6 ms·

China and Vietnam get the virus under control by using centralised quarantines. I wonder how many people supporting the sentiments of this article would be ok

by zpeti 6y ago

China and Vietnam get the virus under control by using centralised quarantines. I wonder how many people supporting the sentiments of this article would be ok with someone arriving at their doorstep, taking you to a prison basically whether you agree or not, and quaranteening you there for at least 10 days with other covid people. Perhaps they also take your family too, in case they are also infected. Are you willing to pay that price?

baxtr 6y ago
This and all other countries mentioned are Islands (Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan)
- josephg 6y ago
  Just because she's not an island, Canada can still close her borders. I'm sure it'll be inconvenient, but short and sharp beats long and drawn out.
  - baxtr 6y ago
    Yes I agree. Canada has a long border but just with one country. So think it’s in a good position. It’s way more difficult for a European country for example.
    - threeseed 6y ago
      It's not that difficult for most European countries. People are going to be crossing borders at relatively few and well understood locations. And they could've simply imposed large fines for anyone who tried to sneak through.
      - baxtr 6y ago
        You obviously don’t live in mainland Europe. I can easily cross borders in a small village, on a field, through a forest. There are no fences. Sometimes you don’t even have a line. It’s a bit like saying New York should close its borders with Pennsylvania
  - icelancer 6y ago
    >> Canada can still close her borders This was already done and the infection rates are still sky high.
    - josephg 6y ago
      With closed borders, Canada is basically an island like Australia, NZ and the UK. Lots of posters here seem convinced that being an island makes it easy to control covid. If thats the most important factor, I'd love to hear some theories on why the numbers in canada aren't coming down to 0, like they have in Australia and NZ?
      - Ekaros 6y ago
        Key detail here is likely that it should have been done early enough. Once the virus is inside it is very hard to contain. Specially when asymptomatic carrier are common. Chain of them can keep virus alive and spreading for weeks or months.
        josephg 6y ago
        Yeah its much easier to do before the numbers spike. Some analysis I heard recently said if you do a lockdown, delaying by 1 day at the outset leads to locking down a whole extra week at the other end. The numbers are coming down (slowly) in Montreal now that they have a strict lockdown. I think the process could work; but at this point it might take so long to get the numbers under control that people wouldn't tolerate it. Especially not when the vaccine feels so close. We'd be talking like, 4 months in a row of strict lockdown + business closures. The other aspect is contact tracing. When numbers are very low, its much easier to do diligent contact tracing around every infected person. In the recent outbreak in Sydney they tracked down and personally contacted everyone they could place in the vicinity of an infected person and asked them to self isolate. By the time a handful of those people tested positive, most of them had already been isolating and as a result didn't infect anyone - which broke the chain of transmission. We could do that because the number of new cases was only around ~10/day. That would be way less feasible at Montreal's 1600 cases/day.
- threeseed 6y ago
  UK is an island and is the worst country in the world per-capita. Australia, New Zealand etc chose to implement mandatory 2-week quarantining of all arrivals. UK did not. There is no evidence that being an island or not makes a difference. But plenty of evidence that an aggressive, science-driven policy response does.
  - baxtr 6y ago
    Yes, agreed. It’s embarrassing for the UK... my point was that there is no example of a western, liberal country not being an island that was able to reach zero Covid. It’s just way easier as an island state.
    - gridspy 6y ago
      New Zealand is about as large as Europe. Larger than the UK. https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2019/08/map-how-nz-and-europe-compare-when-it-comes-to-land-mass.html https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2019/08/map-how-n...
      - baxtr 6y ago
        With no borders to other countries
      - KineticLensman 6y ago
        But not a major transit hub, miles from anywhere, low density population
        gridspy 6y ago
        Being a transit hub is irrelevant if the people in transit do not mix with those out of transit. Keep the (potentially) sick people on the "air side" of the airport terminal and then directly into quarantines on arrive at the final destination. Those who bridge this gap (air crews, terminal staff) need to follow very strict measures (PPE, cleaning, regular testing) to make that work. Perhaps more places need to decide they don't want to be a major transit hub during this pandemic? You know, restrict non-essential traffic a bit to make the essential traffic and local populace safer?
