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> that anything China claims is true, so far they've been lying constantly, we know this. What lies are you specifically talking about? A lot of people have t

> that anything China claims is true, so far they've been lying constantly, we know this. What lies are you specifically talking about? A lot of people have the impression that China is some sort of black hole: no information gets out, so who knows what's going on inside? There is a huge amount of information coming out of China. People I talk to there tell me about what their everyday lives are like. There are millions of Chinese people communicating with the outside world every day. What's certain is that the situation is completely different from how it was in late January through February. The epidemic really does appear to be under control there. > Contact tracing is a nice to have, but not important. The important things are healthcare capacity (aka ventilators) and population monitoring. What you're proposing is a control strategy, in which the epidemic is held at a level that doesn't overwhelm hospitals, but in which a large number of people continue to be infected each day. It's a steady state with R ~ 1 and a manageable case load. In the US, this is the current situation, and it means a steady pace of ~2000 deaths/day. In that strategy, the second you reduce social distancing measures, the epidemic will flare up again, because you're balancing on a knife's edge. The strategy that China pursued was suppression (R << 1), followed by containment of the epidemic at a much lower level. In the first phase, extreme social distancing and quarantine measures reduced the number of new infections to a small number (tens/day). In the second phase, social distancing measures have been relaxed, and widespread testing and contact tracing are being used to try to catch nearly every new case in the country. That's only feasible if the number of cases is small. This two-phase strategy is the only one I can see that does not lead to ~0.5% of the population being sacrificed.

LatteLazy 7y ago
OK, we need to stop discussing China and Chinas approach because we know they are lying about all of their numbers. That's what basically every Western country had said. If you don't believe me, that's fine, just go Google it. US intelligence have publicly stated this. Just in the last few days the UK has stopped listing Chinese numbers at all because they as so badly wrong. I don't doubt that there are a lot of personal anecdotes coming from China, but as far as I know the only numbers are the official ones and they are pap. If you can offer factual evidence that that is not true, I'd be very pleased to be wrong since apparently Chinese coronavirus is 100 times less deadly than average... So that brings us to contact tracing. I'm happy to agree that contact tracing would mean we could keep R values lower with less disruption to people's lives. You could let people without contact go out more etc IF AND ONLY IF you can accurately do contact tracing. But we've never done that before in the West. I belive it has been semi managed in Africa with Ebola. But Ebola is easier to test for. And its much faster to show symptoms. And patients tend to self isolate because they're so sick they can't get out of bed. Coronavirus is airborne and seems to survive for long periods on surfaces. So you get many many more contacts even if you get fewer infections per contact. The article doesn't attempt any maths despite these factors being key to knowing whether contact tracing works for a given disease. Do you know of any such model? Do we know what parameters we need to input for coronavirus (what defines a contact, how many contacts require quarantines etc)? I think these values are total unknowns for coronavirus, it's taken us this long to get to a semi reliable R0 value, we still don't know how R changed with quarantine methods and levels. So will we discover any of this in time to use it with COVID-19? Or will we just do the less accurate but just as effective measures we need to do and get through this in another 2-3 months? Fyi, 0.6% (plus or minute 0.2percetage points) overall population fatality is what we are aiming for already based on having 100% treatment availability as far as I know. So apparently contact tracing offers exactly the same outcome? I have to ask again, what's the point? Isn't this at best a nice to have and at worse a wild goose chase?
- DiogenesKynikos 7y ago
  You keep asserting that Chinese numbers are all faked, and then you want me to prove a negative. > That's what basically every Western country had said. I've heard the US and UK governments say this, coincidentally at exactly the moment when they were coming under political pressure because of their insufficient early responses to coronavirus. > US intelligence have publicly stated this. They're not a reliable source of information. > apparently Chinese coronavirus is 100 times less deadly than average... Where are you getting that from? Case fatality rates in China were similar to what was later found in Western countries. > we still don't know how R changed with quarantine methods There's actually very interesting research coming out of China about how different measures affected the reproductive rate of the virus. The Journal of the American Medical Association just published a study on exactly this question.[1] It strikes me as careless to write off this important information so easily. I think the reasons for doing so are primarily political: a lot of people have a hard time accepting that the Chinese government did something effectively, or that it succeeded in suppressing the epidemic where Western governments have so far mostly failed. 1. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2020.6130 https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2020.6130
  - LatteLazy 7y ago
    I don't think i can convince you that Chinas official numbers are wrong if you the US and UK governments can't. Whatever you think of the US intelligence agencies (I also don't much rate them) the fact they publicly call out China on this should cause you to at least question the numbers. But that's up to you. Sorry if that sounds snippy, I just think we have different views on the Chinese numbers and are unlikely to find a matching set of facts. May I ask, what do you believe the Chinese death toll has been in total so far? The official number is 4642 I think. So if other countries are as efficient as China, this whole pandemic will kill only around 23,000 world wide. Let's up the Chinese are being accurate and we get these excellent numbers! Just for the record, I am actually very happy to concede that the Chinese government has been effective (after the first few weeks of the outbreak at least). I think China has a very effective government and I envy them that. But effective does not mean reliable. Aside from the above and needing to close their wet markets and treat their minories better, I don't have major objections to China...

