17 ms·

A globally coordinated approach, similar to NZ's approach could have ended the oandemic already a year ago. Thanks to COVID-19 fatigue amongst the population,

A globally coordinated approach, similar to NZ's approach could have ended the oandemic already a year ago. Thanks to COVID-19 fatigue amongst the population, such an effort very close to impossible.

kikokikokiko 6y ago
Comparing an island nation of 5 million people, that can effectively close it's borders and "avoid" new focuses of infection, to countries of 100+ million of people, where the difficulties of border closing are effectively unsurmountable, is extremely disingenuous. The whole approach governments took in facing this pandemic needs to be studied in the next decades. It's an eye opening thing to see how viruses spread pretty much the way they do, and there is almost nothing we can do to stop it. It's really humbling to see that if you keep everything open (i.e. Florida) you get the same results as if you make your population effectively stop to live for one year (i.e. California).
- dragontamer 6y ago
  Its likely illegal for California to close its borders to Florida. But that probably would have slowed the spread significantly, at least in the 3rd wave where the Mid-Western / anti-mask states led the 3rd wave. This country was in this together. For better or for worse. Closing the borders of states was never an option.
  - viraptor 6y ago
    > Its likely illegal for California to close its borders to Florida. I wonder if that's really the case. A year ago I'd say the same for Australia. Yet most Australian states closed their borders at some point as a response to local cases spiking. (I agree it's less practical in the US, but I do wonder about the legality)
    - jedberg 6y ago
      Whatever the answer I feel like it would take the courts a few weeks at least to figure it out. California (or more realistically Hawaii) could have had a full three week border closure before anyone settled the case law.
      - refurb 6y ago
        They certainly could have “closed” the border but how effective would it have been? How many road cross into CA? How many open fields? You’d need an army of hundreds of thousands to ensure nobody crosses.
        mewse 6y ago
        Maybe they could build a wall.
        labster 6y ago
        Not very many roads enter California, as it has natural geological borders. An ocean to the west, hilly forest to the north. On the east, a 3 km high mountain range which leads into a hot desert, cut by the mighty Colorado. The terrain is a lot more forgiving to the south, but there’s an artificial border with Baja California there. Plus, most of the infrastructure is there for the agricultural inspection stations. Just use it to stop human disease instead of plant disease.
        refurb 6y ago
        Logically that makes sense but we can't even seem to secure our southern border with Mexico. And interestingly there are only 16 agricultural stations for all of California. They are only in place at major highways. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Border_Protection_Stations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Border_Protection_S... And if I kind of zoom into Google maps I count 36 crossing between the Oregon/California border just between the Pacific ocean and I-5. Sure, a lot of those are probably logging roads and such, but that's just a 60 mile stretch.
        6y ago
  - kikokikokiko 6y ago
    I do not live in the US, but I love that your system allows you guys to have effectively 51 experiments on how to deal with the spread of a virus, and see the results of every strategy. Do you really think that, if you can't even control your borders between states, your border on the south with Mexico for instance, would ever be effectively controlled to avoid the virus to come through it? The complete failure of California (even when compared to states where the demographics tend more to the older generations) tells me everything that is needed to understand if the lockdown approach works or not.
    - sdenton4 6y ago
      California is far from a monolith, though. Alameda County, where I live, hasn't been that bad, and has had a strong lockdown policy. Other parts of california have larger populations of anti-maskers. And the California prison system has been a complete disaster, largely because of incompetence and inhumanity in the administration.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- the_cat_kittles 6y ago
  well vietnam also did extremely well. and new zealands managed isolation (which i just went through) could easily be replicated anywhere there are hotels
  - Leherenn 6y ago
    In Europe, a lot of people (including many essential workers) commute across a border every day to work. What do you do with them?
  - jokteur 6y ago
    In my country of 8 millions (Switzerland), about 340'000 people commute to Switzerland each day to work [1]. These people come from Italy, France, Germany and a bit from Austria. A lot of these people do important work, such as working in hospitals, administration, services, ... Locking down the borders completely would just have been impossible. You would be suddendly in need of nurses and doctors. Sometimes, more than 50% of the personal in bordering hospitals are cross-border commuters [2]. Yes, you could discuss on how Switzerland is taking advantage of "cheap" labor from neighboring countries, but it does not change the fact that for Switzerland, closing completely the borders (with 14 days isolation) is just an impossible task. [1] https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/en/home/statistics/work-income/employment-working-hours/employed-persons/swiss-foreign-nationals/cross-border-commuters.html https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/en/home/statistics/work-income/... [2] https://www.swissinfo.ch/fre/fran%C3%A7ais-et-italiens-dans-les-soins_-sans-frontaliers--plusieurs-de-nos-cliniques-ne-tourneraient-pas-/44126324 https://www.swissinfo.ch/fre/fran%C3%A7ais-et-italiens-dans-...