MattGaiser 6y ago
This is cherry picking as Taiwan and New Zealand are also on the list.
- irq11 6y ago
  Until they open their borders.
  - gridspy 6y ago
    The New Zealand borders are open and accepting citizen and essential arrivals into quarantine with a long waiting list.
    - icelancer 6y ago
      >> The New Zealand borders are open and accepting citizen and essential arrivals into quarantine with a long waiting list. This effectively reads "closed."
      - gridspy 6y ago
        Strong borders are the price you have to pay for very little restriction inside them when most of the world is busy infecting its populace. But yes, tourism or business trips are now infeasible. Fortunately it turns out that they were never essential.
        irq11 6y ago
        > Fortunately, it turns out that they were never essential. HN user doesn’t see the need for something, therefore it must not be essential.
  - mkl 6y ago
    The NZ border is unlikely to be open to non-citizens this year. We'll wait until we've vaccinated ~everyone, and since we have no community transmission, we're sitting back in the queue a bit.
kiba 6y ago
Yes. If it means I can actually go to the gym and workout, meet my friends, etc. I am tired of wearing the god damn masks, having to worry about my elderly parents, Are you tired of the god damn pandemic? I know I am. Because we already have no freedom.
- __blockcipher__ 6y ago
  Ethics of mandates aside, there’s no strong evidence that universal cloth masking in a community setting reduces transmissions, and many theoretical mechanisms by which they could worsen transmission (increased aerosol generation, deeper breaths to maintain o2 homeostasis leading to more absolute aerosols, improper handling->contamination, altered social behavior, having to speak louder or closer). So, I would argue that you don’t have to wear a mask now because of the pandemic, you choose to wear one despite a lack of scientific evidence (or are mandated to wear one of course). SARS-2 is a zoonotic, endemic respiratory virus. If you’re tired of it, you need to accept that it’s here to stay and realize that we can’t put life on hold indefinitely and trigger a global food shortage that will end up eclipsing COVID-19 deaths anyway (oops). Anyway, it is your right to decide that you would like totalitarian measures enacted upon you and your family. But you shouldn’t be able to make that decision for me, and unfortunately your “side” has already won and enacted [a half-assed version of] those very failed policies that you continue to venerate across most of the globe. If people put risk in perspective the average person would be less (or equally) afraid of COVID-19 personally than the flu, and your average elderly person would be 5-10x as afraid as the flu but not the current level of fear (feels like 100x IMO). Oh, and schools would be open worldwide with no masks nor social distancing because children are rarely harmed by COVID-19 and are frequently harmed by lockdown measures. [/ramble]
  - Jestar342 6y ago
    https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2020-07-08-oxford-covid-19-study-face-masks-and-coverings-work-act-now/ https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2020-07-08-oxford-covid-19-study-f... https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2020/06/417906/still-confused-about-masks-heres-science-behind-how-face-masks-prevent https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2020/06/417906/still-confused-abou... https://fullfact.org/health/evidence-shows-masks-do-offer-protection-covid-19/ https://fullfact.org/health/evidence-shows-masks-do-offer-pr... Please stop perpetuating this myth that masks don't work all because you just don't like wearing one.
res0nat0r 6y ago
Absolutely.
strogonoff 6y ago
I find the notion of China having the virus under control hard to believe. CCP is known to misinform with less at stake than this, and to not care all that much about large areas of rural territory (recall the one child policy, which was more or less unenforced outside of larger cities and resulted in the depressing phenomenon of millions of “invisible” children who are outside of the system and do not have access to education or healthcare). With that in mind, I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that the virus has been raging over the countryside, unreported. That is not to say I know one way or the other, but merely to point out that relying on official information may not be correct—one ought to look at secondary signs, such as new hospitals being built or some inconsistencies in numbers. Claiming that centralized measures helped get the virus under control based on official numbers from a totalitarian regime may be disingenuous.
- lordnacho 6y ago
