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>If lockdowns were taken seriously from the start, it would had prevented going wild and risking new strains. I don't think a strategy that needs every country

by carlmr 6y ago

>If lockdowns were taken seriously from the start, it would had prevented going wild and risking new strains. I don't think a strategy that needs every country on earth to cooperate this tightly ever had a chance to work. Most countries aren't the first world, most countries don't have the resources to test and quarantine properly, most countries can't afford lockdowns. On top of that a lot of countries have much worse disease to deal with, Malaria for example, for them this is just one of many, and not such a terrible one. There will be mutations, this will come back a few times, maybe it becomes milder on its own, but thinking you can keep it from mutating is Quixotic.

tialaramex 6y ago
The long distance travel which spreads a pandemic so fast now is predominantly a First World thing. We could and should have shut that down. A month after we knew we were in deep trouble it was still perfectly normal to decide hey this is boring I'll go on vacation to somewhere with nowhere near the capacity needed to handle COVID-19. Oh, I have a little cough, never mind if I feel sick I'll just fly home after I'm done infecting these people. Remember this is SARS-CoV-2. Where's the mutations and endless new strains of SARS-CoV-1? There aren't any, it was eliminated in humans. So yes it is now sadly likely we're stuck with this, but we ought to be clear it's our fault in countries that didn't do even one tenth of what they should to prevent it.
- carlmr 6y ago
  >Remember this is SARS-CoV-2. Where's the mutations and endless new strains of SARS-CoV-1? There aren't any, it was eliminated in humans. I think this is only because it was contained in China before it reached the world. They had an excellent pandemic response and quashed it before it reached other countries. This time around it had spread around the world before we even heard about it. It was completely predictable containment efforts would be futile.
  - nopzor 6y ago
    sars definitely reached other countries outside of china..
  - curlypaul924 6y ago
    > I think this is only because it was contained in China before it reached the world Is this true? According to the CDC, there were SARS cases reported in Europe and the Americas prior to containment in China. Why was it different this time around?
    - cperciva 6y ago
      SARS was more lethal and people actually took public health measures seriously.
      - lazide 6y ago
        Additionally, SARS v1 was not contagious until there were visible symptoms - a huge difference from COVID/SARS v2.
        cperciva 6y ago
        I wouldn't put too much confidence in that. SARS wasn't known to be contagious presymptomatically, but neither was COVID-19 for many months. Levels of presymptomatic transmission similar to COVID-19 are entirely consistent with the evidence we have from SARS.
        lazide 6y ago
        That seems unlikely, if for no other reason than the way COVID has spread. Do you have any data? All the data I've seen on SARs and the mechanisms deployed to control it indicate infectivity at or only very, very shortly before clear symptoms or they would not have been able to control it. COVID is quite clearly infectious before visible symptoms of any kind, and even when visible many times symptoms are pretty mild - where SARs was not - and this matches it's observed spread and difficulty in controlling it.
acdha 6y ago
> I don't think a strategy that needs every country on earth to cooperate this tightly ever had a chance to work. It doesn’t need anything that drastic: imagine an alternate history where the Taiwanese warnings in December 2019 had been taken seriously and international travel was locked down with a mandatory three week quarantine (adjusted by the later availability of tests) on arrival. That would require no cooperation from any other government, and it would have kept spread down below the level where contact tracing and other measures could be effective. Making it a delay avoided the obvious failures like an outright ban packing as many people as possible into crowded transportation and customs facilities, and means that critically important travel could still happen. The problem was that businesses like the travel industry are influential and delayed until it was too well established in most countries and once it had successfully been turned into a political shibboleth, the chances of lighter approaches working plummeted.
- berdario 6y ago
  > Taiwanese warnings The disease originated in Wuhan, mainland China, not Taiwan. The emergency was communicated in China (as well as Taiwan): http://py.cnhubei.com/py_news/2019/1231/3290.shtml http://py.cnhubei.com/py_news/2019/1231/3290.shtml Sure, listening to any official source would've been better than what happened... But shutting down travel to/from the whole of China (since otherwise you'd have to trust every passenger to declare if they had been in Wuhan) while there were less then 30/40 cases of pneumonia, and not a single death would've been a really difficult measure to sell
  - acdha 6y ago
    > The disease originated in Wuhan, mainland China, not Taiwan. Yes, I’m aware - try more carefully reading my comment and note that I never said otherwise. What I was referring to was Taiwan being faster to acknowledge human to human spread when the Chinese government was still in damage control mode and WHO was following their official statements saying there was no confirmation of retransmission. This happened 2 weeks later: https://www.who.int/csr/don/14-january-2020-novel-coronavirus-thailand-ex-china/en/ https://www.who.int/csr/don/14-january-2020-novel-coronaviru... Taiwan had begun health screenings of travelers from Wuhan on December 31st, following their request to WHO and the China CDC for more information. By the time the first case was detected 3 weeks later they’d already activated a substantial public health plan — not because they were prescient but because SARS had given key officials a strong sense of the importance of not delaying.
jimbokun 6y ago
> Most countries aren't the first world, most countries don't have the resources to test and quarantine properly, most countries can't afford lockdowns. The United States meets all these criteria, and has the highest number of cases and deaths in the world. (And near the top in per-capita measures, too.)
- makomk 6y ago
  Of course a country with the resources to test properly has the highest number of cases and deaths in the world, because if you can't test properly you can't detect Covid-19 cases and deaths. I know the American press has fed its citizens a load of nonsense about this for nakedly partisan reasons, just like it has with every other part of the Covid-19 crisis, and it's getting tiring...
  - carlmr 6y ago
    That of course is another thing to mention. Kind of like the EU countries talking badly about England after they discovered a more infectious mutation. In Germany at the time they didn't even sequence enough viruses to detect mutations before they're widespread.
- carlmr 6y ago
  I was listing the necessary, not the sufficient criteria. The United States could but it doesn't because the political system is too federalized for a centralized response.
tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago
> I don't think a strategy that needs every country on earth to cooperate this tightly ever had a chance to work. It doesn't need that though. It needs countries to close the borders tightly except to countries that do cooperate, as many Asian countries have successfully done.
- carlmr 6y ago
  If your goal is to stop mutations from happening, yes, you need everyone in the world to go on full lockdown for 4 weeks. And then test everybody and quarantine until the disease is gone. The situation right now is that you have plenty of breeding grounds for new mutations, and it only needs some minor crossing of borders for these to get through. I would also say it's infeasible for non-island nations that need to trade with other countries to completely lock the borders.