- peteretep 6y ago
  Thailand’s 50m people with 3,000km of mostly unpoliced border, they made it work. Vietnam made it work. Locking borders early and moving to quarantined entry apparently works, and when some knobs walk over the border with Covid, as has happened with both countries, you can unleash an almighty track-and-trace and isolated lockdowns because the health system isn’t already on its knees.
  - tim333 6y ago
    Track and trace works way better when you have 20 or so people infected than when you have 100,000. It's not even the health system, just the logistics of tracking everyone down. I kind of experienced both - the first in Koh Lanta and the second in London.
  - throwaway-8c93 6y ago
    They're not islands in a strict geographical sense, but there are a dozen or so countries which are de-facto islands for any practical purposes - accessible only through large bodies of water, with land borders mostly impassable or crossed so infrequently that they don't matter. South Korea, North Korea, Finland, Vietnam, several central American countries and others. Even China fits the bill. Not sure how frequent traffic across Thai borders are, but my impression is that SE Asian countries are not very well integrated.
onetimemanytime 6y ago
The only chance for lockdowns was in China, early on. Being a country with virtually unlimited money, manpower and an authoritarian regime Covid could have died in there. Quarantine enforced by millions of soldiers and police. Once out, you're dealing with about 200 countries divided in tens of thousands of localities and hundreds of thousands of politicians with their own goals and beliefs. So, not doable.
- FooBarWidget 6y ago
  That's impossible. China is not North Korea. All it takes is just 1 asymptomatic infected person to leave the country - perhaps 1 hour before the hypothetical country-wide lockdown - for the virus to spread. No, it's even worse than that. Signs of covid have been found in Europe dating back to October 2019, before anyone in China knew that this existed. Besides, western countries didn't take the virus seriously in the beginning at all. Even a month after the Wuhan lockdown, the Dutch didn't take much action, while Trump said it's just the cold. The attitude was basically: it's only a disaster in China, outside China it's not serious.
  - Pyramus 6y ago
    > The attitude was basically: it's only a disaster in China, outside China it's not serious. Your comment is on point. I'm certain that many European countries benefitted from the escalation in Italy and pictures of army trucks filled with body bags. From then on, most took the virus a lot more serious. 'It's only a disaster in X, in our country it's not serious' has been a recurring theme and it's one of the things that makes me bearish going forward.
  - sgt101 6y ago
    >Signs of covid have been found in Europe dating back to October 2019 I've always been skeptical of this; test enough samples and you will get positives. More careful and systematic analysis is required on this one.
    - saiya-jin 6y ago
winocm 6y ago
COVID-19 fatigue has nearly killed me.
refurb 6y ago
I’m skeptical. Even countries like Singapore have constantly had 1 or 2 locally transmitted cases per month they can’t trace. Now multiply that across 170 countries some too poor to do what Singapore did. If every country had locked down like NZ, we would have just had a series of lockdowns and flare ups and more lockdowns. It certainly would have kept the case numbers much lower but can you imagine the fatigue after going through your 12th lockdown?
- scott_w 6y ago
  I can imagine the fatigue of what I’m currently going through of constantly locking down for 4 months at a time! Compared to that, having to lock down every couple of months for a week or two doesn’t seem anywhere near as bad. Oh, and we wouldn’t have 130,000 dead in the UK and 500,000+ dead in the USA!
  - jb775 6y ago
    To bad that simply isn't realistic when accounting for hundreds of millions of people. Not to mention the whole "freedom" thing. Quit virtue signaling using conjecture and bogus stats (i.e. my way would have saved everyone!).
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - vanviegen 6y ago
      Virtue signaling? That seems like a stretch. GP is only saying how they think covid-19 should have been handled.
      - saiya-jin 6y ago
        Yeah but that's unrealistic proposal that looks nice on paper, but completely ignores real human nature and how complex and diverse real world is. Who has the authority for global shutdowns? Nobody. Many nations wouldn't agree on that and political discussions would be endless, everybody has their own agenda regardless of virus. Can you imagine some Europeans telling USA 'OK now whole of your nation will stay at home for 2 weeks'. Not going to fly on any US level. Or Americans to Chinese. Globally it haven't been handled OK by any means, but these naive suggestions don't help getting a workable solution. 'If only all people behaved rationally' can be wished in any discussion, sure, but it doesn't get us anywhere closer to solutions.