LatteLazy 7y ago

OK, we need to stop discussing China and Chinas approach because we know they are lying about all of their numbers. That's what basically every Western country had said. If you don't believe me, that's fine, just go Google it. US intelligence have publicly stated this. Just in the last few days the UK has stopped listing Chinese numbers at all because they as so badly wrong. I don't doubt that there are a lot of personal anecdotes coming from China, but as far as I know the only numbers are the official ones and they are pap. If you can offer factual evidence that that is not true, I'd be very pleased to be wrong since apparently Chinese coronavirus is 100 times less deadly than average... So that brings us to contact tracing. I'm happy to agree that contact tracing would mean we could keep R values lower with less disruption to people's lives. You could let people without contact go out more etc IF AND ONLY IF you can accurately do contact tracing. But we've never done that before in the West. I belive it has been semi managed in Africa with Ebola. But Ebola is easier to test for. And its much faster to show symptoms. And patients tend to self isolate because they're so sick they can't get out of bed. Coronavirus is airborne and seems to survive for long periods on surfaces. So you get many many more contacts even if you get fewer infections per contact. The article doesn't attempt any maths despite these factors being key to knowing whether contact tracing works for a given disease. Do you know of any such model? Do we know what parameters we need to input for coronavirus (what defines a contact, how many contacts require quarantines etc)? I think these values are total unknowns for coronavirus, it's taken us this long to get to a semi reliable R0 value, we still don't know how R changed with quarantine methods and levels. So will we discover any of this in time to use it with COVID-19? Or will we just do the less accurate but just as effective measures we need to do and get through this in another 2-3 months? Fyi, 0.6% (plus or minute 0.2percetage points) overall population fatality is what we are aiming for already based on having 100% treatment availability as far as I know. So apparently contact tracing offers exactly the same outcome? I have to ask again, what's the point? Isn't this at best a nice to have and at worse a wild goose chase?

DiogenesKynikos 7y ago
You keep asserting that Chinese numbers are all faked, and then you want me to prove a negative. > That's what basically every Western country had said. I've heard the US and UK governments say this, coincidentally at exactly the moment when they were coming under political pressure because of their insufficient early responses to coronavirus. > US intelligence have publicly stated this. They're not a reliable source of information. > apparently Chinese coronavirus is 100 times less deadly than average... Where are you getting that from? Case fatality rates in China were similar to what was later found in Western countries. > we still don't know how R changed with quarantine methods There's actually very interesting research coming out of China about how different measures affected the reproductive rate of the virus. The Journal of the American Medical Association just published a study on exactly this question.[1] It strikes me as careless to write off this important information so easily. I think the reasons for doing so are primarily political: a lot of people have a hard time accepting that the Chinese government did something effectively, or that it succeeded in suppressing the epidemic where Western governments have so far mostly failed. 1. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2020.6130 https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2020.6130
- LatteLazy 7y ago
  I don't think i can convince you that Chinas official numbers are wrong if you the US and UK governments can't. Whatever you think of the US intelligence agencies (I also don't much rate them) the fact they publicly call out China on this should cause you to at least question the numbers. But that's up to you. Sorry if that sounds snippy, I just think we have different views on the Chinese numbers and are unlikely to find a matching set of facts. May I ask, what do you believe the Chinese death toll has been in total so far? The official number is 4642 I think. So if other countries are as efficient as China, this whole pandemic will kill only around 23,000 world wide. Let's up the Chinese are being accurate and we get these excellent numbers! Just for the record, I am actually very happy to concede that the Chinese government has been effective (after the first few weeks of the outbreak at least). I think China has a very effective government and I envy them that. But effective does not mean reliable. Aside from the above and needing to close their wet markets and treat their minories better, I don't have major objections to China...