3 ms·

So this is pretty close to my area of expertise. It would have been totally feasible to completely stop the thing in a matter of weeks. This thing did not have

by epgui 4y ago

So this is pretty close to my area of expertise. It would have been totally feasible to completely stop the thing in a matter of weeks. This thing did not have an outrageously high R_0, and we knew enough in March 2020 to stop the spread. However, that would have required very decisive/heavy-handed and coordinated action across the world. This did not happen, and so there was no stopping the thing.

monero-xmr 4y ago
I don’t believe a single country on earth stopped the spread, even China succumbed after wounding their economy for years
- epgui 4y ago
  Infectious diseases spread. If one country is doing all the right things but not enough other countries are, then that country doing all the right things won't be able to stop the spread on its own, even within its geography. That's normal and to be expected. This is why I said coordinated action was required: I didn't say that for no reason.
  - monero-xmr 4y ago
    [flagged]
    - epgui 4y ago
      Let's not go down this tangent please. If you genuinely want to discuss this honestly (I am skeptical, but prove me wrong), we should do it in a more appropriate forum / context.
    - tempestn 4y ago
      The initial lockdowns were intended to prevent a rapid spike in cases that would overwhelm the medical system. That was important, and largely successful. If such measure could have been taken in a globally coordinated, and fairly extreme manner, which was never realistic, then in theory the virus could've been eradicated early on. But that doesn't mean they were worthless otherwise. After that period there were measures of varying strictness applied in different areas, some of which were beneficial, and some did more harm than good. Some were based on a mistaken notion that the virus could be locally eradicated. Others were based on good science to blunt spikes of infections, again to reduce strain on the medical system, or to buy time for vaccinations. We can't look at complex issues as black and white.
  - mc32 4y ago
    They have an authoritarian government -one which could weld shut windows and doors ignoring any fire safety issues to lock down a block because there was one case… And it still spread. No, 10 days with democratic governments don’t allow one to truthfully say ‘10 days to stop the spread’. It’s either ignorance or willful misinformation/lying.
    - epgui 4y ago
      I think you should read my comment more slowly and more carefully, because if I copy-pasted it right here it would be an adequate response to your response.
      - mc32 4y ago
        Th premise is all governments would have the power to shut things down. They don't. We have civil liberties. It was unfeasible. Even absolute world-wide martial law would not stop it [you can't freeze people in place for ten days straight]. So the statement that it could have been stopped in 10 days if... No, that "if" was not going to happen.
        epgui 4y ago
        I think you need to draw an actual timeline of all the measures that were taken, and where and when they happened. That should help clarify.
        mc32 4y ago
        Do you recall the very early days when there was a cruise ship where a passenger caught SARS-COV2 and they anchored it in the SF bay and didn't let anyone off even while some succumbed to the disease and treated passengers as if they had Ebola? Yet, it still jumped and infected people (landlubbers). There was no way "10 days to stop the spread" was going to be effective.
        epgui 4y ago
  - ekianjo 4y ago
    > This is why I said coordinated action was required: I didn't say that for no reason. Nobody wants more clueless WHO driving things
    - epgui 4y ago
      Nobody wants to pay taxes either, but sometimes doing things we don't want to do is the best way to optimize quality (and quantity) of life for everyone. It all comes down to epidemiology, actuarial science and medical economics.
      - quonn 4y ago
        It comes down to a phantasy world complete with unicorns and all that does not exist anywhere except in your mind.
- qu4z-2 4y ago
  We repeatedly kicked it out of New Zealand, but eventually you've got to allow overseas travel.
  - Bazzas 4y ago
    [flagged]
- cameldrv 4y ago
  Australia and New Zealand also had COVID fully contained for a long time (not as long as China). It was possible but very difficult. We just weren’t up to the task. The hope was that the vaccine would make COVID like Measles, i.e. a few cases here and there, but you get your shot and basically never worry about it again. Unfortunately the vaccines aren’t good enough/COVID evolves too fast, so we are just living with massive death and disability.
ekianjo 4y ago
> . It would have been totally feasible to completely stop the thing in a matter of week You must be dreaming. There was not even any way to assess who was infected in the early days. Nobody was able to contain it either so your expertise needs to face hard facts
godelski 4y ago
For people wondering how this could happen, epgui is assuming action happened early on. April 1st 2020 there were 18k new daily cases (<200k cumulative) and <460 deaths (<4k cumulative). The reproduction rate was already in sharp decline (US even had <1 by May 3rd). To oversimplify things: you can't spread a virus if there's no one to spread it to. (we also learned a lot though, like how viruses spread through central ventilation systems in apartment complexes) Sources: https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus/country/united-states https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus/country/united-states https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&time=earliest..2020-05-03&facet=none&pickerSort=asc&pickerMetric=location&Metric=Reproduction+rate&Interval=7-day+rolling+average&Relative+to+Population=true&Color+by+test+positivity=false&country=USA%7EISR%7EFRA%7EESP https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
mikevm 4y ago
> So this is pretty close to my area of expertise. Oh great, another "expert". Yeah, if only we put you in charge things would've been totally different, right? I think it's pretty clear by now that the reaction to the disease has been grossly mishandled by the so called "public health experts" which acted against evidence that was already available at the time (children not in serious danger from COVID), or which made up evidence (vaccines stop infection, etc..). > However, that would have required very decisive/heavy-handed and coordinated action across the world. This did not happen, and so there was no stopping the thing. Exactly. So whatever you said about stopping the spread is unfeasible in the real world.
- epgui 4y ago
  Vaccines do prevent infections at the population scale. (cue: how many minutes until commenter replies with some bad counter-argument that ignores exactly half of the words I used in that sentence? I'm even going to tell you which ones ahead of time because I don't want to bother replying to your upcoming reply: at the population scale.)
_hypx 4y ago
I'm gonna guess that there was significant silent transmission. I.e. people who were asymptomatic were spreading the disease. If that's the case, then there is no stopping once it went beyond a few dozen people. The last date that we could've stopped it was probably in 2019, before anyone even knew there was a problem. The Covid-19 might have been one of those few examples of the future being totally ordained and completely unchangeable.