Method-X 6y ago
New Zealand is an island nation, which gives it a pretty significant advantage when it comes to controlling pandemics.
- neilwilson 6y ago
  It's a distant island nation at the end of the transport network. One of the reasons New York, London and Brussels have been hit so hard is that they are global hubs in the world transport and financial power networks.
- digianarchist 6y ago
  So is Britain.
  - nxpnsv 6y ago
    There is a tunnel, it’s a transportation hub, lots more people, and boris..
    - te_chris 6y ago
      Was a transportation hub. Brexit should sort that out.
- tshaddox 6y ago
  Hence a global approach similar to New Zealand’s. The globe has similar advantages to New Zealand when it comes to controlling pandemics.
  - vasco 6y ago
    The globe doesn't have an important property of centralized government and decisionmaking.
  - toxik 6y ago
    But for the fact that there is no single governing entity... which is an enormous caveat.
cfn 6y ago
I live in the Azores on an island with less than 15k people which was mostly closed last year. There are only two ways to enter the island: the port and the airport there isn't a lot of movement and everyone coming in is tested twice. On top of that people here are terrified of the virus and take it very seriously (masks, distancing, etc) and can even be hostile to newcomers. Still, cases keep popping up even without systematic testing. There are no deaths or even ICU cases but the virus keeps finding its way in. I believe that, like New Zealand, we are just postponing the inevitable.
- ern 6y ago
  I believe that, like New Zealand, we are just postponing the inevitable New Zealand (and Australia) don't have cases, because every single traveler who enters those island nations is kept in hotel quarantine, and tested multiple times before being released only after the quarantine period ends. It isn't the same as testing people when they come in and letting them straight into the community if they test negative. That said, with vaccines now being rolled out, it may well be that these countries managed to dodge the bullet. It's hard to see what was "inevitable" about Covid, except the dogma (still promoted by the WHO, when I last checked) that travel bans are bad.
  - saiya-jin 6y ago
    This is enforceable in remote island countries, but in ie Europe its not. You can't 100% lock the borders, there would be shortages of basically everything, from food to materials used in all industries. Europe is not so unified as US for example, there is a lot of independence, for better or worse. Food is transported on trucks, till it reaches from Spain say Poland it crosses minimum of 4-5 countries, each with their own covid situation, laws, rules, bans etc. If we knew back a year ago how bad things would get and are still getting, I believe such a lockdown for say a month could pass, otherwise not and there isn't a central authority that could enforce it. And saying it was to be expected doesn't make much sense, spread of predicted outcomes was basically between yet another flu to another spanish flu.
  - makomk 6y ago
    New Zealand and Australia have had cases outside of quarantine despite every single traveller who enters those island nations being kept in hotel quarantine, tested multiple times, and being released only after the quarantine period ends. Some of those cases are directly traceable to quarantined travellers, some aren't. In any case, even those measures which aren't practical except in an island nation aren't effective enough to prevent outbreaks when implemented on a larger scale; the bigger the country the more opportunities for one of those cases to turn into something that's not easily controlled.
Eliezer 6y ago
What could've ended the pandemic around 6 months ago was human challenge trials on vaccines, and paying much more for earlier supplies of vaccines including those donated to other countries. (What counts as an impossible supply challenge is very different at the $500 price point than at the $50 price point.)
- brmgb 6y ago
  > What counts as an impossible supply challenge is very different at the $500 price point than at the $50 price point. Considering the insane profits pharmaceutical companies are currently recording, the issue has more to do with these companies favoring their benefits to the detriment of the general population which should come as no surprise to anyone having experience dealing with a pharma company. The issue is particularly prevalent in Europe because as usual, apart from some grand posturing in the media, Europe will do nothing to fight back.
  - eonwe 6y ago
    I think most of the companies are selling the vaccine quite cheaply. Moderna and Pfizer are asking for 15-20 $ / person for vaccine that has value of thousands of euros. Which, as Eliezer notes, is part of the problem. That together with flexible delivery schedules in agreements mean that companies have little extra resources and incentives to invest in fast vaccine production. For more discussion, see https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/02/market-design-to-accelerate-vaccine-supply.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/02/ma...
nickthemagicman 6y ago
Good luck paying for 6 billion people to stay at home. That's not how our global economy works.
tim333 6y ago
I remember the Chinese guy Zhong Nanshan saying if the world took his/Chinese advice, basically Wuhan like policies, that the whole thing could be gone by June 2020. But I guess with Trumps and Bolsonaros running countries that wasn't on the cards.