  While it's true they have a reason to misrepresent, I think it would be fairly obvious if hospitals were overrun with patients. The great firewall is not so high that that message wouldn't come out. They had good reason to keep the prison camps in Xinjiang secret too, but that came out, and there's a lot fewer of those than hospitals.
  - strogonoff 6y ago
    I just don’t think many messages come out at all (considering bans on inbound travel and recent crackdowns on documentary uses of social media), and especially from outside of larger cities.
    - lordnacho 6y ago
      Any population of Chinese speakers in the west is going to know someone there on Wechat. I've talked to friends there as well, there's no major problem now. By contrast when things were bad in Wuhan people were reporting it. On top of that there's plenty of foreign reporters there, and plenty of foreign diplomats who would also notice.
josephg 6y ago
Australian here, living in Victoria (where we had a second wave and a strict lockdown that took us to 0). They didn't round up the whole country and put us in prison (!?). The rules we had were: - Stay home. The only allowed reasons to leave our homes were essential supplies (eg visiting the supermarket), caring for family, going to work (if you couldn't work from home) or exercise (eg going for a walk). Or if you needed medical care. - Unless we had a really good reason, we had to stay within a 5km radius of home at all times, and couldn't leave home for more than 1hr each day. We also had an 8pm curfew - though I'm still not sure what that was for. - No visitors unless they're an intimate partner - Masks mandatory any time you left your home. On the spot fines from police if they catch you outside without a mask. Basically everything indoors was closed - no gyms, takeout only at restaurants, etc. Supermarkets had security guards to make sure nobody entered without a mask on, and they had complimentary hand sanitizer at the entrance. That strategy was enough to go from 700/day down to 0/day in a couple months. Those months were awful, but just about everything has opened up again now since we've been sitting at 0 local infections in the whole country for the last few weeks. We only broke our streak today - a hotel quarantine worker was infected in Perth. The city has immediately locked down to make sure it doesn't spread. If the whole world followed the same strategy, covid would be gone already and international travel could have resumed months ago.
- freeone3000 6y ago
  Montreal is following the same rules, down to the silly curfew, but, we're at 600 cases a day still and rising. Obviously people aren't following it, but... It doesn't seem to be enough.
  - josephg 6y ago
    When did you start? Because of the incubation period, covid numbers are effectively delayed 2 weeks. That is to say, there's a 2 week delay between the time your government changes policies and when you see the effect of those policies on covid case numbers. It took us awhile too - after they brought the lockdown into effect our numbers kept going up for awhile - which was terrifying. But the numbers trended down eventually.
pessimizer 6y ago
I'd very much support this. Somehow America thought this was fine for decades when somebody might be smoking a joint, but now it's fascism when it actually has a material purpose. Pretend like the people with covid actually have drugs and 10 days in jail sounds absurdly progressive when viewed in terms of very recent history. Covid is a gateway drug to full respiratory failure, and it takes very little peer pressure to spread it. edit: also, I thought our pretense for harassing prostitutes was to stop the spread of disease. If we don't actually care about disease we should stop harassing them so they can have have a few years of freedom from interference before a strain of covid mutates into the death rate of MERS and civilization falls because we can't live like the awful Chinese.
blueblisters 6y ago
Yeah I don't think lockdowns have worked universally. Even stringent ones like those in India where cases picked up quickly after they opened up. What seems to have worked in Wuhan was, in addition to lockdowns, rigorous contact tracing and isolation of symptomatic patients and their close contacts in centralized quarantine facilities. Once all of this is done, I hope we learn more about how China actually contained this. But the answer is likely authoritarian measures that no democracy can legally or politically afford.
f311a 6y ago
I was in a Vietnamese quarantine in March as a foreigner. It's definitely not a prison. There are two types of quarantine: before and after the test. The second one is pretty good and you can even live in a special hotel.
lancewiggs 6y ago
Exactly what we have in NZ right now. But it’s not prison (which is emotional language at best). Quarantining is done in nice hotels, and people are treated well. Special accommodations are even made for extended family groups.

