Wait, what, just right? First we laughed at China, downplayed it, now we ignore them again? (And if not China, why not look more at Taiwan, South Korea, Japan,

Wait, what, just right? First we laughed at China, downplayed it, now we ignore them again? (And if not China, why not look more at Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, there seem to be ways to keep the load for the health system reasonable enough .. but what I also miss too much is how we go forward, not just flatten the curve, but also rump up hospitals, and masks for everyone, and what else it takes to get into some reasonable state as before). Just translating http://blog.fefe.de/?ts=a089a4d9 http://blog.fefe.de/?ts=a089a4d9 from someone who claims to be China insider via his wife: The reason why China thinks it can lower its shutdown is because they believe they control it now well enough. What is not clear to us in the West is how draconian but efficient they did the lockdown and quarantine: - Immediate true and complete lockdown of whole China. They do not agree what we understand as lockdown in Italy and other European countries. - In Shandong (80.000.000 inhabitants) they started tracking by licenses plates, train tickets and mobile phones all 70.000 persons that were in Wuhan and sent them to quarantine. That is like if Germany would have sent anyone who was in Italy on vacation into quarantine start of February. - Every known infected case had 5 people working on it that via big data, tracking and interviews identified every contact person and put these into quarantine. - As there was an infection case in a block, the whole house (30 flats) came for 14 days into quarantine into a hotel, they disinfected the whole house, and everyone else in the block (500 flats) were fever checked daily by security. - Patrols in Wuhan arrested everyone breaking quarantine. - Fever checking at every checkpoint. But there was not only force, they are getting daily SMS to their chinese SIM: - current state of epdemics - state of food stocks of the province and there is no reason to hamster - inform that all health costs due to corona will be paid - how many face masks are produced each day - that any price gouging is strictly forbidden, with a hotline you can call to report violations - and general tips for behaviour They partly paid people also a month wage if they went into hospital for testing/reporting their corona. What we don't understand in Europe is that Chinese government looked at Wuhan for few weeks and then decided that the cheapest way out of this will be this dramatic complete lockdown. Everyone travelling into China btw must go into 2 weeks quarantine. Thus they feel safe from a second big outbreak wave. -- Let's see if that works (keep in mind everyone there is wearing masks, while not perfect, they likely have a huge impact on reproduction coefficient on large scale). I believe we should have learned much earlier when everyone was reporting that they e.g. build a hospital ultra quick, and then sent everything into complete lockdown, that they maybe had known what they have at their hands. By doing our small steps, and also not having massive testing and good behaviour available like South Korea, I'm afraid, it will just take longer for us and the pain will be much larger. In Italy it already is :(