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Strip away media narrative on both sides, an impartial timeline would be: Wuhan medical community recognized a new pneumonia of unclear cause in late December
by dirtyid 7y ago
Strip away media narrative on both sides, an impartial timeline would be:
Wuhan medical community recognized a new pneumonia of unclear cause in late December during winter and the height of influenza season. The novel Corona Virus was identified, WHO was notified, the genome was sequenced. This took roughly 1 week. Then it took 3 more weeks of "stability management" before central government quarantined WuHan and essentially shutdown the entire country right before the most important holiday of the year and the largest annual human migration.
4 weeks for identification to evaluation to 3 months of aggressive techno-authoritarian quarantine, and assuming 2nd wave and import cases can be managed until the vaccine - China just demonstrated the first civilization model in human history to be able to suppress a virus of this magnitude in large countries. Other countries are only recently adopting the war analogy, China executed it on a dime. How they'll fair in rebooting society is unknown.
Was there missteps? Yes. Could they have done better? Not by much IMO. Every misstep with Chinese characteristics is being repeated just as worst in other countries with their cultural characteristics. The overall response as been not as agile (if there a response at all), despite having ample notice and more information.
The retrospect of this global health crisis is going to be interesting, China and a handful of islands managed to successful crush the curve, complacent developed countries may or may not successful spread the curve, and all the developing countries get rapid herd immunity because like the Spanish flu, they have no other choice. 1.4 billion people without herd immunity among a globalized world with immunity is going to be a conundrum though.
- tluyben2 7y agoHerd community for covid19 is speculation right? There is no proof that that will happen is there? It is a (dangerous) gamble at this point as I understand it.
- jjeaff 7y agoAssuming patients can't get reinfected with the virus, then herd immunity will definitely work. But for herd immunity to occur, a very large portion of the herd needs to get infected. And I would assume that proportion is greater, the more infectious a disease is. The idea with the lockdowns is to keep the rate of infection slow enough that hospitals can handle the influx of cases.
- YZF 7y agoLots of people left Wuhan before the lockdown though. Also lots of people still travelled for the Chinese New Year internally. January 10th is the beginning of travel season, Wuhan was locked down on the 23rd: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_2019%E2%80%9320_coronavirus_pandemic_in_November_2019_%E2%80%93_January_2020 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_2019%E2%80%932...
- dirtyid 7y agoLocking down Hubei after 600 cases / ~3weeks is extremely expedient for an utterly unprecedented response. NYC was at 10k+ cases before they implement a light lock down, 60 days after Hubei, they're still meandering through half-measures. That's a comparatively severe response outside of China. Many considerations in a region of 60million, i.e Jan 17th was the regional two sessions meeting. The early migration and WuHan being regional hub no doubt precipitated the decision to lock-down that fast. China locked down most of the country after ~30 days. Outside of a few city-states or island nations, we have ample counter-examples that no other country has responded as agile as China. Many don't even have a meaning response plan in place.
- emmelaich 7y ago> new pneumonia of unclear cause in late December The earliest known case was 1 Dec. There were suspected cases going back at least as mid-November.
- rfoo 7y agoThe earliest known case, just as the mid-November suspected cases you cited, is a suspected case. If you read the original paper claiming the Dec 1 case, you are going to see they made the conclusion based on symptoms and epidemiology. This is something which can only happen retrospectively. It does not mean someone can magically realize there is a novel virus when the first few patients just showed up.
- emmelaich 7y agoOK, the first known case was 8 Dec. Do you doubt that health officials in Wuhan were - to put it mildly, incurious about the novel flu like sickness?
- rfoo 7y agoThe health officials surely isn't (and won't be) curious about isolated flu-like cases, they can't because there are simply too many such patients, to the point it is not realistic to track them all. The doctors who saw these cases are certainly curious, but unless one sees a number of related cases with similar symptoms, "novel infectious disease" would not be among the first few explanations one turns to. There are simply too many other possible reasons (and more probable in routines) for flu-like symptoms. Unfortunately due to the nature of this virus early cases are indeed pretty isolated. From what I read, the virus was first detected by an mNGS run in late Dec, which as far is still a "fuck I believe this must be caused by microbe but I'm seriously out of idea what could this be"-thing to Chinese doctors.
- emmelaich 7y agohttps://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-51364382 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-51364382