 1% of cases require hospitalization and ventilation. That means we can sustain a sick population of 200 per 100k, or 0.2% at any given time. You underestimate just how unprepared we are for this situation. It is not possible to "bend the curve" enough to keep everyone safe (infected below 2% of the population). Full stop, that little chart from bendthecurve.com with the nice flat blue curve that goes under "medical system capacity" will not happen. That's fantasy. By all means we should do everything we can, the more we can slow the disease the fewer people will die, but the happy fantasy scenarios about everybody washes their hands and doesn't go to the sportsball game and we bend the curve enough that our medical system's capacity will be sufficient is just a fantasy. Further, the lower we reduce the reproduction rate, the longer this crisis will last. This is a crass observation, but if you let it burn through the population it'll be done in a few months. If you really "bend that curve" and substantially decrease reproduction rate, then it'll take correspondingly longer to exhaust its susceptible population. That means sustaining quarantine measures for a longer period of time. Researchers point to Coronavirus peaking around June or July. That means it will remain a serious problem through at least August or September ("peak" doesn't mean it's done, it just means it's slowing down). Interventions will extend that further. We need to consider the possibility that quarantine will be required for an extended period. How will this work if we need to turn our economy off for 6 months? Nine months? A year? Grandparent is probably correct that if China loosens its quarantine measures that it's going to bounce back. And in fact that is a problem that everyone has to consider. https://www.ketv.com/article/unmc-models-suggest-covid-19-cases-in-us-may-peak-between-april-and-june-coronavirus-virus/31339926 https://www.ketv.com/article/unmc-models-suggest-covid-19-ca... https://www.itv.com/news/2020-03-03/coronavirus-government-works-to-make-sure-any-covid-19-epidemic-is-delayed-to-summer-writes-robert-peston/ https://www.itv.com/news/2020-03-03/coronavirus-government-w... https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.12.20022566v1 https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.12.20022566v...

slovenlyrobot 7y ago

> Here is evidence why it works: new cases/day decreasing dramatically since February: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ESywcEKUwAADhcQ?format=png&name=.. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ESywcEKUwAADhcQ?format=png&name=.... Such an impressive single day drop, it's almost like they stopped testing people.. Meanwhile, I recommend relying on vastly more credible and less easily falsified sources to judge how China is recovering. If you trust your eyes, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tf-4zQADLS8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tf-4zQADLS8 If you trust TomTom, https://www.tomtom.com/en_gb/traffic-index/wuhan-traffic https://www.tomtom.com/en_gb/traffic-index/wuhan-traffic

nl 7y ago
Isn't that showing how well the shutdown of Wuhan is working? No one has claimed the shutdown is over. If anything that makes the number more believable.
gravelc 7y ago
Even if testing completely stopped, presumably an over-strained health system would be obvious and almost impossible to hide. I can see why people are extremely resistant to believing anything the Chinese government says, but there seem to be indicators that don't rely on their statements.
- marcosdumay 7y ago
  So, how strained exactly are China hospitals? Because I certainly don't know it, and there isn't anybody around here talking about this for some reason (and ok, even if there were, it would be hard to know if they are reliable - and yes, the entire world knows the reason, China prohibited talking about it).
  - scarmig 7y ago
    "China hospitals" is a bit broad. From my perspective in Beijing, at least, the hospitals here are on high alert but not at all strained.
7y ago

semerda 7y ago

Large-scale extreme response measures are a disaster waiting to happen. 1. 38% of nurses have children at school. Shutdown the country and 1/4 of the US healthcare industry will choose their children over work in a blink. We don't want to put any more pressure on the people working in healthcare. 2. 75% of US companies have now a disrupted supply chain. Yes the cons of outsourcing core economic functions like manufacturing drugs, hospital supplies etc... Mass mania followed by ongoing shopping sprees will set in further draining a crippled supply chain. What we need more of is hygiene education (with strict fines) and detailed data about who, where and how they are affected by the virus. Being politically correct in a time where the world is at the brink of chaos is not going to save anyone. Sometimes hard debates need to be had and tight restrictions enforced. It's sort of like the Trolley problem.

dmagee 7y ago

https://www.databrew.cc/posts/covid https://www.databrew.cc/posts/covid Is a really good blog post on the data behind COVID-19. Once countries get to about 150 cases their trajectories are very similar. So far the USA has not been too different to Italy.

skmurphy 7y ago

Singapore offers a compelling counter example entailing enlisting voluntary cooperation, rigorous testing and contact tracing, price controls on masks. I don't think China's fundamentally totalitarian / martial law approach is the place to start. I think Singapore offers a much much better model for dealing with Wuhan Flu.

9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago
But Singapore also backs up its "voluntary cooperation" with a big stick that they're not afraid to use: quarantine order violations including giving false/incomplete information for contact tracing can result in $10,000 fines and 6 months in jail for a first offence, plus cancelling work visas/residency permits for non-citizens: https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/health/100-a-day-for-those-quarantined-severe-penalties-for-people-who-flout-quarantine https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/health/100-a-day-for-... Apparently -- and this is unconfirmed scuttlebutt -- somebody already landed in hot water for neglecting to tell the authorities about their visits to a red light district. (Which, this being Singapore, are both legal and closely regulated.)
- skmurphy 7y ago
  That's very different from the martial law that was effectively imposed in China. If you don't follow the law in most countries you will subject to sanctions, it's no different in Singapore. Typhoid Mary was subjected to forcible quarantine in the US https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Mallon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Mallon
  - debian3 7y ago
    It’s just that the sanction in Singapore are much more harsh than in the West. When I visited I noticed that fines are about 10 times higher than in Canada for the same offense. And there is no caning as well.
  - jxramos 7y ago
    that's a fascinating historical case, first time I learned of it. Do we know how exactly Mary spread the disease? Was it unwashed hands or saliva or her breath? How is typhoid transmitted exactly?

cashsterling 7y ago

I think you need to be really careful creating statistics out of thin air, like: "20% of infected people require hospitalization". We don't know how many people in a given region are infected... we only know the positive test cases and all percentages are based upon the positive test cases. There is evidence that a lot of people contract the virus and have no symptoms or very mild symptoms. Reported stats out of various countries/egions also do not account for things like the severity of regional air pollution (Wuhan, Tehran, and Milan have BAD air pollution) or the other key statistics, like "do they smoke?" (lot of smokers in China, Italy, and Iran... just saying). Bad air pollution and smoking tears the crap out of the lungs and makes it much easier to contract respiratory infections. Caution and concern are completely warranted.... significant action needs to be taken to protect all of us, especially our elderly and immune suppressed. But we need to be careful about pushing information that causes a descent into panic.

simonh 7y ago

I think I’m retrospect the severity of the lockdown in China will be seen as a mistake. Many of the steps they took were unnecessarily damaging, and realistically It’s only a matter of time before there’s another outbreak over there, in fact it’s probably already happening. There’s just no way to stop this virus, we can only slow it down.

mercer 7y ago
From what I understand, 'slowing it down' is really important, so we can't really tell quite yet how necessary the lockdown in China was. Sure, the virus isn't contained and it will probably return. But how many lives were saved or will be saved because the lockdown 'only' slowed things down? Not saying I have a strong opinion on this; I really have no clue. But at least from what I understand even just slowdown might be worth quite a high cost.
- simonh 7y ago
  Yes, that’s all true. It’s just a matter of the scale of the cost and benefits. Welding people into their apartments seems excessive, I have to wonder how many old or sick people died or suffered unnecessarily as a result.

classified 7y ago

The rest of the world is definitely not fascist enough in handling this. We should pass worldwide control to the Chinese government.