by carlmr 6y ago

tialaramex 6y ago

The long distance travel which spreads a pandemic so fast now is predominantly a First World thing. We could and should have shut that down. A month after we knew we were in deep trouble it was still perfectly normal to decide hey this is boring I'll go on vacation to somewhere with nowhere near the capacity needed to handle COVID-19. Oh, I have a little cough, never mind if I feel sick I'll just fly home after I'm done infecting these people. Remember this is SARS-CoV-2. Where's the mutations and endless new strains of SARS-CoV-1? There aren't any, it was eliminated in humans. So yes it is now sadly likely we're stuck with this, but we ought to be clear it's our fault in countries that didn't do even one tenth of what they should to prevent it.

carlmr 6y ago
>Remember this is SARS-CoV-2. Where's the mutations and endless new strains of SARS-CoV-1? There aren't any, it was eliminated in humans. I think this is only because it was contained in China before it reached the world. They had an excellent pandemic response and quashed it before it reached other countries. This time around it had spread around the world before we even heard about it. It was completely predictable containment efforts would be futile.
- nopzor 6y ago
  sars definitely reached other countries outside of china..
- curlypaul924 6y ago
  > I think this is only because it was contained in China before it reached the world Is this true? According to the CDC, there were SARS cases reported in Europe and the Americas prior to containment in China. Why was it different this time around?
  - cperciva 6y ago
    SARS was more lethal and people actually took public health measures seriously.
    - lazide 6y ago
      Additionally, SARS v1 was not contagious until there were visible symptoms - a huge difference from COVID/SARS v2.
      - cperciva 6y ago
        I wouldn't put too much confidence in that. SARS wasn't known to be contagious presymptomatically, but neither was COVID-19 for many months. Levels of presymptomatic transmission similar to COVID-19 are entirely consistent with the evidence we have from SARS.
        lazide 6y ago
        That seems unlikely, if for no other reason than the way COVID has spread. Do you have any data? All the data I've seen on SARs and the mechanisms deployed to control it indicate infectivity at or only very, very shortly before clear symptoms or they would not have been able to control it. COVID is quite clearly infectious before visible symptoms of any kind, and even when visible many times symptoms are pretty mild - where SARs was not - and this matches it's observed spread and difficulty in controlling it.