A globally coordinated approach, similar to NZ's approach could have ended the oandemic already a year ago. Thanks to COVID-19 fatigue amongst the population, such an effort very close to impossible.

kikokikokiko 6y ago

Comparing an island nation of 5 million people, that can effectively close it's borders and "avoid" new focuses of infection, to countries of 100+ million of people, where the difficulties of border closing are effectively unsurmountable, is extremely disingenuous. The whole approach governments took in facing this pandemic needs to be studied in the next decades. It's an eye opening thing to see how viruses spread pretty much the way they do, and there is almost nothing we can do to stop it. It's really humbling to see that if you keep everything open (i.e. Florida) you get the same results as if you make your population effectively stop to live for one year (i.e. California).

dragontamer 6y ago
Its likely illegal for California to close its borders to Florida. But that probably would have slowed the spread significantly, at least in the 3rd wave where the Mid-Western / anti-mask states led the 3rd wave. This country was in this together. For better or for worse. Closing the borders of states was never an option.
- viraptor 6y ago
  > Its likely illegal for California to close its borders to Florida. I wonder if that's really the case. A year ago I'd say the same for Australia. Yet most Australian states closed their borders at some point as a response to local cases spiking. (I agree it's less practical in the US, but I do wonder about the legality)
  - jedberg 6y ago
    Whatever the answer I feel like it would take the courts a few weeks at least to figure it out. California (or more realistically Hawaii) could have had a full three week border closure before anyone settled the case law.
    - refurb 6y ago
      They certainly could have “closed” the border but how effective would it have been? How many road cross into CA? How many open fields? You’d need an army of hundreds of thousands to ensure nobody crosses.
      - mewse 6y ago
        Maybe they could build a wall.
      - labster 6y ago
        Not very many roads enter California, as it has natural geological borders. An ocean to the west, hilly forest to the north. On the east, a 3 km high mountain range which leads into a hot desert, cut by the mighty Colorado. The terrain is a lot more forgiving to the south, but there’s an artificial border with Baja California there. Plus, most of the infrastructure is there for the agricultural inspection stations. Just use it to stop human disease instead of plant disease.
        refurb 6y ago
        Logically that makes sense but we can't even seem to secure our southern border with Mexico. And interestingly there are only 16 agricultural stations for all of California. They are only in place at major highways. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Border_Protection_Stations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Border_Protection_S... And if I kind of zoom into Google maps I count 36 crossing between the Oregon/California border just between the Pacific ocean and I-5. Sure, a lot of those are probably logging roads and such, but that's just a 60 mile stretch.
      - 6y ago
- kikokikokiko 6y ago
  I do not live in the US, but I love that your system allows you guys to have effectively 51 experiments on how to deal with the spread of a virus, and see the results of every strategy. Do you really think that, if you can't even control your borders between states, your border on the south with Mexico for instance, would ever be effectively controlled to avoid the virus to come through it? The complete failure of California (even when compared to states where the demographics tend more to the older generations) tells me everything that is needed to understand if the lockdown approach works or not.