by zpeti 6y ago

baxtr 6y ago

This and all other countries mentioned are Islands (Australia, New Zealand, Taiwan)

josephg 6y ago
Just because she's not an island, Canada can still close her borders. I'm sure it'll be inconvenient, but short and sharp beats long and drawn out.
- baxtr 6y ago
  Yes I agree. Canada has a long border but just with one country. So think it’s in a good position. It’s way more difficult for a European country for example.
  - threeseed 6y ago
    It's not that difficult for most European countries. People are going to be crossing borders at relatively few and well understood locations. And they could've simply imposed large fines for anyone who tried to sneak through.
    - baxtr 6y ago
      You obviously don’t live in mainland Europe. I can easily cross borders in a small village, on a field, through a forest. There are no fences. Sometimes you don’t even have a line. It’s a bit like saying New York should close its borders with Pennsylvania
- icelancer 6y ago
  >> Canada can still close her borders This was already done and the infection rates are still sky high.
  - josephg 6y ago
    With closed borders, Canada is basically an island like Australia, NZ and the UK. Lots of posters here seem convinced that being an island makes it easy to control covid. If thats the most important factor, I'd love to hear some theories on why the numbers in canada aren't coming down to 0, like they have in Australia and NZ?
    - Ekaros 6y ago
      Key detail here is likely that it should have been done early enough. Once the virus is inside it is very hard to contain. Specially when asymptomatic carrier are common. Chain of them can keep virus alive and spreading for weeks or months.
      - josephg 6y ago
        Yeah its much easier to do before the numbers spike. Some analysis I heard recently said if you do a lockdown, delaying by 1 day at the outset leads to locking down a whole extra week at the other end. The numbers are coming down (slowly) in Montreal now that they have a strict lockdown. I think the process could work; but at this point it might take so long to get the numbers under control that people wouldn't tolerate it. Especially not when the vaccine feels so close. We'd be talking like, 4 months in a row of strict lockdown + business closures. The other aspect is contact tracing. When numbers are very low, its much easier to do diligent contact tracing around every infected person. In the recent outbreak in Sydney they tracked down and personally contacted everyone they could place in the vicinity of an infected person and asked them to self isolate. By the time a handful of those people tested positive, most of them had already been isolating and as a result didn't infect anyone - which broke the chain of transmission. We could do that because the number of new cases was only around ~10/day. That would be way less feasible at Montreal's 1600 cases/day.
threeseed 6y ago
UK is an island and is the worst country in the world per-capita. Australia, New Zealand etc chose to implement mandatory 2-week quarantining of all arrivals. UK did not. There is no evidence that being an island or not makes a difference. But plenty of evidence that an aggressive, science-driven policy response does.
- baxtr 6y ago
  Yes, agreed. It’s embarrassing for the UK... my point was that there is no example of a western, liberal country not being an island that was able to reach zero Covid. It’s just way easier as an island state.
  - gridspy 6y ago
    New Zealand is about as large as Europe. Larger than the UK. https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2019/08/map-how-nz-and-europe-compare-when-it-comes-to-land-mass.html https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2019/08/map-how-n...
    - baxtr 6y ago
      With no borders to other countries
    - KineticLensman 6y ago
      But not a major transit hub, miles from anywhere, low density population
      - gridspy 6y ago
        Being a transit hub is irrelevant if the people in transit do not mix with those out of transit. Keep the (potentially) sick people on the "air side" of the airport terminal and then directly into quarantines on arrive at the final destination. Those who bridge this gap (air crews, terminal staff) need to follow very strict measures (PPE, cleaning, regular testing) to make that work. Perhaps more places need to decide they don't want to be a major transit hub during this pandemic? You know, restrict non-essential traffic a bit to make the essential traffic and local populace safer?