- epgui 4y ago
  There's no need to guess, we know that for sure. That (along with the k-factor) was a curve ball, but it doesn't change what I wrote at all, and it is totally false that we did not have the capacity to stop the spread. You don't necessarily need to identify every individual case, although being able to do so definitely helps.
  - _hypx 4y ago
    Even among identified cases, we did not put even a small dent in the rate of new daily cases until the very end of 2020: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/worldwide-graphs/#daily-cases https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/worldwide-graphs/#... Since that was about the time we had vaccines available, that suggests that none of our isolation strategies were capable of stopping the outbreak. It could only have slowed it down.
    - epgui 4y ago
      It's so tiring engaging with the public about this. No. Literally the only indicator you need to look at is R_t, and R_t was less than 1.0 at various times in various places throughout all of 2020. All you need to do to make an infectious disease go away is keep R_t below 1.0 for long enough (this depends on the lifecycle of the pathogen, but in this case we're talking weeks).
      - _hypx 4y ago
        But it simply didn't happen. At all in fact, once you look at the whole world. And all of this is based on reported data. We never got a clear picture of what unknown transmission looked like. If I had to guess, it was many-fold worse.
VirusNewbie 4y ago
Is this parody? You do know about china?
- epgui 4y ago
  A stronger example would probably be New Zealand, just because stats from China are very difficult to ascertain. (China did a lot of things right, but they also did a lot of things very wrong.)
  - oska 4y ago
    New Zealand, a small, wealthy nation that is famously isolated and has no land borders with any other countries. It's an almost completely useless model to apply to countries like Bangladesh or Peru.
oska 4y ago
I used to think this but I don't any longer. Two reasons : 1) asymptomatic, airborne spread makes infection control much harder and 2) your own admission that it would have required "very heavy-handed and coordinated action across the world". This second reason made it impracticable to stop the spread in March 2020. There are countries in the world where you simply cannot apply such heavy-handed action; there is not the level of control of or essential support for the population available. Btw, I've looked through your earlier replies to others under this comment and I have to remark that you took a very patronising tone, which I found unfortunate.
- simondotau 4y ago
  Not to mention that we massively underestimated the spread of COVID in other species. It’s all well and good to pretend that we could lock down humans, but good luck getting wild animals to socially distance. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/how-so-many-animal-species-contract-covid https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/how-so-ma...
gizmo 4y ago
You can't stop the spread because a large percentage of the workforce simply has to keep working to keep society functioning. Electricity, water, garbage pickup, supermarkets, hospitals, fire department, etc. You can't do without those. And people who work in those vital industries need to bring their kids to daycare/school, otherwise they can't work. If literally everybody stays home you can stop a disease like covid19. Otherwise, even with draconian countermeasures it will take way too long to snuff the thing out.
- foobarian 4y ago
  The lockdown idea is appealing but the devil is in the details, you have to limit group sizes. If the transmissible window is say 3 days, and the group size limit is 5, that's a 15 day lockdown. In practice big households are impossible to limit so in theory if you don't lock down for O(household members) you waste time.
tomp 4y ago
This is 100% delusional thinking. The only countries that somewhat managed do achieve that, are Australia and New Zealand, which are islands with long-term restrictive border control (completely a no-go in the US). And even they needed months of lockdowns. And ultimately failed.
- simondotau 4y ago
  Australian here. It didn’t “ultimately fail”, it partially succeeded. The practical point of lockdown wasn’t a vain attempt to eradicate the virus. It was to buy the population time for vaccines to get tested, manufactured and injected. The statistics leave no room for doubt that thousands of deaths were avoided as a result. The only question is whether the lives saved was sufficient to justify the economic, social, and psychological consequences. Good arguments be made both ways.
  - nickpp 4y ago
    Wasn’t Sweden's excess mortality over the whole period smaller than Australia's though? And smaller than most of the lockdown-happy countries as well.
roenxi 4y ago
That seems very implausible and needs a better argument than an "area of expertise". By March 2020 there were cases popping up everywhere [0] and it wasn't just travellers from China. It'd take a handful of undetected cases in India and Africa and then how exactly would you plan on stopping COVID spread? > However, that would have required very decisive/heavy-handed and coordinated action across the world. This is infeasible. If we had a system for global heavy-handed coordinated action we'd be much worse off than what COVID did; the political ramifications of that sort of measure would be disastrous. We went in to COVID with economic concerns and a bit of turmoil in the world and came out the other side with a rolling economic crisis and a potentially brewing WWIII. Having a reliable mechanism for triggering that sort of thing would end poorly. Also the US already spies on everyone, having mechanisms to be able to enforce its whims would only make the situation worse. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_COVID-19_pandemic_in_March_2020 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_COVID-19_pande...
- sudosysgen 4y ago
  It's a very simple argument. If you hold R_t under 1, the number of cases decreases exponentially. Eventually, you can unlock localities while restricting movement, and after some time the whole thing is dead in its tracks. This is something that almost every country eventually got around to doing anyways for probably longer on aggregate than it would have taken, it just wasn't timed right. There is no need for digital mass surveillance to enforce a quarantine. It's been done before computers were invented.
  - roenxi 4y ago
    Ooh! Oh we have to keep R_t under 1! Nobody thought of that. I wish the experts had spelled that out for us. Sorry to drip sarcasm but that is upsetting me. How do you intend to achieve this miracle? Will the plan involve Maoist policies? How will the plan be hardened to prevent its being used for Maoist policies? Any mechanism that could possibly coordinate a worldwide lock-down of everyone is eventually going to be used to implement a "common sense" policy that starves ... these days it could be a billion people if coordinated globally. That is a much worse idea than the COVID pandemic which, apart from the lockdowns, was nowhere near as bad as a system that could allow global coordinated action to disable the world economy in coordinated fashion on demand.