  - sdenton4 6y ago
    California is far from a monolith, though. Alameda County, where I live, hasn't been that bad, and has had a strong lockdown policy. Other parts of california have larger populations of anti-maskers. And the California prison system has been a complete disaster, largely because of incompetence and inhumanity in the administration.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
the_cat_kittles 6y ago
well vietnam also did extremely well. and new zealands managed isolation (which i just went through) could easily be replicated anywhere there are hotels
- Leherenn 6y ago
  In Europe, a lot of people (including many essential workers) commute across a border every day to work. What do you do with them?
- jokteur 6y ago
  In my country of 8 millions (Switzerland), about 340'000 people commute to Switzerland each day to work [1]. These people come from Italy, France, Germany and a bit from Austria. A lot of these people do important work, such as working in hospitals, administration, services, ... Locking down the borders completely would just have been impossible. You would be suddendly in need of nurses and doctors. Sometimes, more than 50% of the personal in bordering hospitals are cross-border commuters [2]. Yes, you could discuss on how Switzerland is taking advantage of "cheap" labor from neighboring countries, but it does not change the fact that for Switzerland, closing completely the borders (with 14 days isolation) is just an impossible task. [1] https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/en/home/statistics/work-income/employment-working-hours/employed-persons/swiss-foreign-nationals/cross-border-commuters.html https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfs/en/home/statistics/work-income/... [2] https://www.swissinfo.ch/fre/fran%C3%A7ais-et-italiens-dans-les-soins_-sans-frontaliers--plusieurs-de-nos-cliniques-ne-tourneraient-pas-/44126324 https://www.swissinfo.ch/fre/fran%C3%A7ais-et-italiens-dans-...
peteretep 6y ago
Thailand’s 50m people with 3,000km of mostly unpoliced border, they made it work. Vietnam made it work. Locking borders early and moving to quarantined entry apparently works, and when some knobs walk over the border with Covid, as has happened with both countries, you can unleash an almighty track-and-trace and isolated lockdowns because the health system isn’t already on its knees.
- tim333 6y ago
  Track and trace works way better when you have 20 or so people infected than when you have 100,000. It's not even the health system, just the logistics of tracking everyone down. I kind of experienced both - the first in Koh Lanta and the second in London.
- throwaway-8c93 6y ago
  They're not islands in a strict geographical sense, but there are a dozen or so countries which are de-facto islands for any practical purposes - accessible only through large bodies of water, with land borders mostly impassable or crossed so infrequently that they don't matter. South Korea, North Korea, Finland, Vietnam, several central American countries and others. Even China fits the bill. Not sure how frequent traffic across Thai borders are, but my impression is that SE Asian countries are not very well integrated.

onetimemanytime 6y ago

The only chance for lockdowns was in China, early on. Being a country with virtually unlimited money, manpower and an authoritarian regime Covid could have died in there. Quarantine enforced by millions of soldiers and police. Once out, you're dealing with about 200 countries divided in tens of thousands of localities and hundreds of thousands of politicians with their own goals and beliefs. So, not doable.