MattGaiser 6y ago

This is cherry picking as Taiwan and New Zealand are also on the list.

irq11 6y ago
Until they open their borders.
- gridspy 6y ago
  The New Zealand borders are open and accepting citizen and essential arrivals into quarantine with a long waiting list.
  - icelancer 6y ago
    >> The New Zealand borders are open and accepting citizen and essential arrivals into quarantine with a long waiting list. This effectively reads "closed."
    - gridspy 6y ago
      Strong borders are the price you have to pay for very little restriction inside them when most of the world is busy infecting its populace. But yes, tourism or business trips are now infeasible. Fortunately it turns out that they were never essential.
      - irq11 6y ago
        > Fortunately, it turns out that they were never essential. HN user doesn’t see the need for something, therefore it must not be essential.
- mkl 6y ago
  The NZ border is unlikely to be open to non-citizens this year. We'll wait until we've vaccinated ~everyone, and since we have no community transmission, we're sitting back in the queue a bit.

kiba 6y ago

Yes. If it means I can actually go to the gym and workout, meet my friends, etc. I am tired of wearing the god damn masks, having to worry about my elderly parents, Are you tired of the god damn pandemic? I know I am. Because we already have no freedom.

__blockcipher__ 6y ago
Ethics of mandates aside, there’s no strong evidence that universal cloth masking in a community setting reduces transmissions, and many theoretical mechanisms by which they could worsen transmission (increased aerosol generation, deeper breaths to maintain o2 homeostasis leading to more absolute aerosols, improper handling->contamination, altered social behavior, having to speak louder or closer). So, I would argue that you don’t have to wear a mask now because of the pandemic, you choose to wear one despite a lack of scientific evidence (or are mandated to wear one of course). SARS-2 is a zoonotic, endemic respiratory virus. If you’re tired of it, you need to accept that it’s here to stay and realize that we can’t put life on hold indefinitely and trigger a global food shortage that will end up eclipsing COVID-19 deaths anyway (oops). Anyway, it is your right to decide that you would like totalitarian measures enacted upon you and your family. But you shouldn’t be able to make that decision for me, and unfortunately your “side” has already won and enacted [a half-assed version of] those very failed policies that you continue to venerate across most of the globe. If people put risk in perspective the average person would be less (or equally) afraid of COVID-19 personally than the flu, and your average elderly person would be 5-10x as afraid as the flu but not the current level of fear (feels like 100x IMO). Oh, and schools would be open worldwide with no masks nor social distancing because children are rarely harmed by COVID-19 and are frequently harmed by lockdown measures. [/ramble]
- Jestar342 6y ago
  https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2020-07-08-oxford-covid-19-study-face-masks-and-coverings-work-act-now/ https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2020-07-08-oxford-covid-19-study-f... https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2020/06/417906/still-confused-about-masks-heres-science-behind-how-face-masks-prevent https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2020/06/417906/still-confused-abou... https://fullfact.org/health/evidence-shows-masks-do-offer-protection-covid-19/ https://fullfact.org/health/evidence-shows-masks-do-offer-pr... Please stop perpetuating this myth that masks don't work all because you just don't like wearing one.

res0nat0r 6y ago

Absolutely.

strogonoff 6y ago

I find the notion of China having the virus under control hard to believe. CCP is known to misinform with less at stake than this, and to not care all that much about large areas of rural territory (recall the one child policy, which was more or less unenforced outside of larger cities and resulted in the depressing phenomenon of millions of “invisible” children who are outside of the system and do not have access to education or healthcare). With that in mind, I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that the virus has been raging over the countryside, unreported. That is not to say I know one way or the other, but merely to point out that relying on official information may not be correct—one ought to look at secondary signs, such as new hospitals being built or some inconsistencies in numbers. Claiming that centralized measures helped get the virus under control based on official numbers from a totalitarian regime may be disingenuous.

