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I think the problem with our response to covid in the US was that all our policies were half-assed. The result has been that we’ve had this 7 month period of s

• just-juan-post 6y ago
  Ok what are the conditions to end the total lockdown?
  • dredmorbius 6y ago
    No new cases outside quarantine or isolation, as assessed by a competent, evidenced-based governmental authority. There have been four positive cases of Covid-19 outside of managed isolation or quarantine, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern says. After 102 days without community transmission they are the first cases acquired from an unknown source. New Zealand is now activating a resurgence plan. https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/423305/covid-19-new-cases-push-new-zealand-into-resurgence-plan https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/423305/covid-19-new-case... NZ resumed level 3 on August 12, where level 4 is the most restrictive: people are to work from home unless they are essential workers, and stay in their bubbles. Bars and restaurants will have to close, and restrictions come in place for funerals and weddings. Conditions are regularly monitored, assessed, and adjusted. From September 4: Cabinet has decided to keep the current alert levels and will review them again on Monday, September 14, when they will decide whether to adjust them at 11.59pm on Wednesday, September 16. It comes as director general of health Ashley Bloomfield reveals five new cases of Covid-19. Three are in the community. https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=12362251 https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&object...
• dalbasal 6y ago
  Every response everywhere was half assed, including China. That is, a lot of stuff didn't make sense, was contradictory, done at the wrong time, later turned out to be wrong, etc. This is part and parcel of putting together an immediate emergency response. I live in Dublin, Ireland. There was a preemptive anti-vaxer protest here yesterday declaring the virus a hoax. The key point of difference between places, IMO, is public and political tolerance for these things. Can you live with some policy being dumb, because you're inevitably going to think a lot of them are dumb.
  • pjc50 6y ago
    Well, apart from New Zealand and Vietnam, and a few other places.
    • colordrops 6y ago
      There is evidence that exposure to other corona viruses gives some level of protection to covid. The Vietnamese have higher exposure to corona viruses that most other people which is one theory as to why they are less affected.
      • csnover 6y ago
        Can you please provide a link to a study that supports your assertion that Vietnamese have higher exposure to coronaviruses? Thanks!
        • colordrops 6y ago
          https://www.thefitnessdoctors.com/post/natural-immunity-to-covid-19 https://www.thefitnessdoctors.com/post/natural-immunity-to-c... https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/immune-cells-common-cold-may-recognize-sars-cov-2 https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/immune-...
          • csnover 6y ago
• redisman 6y ago
  Worst of both worlds. We get the Endless lockdowns And the unnecessary death
• SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  China's response wasn't just "a full lockdown for a few weeks" - they've repeatedly imposed new full lockdowns in areas across the country where cases are detected. I can't find recent news, but as of last month millions of Chinese citizens were still under full lockdown.
• rtx 6y ago
  Chinese lock down was undemocratic.
  • bzb5 6y ago
    In 2020 undemocratic seems a synonym for “swift and effective”
    • Spivak 6y ago
      I mean if you deployed the police and national guard to enforce a 24/7 curfew with police escort required to leave at all the virus would probably have been eradicated pretty swiftly. The question is always how much freedom are we willing to exchange for increased effectiveness and in the US the answer was very little. And we’re currently paying for that decision but as long as we understand and accept the consequences I don’t think it is an invalid choice. I might personally disagree but that’s the nature of collective decision making.
• bbarn 6y ago
  Any discussion about China has to be taken with more than a small amount of skepticism about the truth in reporting.
• mensetmanusman 6y ago
  Models used by government leaders to make decisions predicted that, by the end of this summer (coming soon!), the US would have >2 million deaths. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/16/us/coronavirus-fatality-rate-white-house.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/16/us/coronavirus-fatality-r... Even with lack of leadership, we have had ~ 200k, a 90% reduction. Not too bad?
  • ciarannolan 6y ago
    You don't get to claim success over the top of 200,000 dead people because an early model said it would be worse.
    • mensetmanusman 6y ago
      The model was correct? Or was it? What is a correct model?
  • ncallaway 6y ago
    This is the report that the article was based on: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/sph/ide/gida-fellowships/Imperial-College-COVID19-NPI-modelling-16-03-2020.pdf https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/s... The 2.2 million figure came from the worst case scenario. The assumptions for that scenario are: "In the (unlikely) absence of any control measures or spontaneous changes in individual behaviour, we would expect a peak in mortality (daily deaths) to occur after approximately 3 months." You don't get to claim a reduction from a baseline that assumes 0 intervention and 0 personal behavior change. That figure was used in the report as a baseline to compare various mitigation and suppression strategies.