FooBarWidget 6y ago
That's impossible. China is not North Korea. All it takes is just 1 asymptomatic infected person to leave the country - perhaps 1 hour before the hypothetical country-wide lockdown - for the virus to spread. No, it's even worse than that. Signs of covid have been found in Europe dating back to October 2019, before anyone in China knew that this existed. Besides, western countries didn't take the virus seriously in the beginning at all. Even a month after the Wuhan lockdown, the Dutch didn't take much action, while Trump said it's just the cold. The attitude was basically: it's only a disaster in China, outside China it's not serious.
- Pyramus 6y ago
  > The attitude was basically: it's only a disaster in China, outside China it's not serious. Your comment is on point. I'm certain that many European countries benefitted from the escalation in Italy and pictures of army trucks filled with body bags. From then on, most took the virus a lot more serious. 'It's only a disaster in X, in our country it's not serious' has been a recurring theme and it's one of the things that makes me bearish going forward.
- sgt101 6y ago
  >Signs of covid have been found in Europe dating back to October 2019 I've always been skeptical of this; test enough samples and you will get positives. More careful and systematic analysis is required on this one.
  - saiya-jin 6y ago

winocm 6y ago

COVID-19 fatigue has nearly killed me.

refurb 6y ago

I’m skeptical. Even countries like Singapore have constantly had 1 or 2 locally transmitted cases per month they can’t trace. Now multiply that across 170 countries some too poor to do what Singapore did. If every country had locked down like NZ, we would have just had a series of lockdowns and flare ups and more lockdowns. It certainly would have kept the case numbers much lower but can you imagine the fatigue after going through your 12th lockdown?

scott_w 6y ago
I can imagine the fatigue of what I’m currently going through of constantly locking down for 4 months at a time! Compared to that, having to lock down every couple of months for a week or two doesn’t seem anywhere near as bad. Oh, and we wouldn’t have 130,000 dead in the UK and 500,000+ dead in the USA!
- jb775 6y ago
  To bad that simply isn't realistic when accounting for hundreds of millions of people. Not to mention the whole "freedom" thing. Quit virtue signaling using conjecture and bogus stats (i.e. my way would have saved everyone!).
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - vanviegen 6y ago
    Virtue signaling? That seems like a stretch. GP is only saying how they think covid-19 should have been handled.
    - saiya-jin 6y ago
      Yeah but that's unrealistic proposal that looks nice on paper, but completely ignores real human nature and how complex and diverse real world is. Who has the authority for global shutdowns? Nobody. Many nations wouldn't agree on that and political discussions would be endless, everybody has their own agenda regardless of virus. Can you imagine some Europeans telling USA 'OK now whole of your nation will stay at home for 2 weeks'. Not going to fly on any US level. Or Americans to Chinese. Globally it haven't been handled OK by any means, but these naive suggestions don't help getting a workable solution. 'If only all people behaved rationally' can be wished in any discussion, sure, but it doesn't get us anywhere closer to solutions.

Method-X 6y ago

New Zealand is an island nation, which gives it a pretty significant advantage when it comes to controlling pandemics.

neilwilson 6y ago
It's a distant island nation at the end of the transport network. One of the reasons New York, London and Brussels have been hit so hard is that they are global hubs in the world transport and financial power networks.
digianarchist 6y ago
So is Britain.
- nxpnsv 6y ago
  There is a tunnel, it’s a transportation hub, lots more people, and boris..
  - te_chris 6y ago
    Was a transportation hub. Brexit should sort that out.
tshaddox 6y ago
Hence a global approach similar to New Zealand’s. The globe has similar advantages to New Zealand when it comes to controlling pandemics.
- vasco 6y ago
  The globe doesn't have an important property of centralized government and decisionmaking.
- toxik 6y ago
  But for the fact that there is no single governing entity... which is an enormous caveat.