lordnacho 6y ago
While it's true they have a reason to misrepresent, I think it would be fairly obvious if hospitals were overrun with patients. The great firewall is not so high that that message wouldn't come out. They had good reason to keep the prison camps in Xinjiang secret too, but that came out, and there's a lot fewer of those than hospitals.
- strogonoff 6y ago
  I just don’t think many messages come out at all (considering bans on inbound travel and recent crackdowns on documentary uses of social media), and especially from outside of larger cities.
  - lordnacho 6y ago
    Any population of Chinese speakers in the west is going to know someone there on Wechat. I've talked to friends there as well, there's no major problem now. By contrast when things were bad in Wuhan people were reporting it. On top of that there's plenty of foreign reporters there, and plenty of foreign diplomats who would also notice.

josephg 6y ago

Australian here, living in Victoria (where we had a second wave and a strict lockdown that took us to 0). They didn't round up the whole country and put us in prison (!?). The rules we had were: - Stay home. The only allowed reasons to leave our homes were essential supplies (eg visiting the supermarket), caring for family, going to work (if you couldn't work from home) or exercise (eg going for a walk). Or if you needed medical care. - Unless we had a really good reason, we had to stay within a 5km radius of home at all times, and couldn't leave home for more than 1hr each day. We also had an 8pm curfew - though I'm still not sure what that was for. - No visitors unless they're an intimate partner - Masks mandatory any time you left your home. On the spot fines from police if they catch you outside without a mask. Basically everything indoors was closed - no gyms, takeout only at restaurants, etc. Supermarkets had security guards to make sure nobody entered without a mask on, and they had complimentary hand sanitizer at the entrance. That strategy was enough to go from 700/day down to 0/day in a couple months. Those months were awful, but just about everything has opened up again now since we've been sitting at 0 local infections in the whole country for the last few weeks. We only broke our streak today - a hotel quarantine worker was infected in Perth. The city has immediately locked down to make sure it doesn't spread. If the whole world followed the same strategy, covid would be gone already and international travel could have resumed months ago.

freeone3000 6y ago
Montreal is following the same rules, down to the silly curfew, but, we're at 600 cases a day still and rising. Obviously people aren't following it, but... It doesn't seem to be enough.
- josephg 6y ago
  When did you start? Because of the incubation period, covid numbers are effectively delayed 2 weeks. That is to say, there's a 2 week delay between the time your government changes policies and when you see the effect of those policies on covid case numbers. It took us awhile too - after they brought the lockdown into effect our numbers kept going up for awhile - which was terrifying. But the numbers trended down eventually.

pessimizer 6y ago

I'd very much support this. Somehow America thought this was fine for decades when somebody might be smoking a joint, but now it's fascism when it actually has a material purpose. Pretend like the people with covid actually have drugs and 10 days in jail sounds absurdly progressive when viewed in terms of very recent history. Covid is a gateway drug to full respiratory failure, and it takes very little peer pressure to spread it. edit: also, I thought our pretense for harassing prostitutes was to stop the spread of disease. If we don't actually care about disease we should stop harassing them so they can have have a few years of freedom from interference before a strain of covid mutates into the death rate of MERS and civilization falls because we can't live like the awful Chinese.

blueblisters 6y ago

Yeah I don't think lockdowns have worked universally. Even stringent ones like those in India where cases picked up quickly after they opened up. What seems to have worked in Wuhan was, in addition to lockdowns, rigorous contact tracing and isolation of symptomatic patients and their close contacts in centralized quarantine facilities. Once all of this is done, I hope we learn more about how China actually contained this. But the answer is likely authoritarian measures that no democracy can legally or politically afford.

f311a 6y ago

I was in a Vietnamese quarantine in March as a foreigner. It's definitely not a prison. There are two types of quarantine: before and after the test. The second one is pretty good and you can even live in a special hotel.

lancewiggs 6y ago

Exactly what we have in NZ right now. But it’s not prison (which is emotional language at best). Quarantining is done in nice hotels, and people are treated well. Special accommodations are even made for extended family groups.