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China's success is weird. Almost none of what they're doing should work. For example, according to their totally-not-propaganda publication describing how they
by makomk 6y ago
China's success is weird. Almost none of what they're doing should work. For example, according to their totally-not-propaganda publication describing how they controlled coronavirus, the foundation is public temperature screening - it's that which feeds potential cases into testing and later contact tracing - and that just fundamentally doesn't work. The false positive and negative rates are atrocious, especially if you do it with forehead thermometers and thermal cameras like they do. They also do big, high-profile testings of entire cities which don't seem to find anything, making them useless. Meanwhile, there kept on being incidents like someone admitted to hospital with coronavirus symptoms in the main city of the region where the big outbreak was known to be at the time not getting tested for coronavirus and spreading it in the hospital. Or China completely missing an outbreak until it happened to spread to the better-tested and better-protected Beijing.
There are some things they do that should have some effect, like treating everyone from Wuhan like a plague carrier very early on in the outbreak (bit late to replicate that now, and China and the WHO loudly campaigned to make sure other countries didn't anyway) and quarantine for people returning to the country. We know from New Zealand though that even dedicated quarantine hotels are too leaky to really work at China scale - and there's also the problem of their extremely long land borders.
- dukoid 6y agoIt's nearly free and should enable detecting and tracing emerging clusters before they become a bigger problem.
- akvadrako 6y agoOr China is lying. It's hard to verify the numbers they publish.
- agumonkey 6y agoI'd find it surprising that they hide really big numbers. They probably lower things but it's not high enough to make people want to leak pictures of dead bodies or weird trucks carrying boxes. Or maybe they're really good at hiding their operations..
- 0xf8 6y agoThey’re really good at hiding operations
- zby 6y agoI don't know - there are also things that should work - like the isolation in hotels with food delivery etc. What I see is that they throw just everything at it and maybe they misinterpret what really worked, maybe some of it was just theatre - but some of the measures did work and the whole also created enough pressure to have high compliance with the orders.
- dirtyid 6y ago> Almost none of what they're doing should work. All China did was aggressively pursue WHO and basic epidemiology strategy of find, test, trace and isolate, and doing so early enough to contain the virus. There's absurd cognitive dissonance many people that somehow this shouldn't/wouldn't work. The controversy shouldn't be that Chinese system could implement basic epidemiologic responses, but currently, many western systems are culturally and politically unable to, even during a (hopefully) once in a generation crisis. Systems needs to be flexible enough suspend liberties and adopt certain authoritarian principles periods of exception, see South Korea and Taiwan whose response was much closer to Chinese authoritarianism than not. This isn't to suggest the west is brittle, but there are qualities of a pandemic that asymmetrically exploits vulnerabilities in liberal societies.
- fxtentacle 6y agoMaybe it works for psychological reasons. If people believe that the temperature checks work, then they'll stay at home if they have symptoms and/or feel like they are getting sick. But in western countries, I presume some people will have symptoms and then shrug it off as "nothing serious" and continue their life as normal, thereby infecting others. So the main purpose of those temperature checks might be their psychological effect: The enhance compliance with the other rules.
- graeme 6y agoThe nothing serious effect is huge. I lived in an area with out of control covid, and you wouldn’t believe the number of people who say “oh it’s just a cold” “oh if’s just allergies” when they had symptoms consistent with covid.
- asdff 6y agoI don't think it's weird, I think it's expected. They are testing entire cities now: https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/10/16/924382187/city-in-china-tests-10-million-people-after-13-covid-19-cases-are-found https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/1... Fundamentally, that's how you eliminate this without requiring a vaccine. Test the entire population or as much of it as humanly possible, enforce heavy quarantine on positive cases until they are no longer contagious, and the virus will therefore have no vectors to spread. It really is that simple.
- throwway239 6y agoI'm not sure that is an accurate reflection of the pandemic control measures used by China and other asian nations. Not only was there a high degree of voluntary compliance with mask wearing and social distancing but the power of the state was engaged in ways unthinkable in Western countries. To take one example, the government mandated that entire neighborhoods in Beijing be completely closed with movement outside only allowed during certain hours of the day. You can disagree with the policy on other grounds but there is no reason to think that extreme steps like that wouldn't be effective. As for 'quarantine hotels' the point isn't that they are entirely fullproof but they are significantly more effective than the alternative of asking positive cases to self-quarantine. The same point applies to temperature checks. China's record may be exaggerated for propoganda purposes but other nations with similar policies like South Korea and Japan have had simliar outcomes.