cfn 6y ago

I live in the Azores on an island with less than 15k people which was mostly closed last year. There are only two ways to enter the island: the port and the airport there isn't a lot of movement and everyone coming in is tested twice. On top of that people here are terrified of the virus and take it very seriously (masks, distancing, etc) and can even be hostile to newcomers. Still, cases keep popping up even without systematic testing. There are no deaths or even ICU cases but the virus keeps finding its way in. I believe that, like New Zealand, we are just postponing the inevitable.

ern 6y ago
I believe that, like New Zealand, we are just postponing the inevitable New Zealand (and Australia) don't have cases, because every single traveler who enters those island nations is kept in hotel quarantine, and tested multiple times before being released only after the quarantine period ends. It isn't the same as testing people when they come in and letting them straight into the community if they test negative. That said, with vaccines now being rolled out, it may well be that these countries managed to dodge the bullet. It's hard to see what was "inevitable" about Covid, except the dogma (still promoted by the WHO, when I last checked) that travel bans are bad.
- saiya-jin 6y ago
  This is enforceable in remote island countries, but in ie Europe its not. You can't 100% lock the borders, there would be shortages of basically everything, from food to materials used in all industries. Europe is not so unified as US for example, there is a lot of independence, for better or worse. Food is transported on trucks, till it reaches from Spain say Poland it crosses minimum of 4-5 countries, each with their own covid situation, laws, rules, bans etc. If we knew back a year ago how bad things would get and are still getting, I believe such a lockdown for say a month could pass, otherwise not and there isn't a central authority that could enforce it. And saying it was to be expected doesn't make much sense, spread of predicted outcomes was basically between yet another flu to another spanish flu.
- makomk 6y ago
  New Zealand and Australia have had cases outside of quarantine despite every single traveller who enters those island nations being kept in hotel quarantine, tested multiple times, and being released only after the quarantine period ends. Some of those cases are directly traceable to quarantined travellers, some aren't. In any case, even those measures which aren't practical except in an island nation aren't effective enough to prevent outbreaks when implemented on a larger scale; the bigger the country the more opportunities for one of those cases to turn into something that's not easily controlled.

Eliezer 6y ago

What could've ended the pandemic around 6 months ago was human challenge trials on vaccines, and paying much more for earlier supplies of vaccines including those donated to other countries. (What counts as an impossible supply challenge is very different at the $500 price point than at the $50 price point.)

brmgb 6y ago
> What counts as an impossible supply challenge is very different at the $500 price point than at the $50 price point. Considering the insane profits pharmaceutical companies are currently recording, the issue has more to do with these companies favoring their benefits to the detriment of the general population which should come as no surprise to anyone having experience dealing with a pharma company. The issue is particularly prevalent in Europe because as usual, apart from some grand posturing in the media, Europe will do nothing to fight back.
- eonwe 6y ago
  I think most of the companies are selling the vaccine quite cheaply. Moderna and Pfizer are asking for 15-20 $ / person for vaccine that has value of thousands of euros. Which, as Eliezer notes, is part of the problem. That together with flexible delivery schedules in agreements mean that companies have little extra resources and incentives to invest in fast vaccine production. For more discussion, see https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/02/market-design-to-accelerate-vaccine-supply.html https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/02/ma...

nickthemagicman 6y ago

Good luck paying for 6 billion people to stay at home. That's not how our global economy works.

tim333 6y ago

I remember the Chinese guy Zhong Nanshan saying if the world took his/Chinese advice, basically Wuhan like policies, that the whole thing could be gone by June 2020. But I guess with Trumps and Bolsonaros running countries that wasn't on the cards.