  • billyhoffman 6y ago
    That’s how exponential growth works. The NYTs article you cite is from March 16th and was based on the US continuing to operate as it had. So changes early can have a huge effect. Of course the US still delayed at the federal level for another 2 weeks to do really anything of substance. The governments responsible for reducing the death toll from 2M To 200K are the state governments of NY and California. The US federal government largely delayed advocating a shutdown until 2 weeks later. Even on April 4th the President was still saying Covid-19 was “going away” [1]. I encourage everyone to go look at the new cases curve on the days proceeding and following April 4th to see what utter complete bullshit such a statement was. Worse, he knew it was bullshit even as he said it, as the conversations with Bob Woodward have revealed. To give the US federal government a grade of “not too bad” is disingenuous. Their discordant and adversarial response is why we have 200K deaths. 1- https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2020/09/politics/coronavirus-trump-woodward-timeline/ https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2020/09/politics/coronavirus...
• dehrmann 6y ago
  > I think the problem with our response to covid in the US was that all our policies were half-assed...China was able to have a full lockdown for a few weeks and mostly eradicate it I see this view a lot from people--the US just needed a real lockdown. Spain also had a real lockdown, and their case count is surging right now. The difference in how China seemingly (you can't spell Xinhua without Xi) handled it is in aggressive contact tracing and tracking where everyone goes regardless of their covid status.
  • mac01021 6y ago
    Is that what South Korea did too?
  • ashtonkem 6y ago
    Contact tracing is going to be a serious problem for the US. While countries like Spain or the UK might fail to setup contact tracing due to incompetence or corruption, the US has the federalism issue to sort out too. Who, exactly, is responsible for setting up contact tracing systems, and under what authority? If it’s devolved to the state level, how are we going to deal with people crossing state borders, or large population centers that are near or straddle borders (Kansas City will be a nightmare for that)? If it’s federal then we might as well give up hope, given how lackluster the federal governments response to the pandemic has been so far.
    • ajmurmann 6y ago
      Other countries like Germany also have federal systems. They were able to coordinate successfully because they didn't politicise the entire thing, because their election system doesn't create was us-vs-them two-party system
  • ajmurmann 6y ago
    A few months ago there was a great write up called The Hammer And the Dance. The idea was to first "Hammer" down there numbers to something controllable with a tight lockdown and then use contact tracing and targeted quarantine to mostly keep it at the lower level. Countries like Spain, China and Italy nailed the hammer part, but are struggling with the dance. South Korea seems to have danced their way through the entire thing by never getting it escalate in the first place. The US tried to do a hammer and failed. The numbers didn't really go down for the city as a whole. We never had a coordinated decision to transition to the dance either and don't have anything in place to be successful at that step. Tests taking over a week and high case numbers to begin with make contact tracing and targeted quarantine in outbreak areas impossible
• ckl1810 6y ago
  The problem with our response to COVID in the US is that China didn't give the world a fair shake. https://medium.com/@georgetoparis/the-book-rage-on-china-f5d3359c5af2 https://medium.com/@georgetoparis/the-book-rage-on-china-f5d... A second reason is all gov were bad to solve novel problems 0 to 1, but good at solving 1 to 2, 2 to 3 problems. HK, Singapore, Korea Japan had experience to protect itself, swine flu, bird flu, SARS, etc. Western world had not. But the truth of the matter, we're victims of geopolitics, media, and social media blaming thy neighbor. Go look at U.S. fatalities due to COVID which NYT posts at 200k as the time of this writing. Then go look at CDC U.S. registered deaths annually, which was last reported at 2.8M. While I am sympathetic for those who loved lost ones for whatever cause of death, quick maths show that in 0.8% of the population dies in a normal year, and COVID-19 blimp would increase it to 0.9 to 1.0%. We've grossly overreacted.
  • cma 6y ago
    Or the increase due to it is only that small due to how serious we took it, even if not serious enough.
• bazooka_penguin 6y ago
  Until a safe vaccine is produced those total lockdown nations have to stay in lockdown. Even a minor outbreak can explode. Korea handled it the best with limited closures, aggressive tracking, and a responsible public, and they still had superspreader events when they loosened up rules on bars and risked having an outbreak. That said, a model like korea's would never work in the west and especially the US. If we're to believe Fauci literally none of the general populace acted responsibly, with even leftwing demographics like the young, urban dwellers, and minorities leading infections despite leftwing leaderships' advice. So its hardly a partisan issue, the basic culture of the US is incompatible with strategies that work in Asia. The spread of this virus was just an inevitability
  • mdoms 6y ago
    I'm in New Zealand. We are most certainly not staying in lockdown.
    • dredmorbius 6y ago
      New Zealand, has a four-stage alert and response level, and constantly monitors and adjusts that according to outbreak status, as I've noted elsewhere in this thread. If I'm reading sources correctly, the country is currently at Level 2 (excepting Aukland at 2.5), and had bumped from Level 2 to 3 in August after community spread was detected. This is what effective and appropriate response looks like.
• presentation 6y ago
  Not sure what to think about Japan - there was never any real lockdown, people were still riding crowded trains in rush hour to companies that wouldn’t let them work remote. But it nonetheless didn’t spread much. Perhaps it’s that people obediently wore masks all the time from the very beginning? But it’s all guessing still.
  • ashtonkem 6y ago
    My guess is early and aggressive mask compliance. They both had the existing infrastructure for that, and the social expectation that everyone will mask up when they’re sick or as necessary during outbreaks of diseases like SARS or COVID.