acdha 6y ago

> I don't think a strategy that needs every country on earth to cooperate this tightly ever had a chance to work. It doesn’t need anything that drastic: imagine an alternate history where the Taiwanese warnings in December 2019 had been taken seriously and international travel was locked down with a mandatory three week quarantine (adjusted by the later availability of tests) on arrival. That would require no cooperation from any other government, and it would have kept spread down below the level where contact tracing and other measures could be effective. Making it a delay avoided the obvious failures like an outright ban packing as many people as possible into crowded transportation and customs facilities, and means that critically important travel could still happen. The problem was that businesses like the travel industry are influential and delayed until it was too well established in most countries and once it had successfully been turned into a political shibboleth, the chances of lighter approaches working plummeted.

berdario 6y ago
> Taiwanese warnings The disease originated in Wuhan, mainland China, not Taiwan. The emergency was communicated in China (as well as Taiwan): http://py.cnhubei.com/py_news/2019/1231/3290.shtml http://py.cnhubei.com/py_news/2019/1231/3290.shtml Sure, listening to any official source would've been better than what happened... But shutting down travel to/from the whole of China (since otherwise you'd have to trust every passenger to declare if they had been in Wuhan) while there were less then 30/40 cases of pneumonia, and not a single death would've been a really difficult measure to sell
- acdha 6y ago
  > The disease originated in Wuhan, mainland China, not Taiwan. Yes, I’m aware - try more carefully reading my comment and note that I never said otherwise. What I was referring to was Taiwan being faster to acknowledge human to human spread when the Chinese government was still in damage control mode and WHO was following their official statements saying there was no confirmation of retransmission. This happened 2 weeks later: https://www.who.int/csr/don/14-january-2020-novel-coronavirus-thailand-ex-china/en/ https://www.who.int/csr/don/14-january-2020-novel-coronaviru... Taiwan had begun health screenings of travelers from Wuhan on December 31st, following their request to WHO and the China CDC for more information. By the time the first case was detected 3 weeks later they’d already activated a substantial public health plan — not because they were prescient but because SARS had given key officials a strong sense of the importance of not delaying.

jimbokun 6y ago

> Most countries aren't the first world, most countries don't have the resources to test and quarantine properly, most countries can't afford lockdowns. The United States meets all these criteria, and has the highest number of cases and deaths in the world. (And near the top in per-capita measures, too.)

makomk 6y ago
Of course a country with the resources to test properly has the highest number of cases and deaths in the world, because if you can't test properly you can't detect Covid-19 cases and deaths. I know the American press has fed its citizens a load of nonsense about this for nakedly partisan reasons, just like it has with every other part of the Covid-19 crisis, and it's getting tiring...
- carlmr 6y ago
  That of course is another thing to mention. Kind of like the EU countries talking badly about England after they discovered a more infectious mutation. In Germany at the time they didn't even sequence enough viruses to detect mutations before they're widespread.
carlmr 6y ago
I was listing the necessary, not the sufficient criteria. The United States could but it doesn't because the political system is too federalized for a centralized response.

tgsovlerkhgsel 6y ago

> I don't think a strategy that needs every country on earth to cooperate this tightly ever had a chance to work. It doesn't need that though. It needs countries to close the borders tightly except to countries that do cooperate, as many Asian countries have successfully done.

carlmr 6y ago
If your goal is to stop mutations from happening, yes, you need everyone in the world to go on full lockdown for 4 weeks. And then test everybody and quarantine until the disease is gone. The situation right now is that you have plenty of breeding grounds for new mutations, and it only needs some minor crossing of borders for these to get through. I would also say it's infeasible for non-island nations that need to trade with other countries to completely lock the borders.