by epgui 4y ago

monero-xmr 4y ago

I don’t believe a single country on earth stopped the spread, even China succumbed after wounding their economy for years

epgui 4y ago
Infectious diseases spread. If one country is doing all the right things but not enough other countries are, then that country doing all the right things won't be able to stop the spread on its own, even within its geography. That's normal and to be expected. This is why I said coordinated action was required: I didn't say that for no reason.
- monero-xmr 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - epgui 4y ago
    Let's not go down this tangent please. If you genuinely want to discuss this honestly (I am skeptical, but prove me wrong), we should do it in a more appropriate forum / context.
  - tempestn 4y ago
    The initial lockdowns were intended to prevent a rapid spike in cases that would overwhelm the medical system. That was important, and largely successful. If such measure could have been taken in a globally coordinated, and fairly extreme manner, which was never realistic, then in theory the virus could've been eradicated early on. But that doesn't mean they were worthless otherwise. After that period there were measures of varying strictness applied in different areas, some of which were beneficial, and some did more harm than good. Some were based on a mistaken notion that the virus could be locally eradicated. Others were based on good science to blunt spikes of infections, again to reduce strain on the medical system, or to buy time for vaccinations. We can't look at complex issues as black and white.
- mc32 4y ago
  They have an authoritarian government -one which could weld shut windows and doors ignoring any fire safety issues to lock down a block because there was one case… And it still spread. No, 10 days with democratic governments don’t allow one to truthfully say ‘10 days to stop the spread’. It’s either ignorance or willful misinformation/lying.
  - epgui 4y ago
    I think you should read my comment more slowly and more carefully, because if I copy-pasted it right here it would be an adequate response to your response.
    - mc32 4y ago
      Th premise is all governments would have the power to shut things down. They don't. We have civil liberties. It was unfeasible. Even absolute world-wide martial law would not stop it [you can't freeze people in place for ten days straight]. So the statement that it could have been stopped in 10 days if... No, that "if" was not going to happen.
      - epgui 4y ago
        I think you need to draw an actual timeline of all the measures that were taken, and where and when they happened. That should help clarify.
        mc32 4y ago
        Do you recall the very early days when there was a cruise ship where a passenger caught SARS-COV2 and they anchored it in the SF bay and didn't let anyone off even while some succumbed to the disease and treated passengers as if they had Ebola? Yet, it still jumped and infected people (landlubbers). There was no way "10 days to stop the spread" was going to be effective.
        epgui 4y ago
- ekianjo 4y ago
  > This is why I said coordinated action was required: I didn't say that for no reason. Nobody wants more clueless WHO driving things
  - epgui 4y ago
    Nobody wants to pay taxes either, but sometimes doing things we don't want to do is the best way to optimize quality (and quantity) of life for everyone. It all comes down to epidemiology, actuarial science and medical economics.
    - quonn 4y ago
      It comes down to a phantasy world complete with unicorns and all that does not exist anywhere except in your mind.
qu4z-2 4y ago
We repeatedly kicked it out of New Zealand, but eventually you've got to allow overseas travel.
- Bazzas 4y ago
  [flagged]
cameldrv 4y ago
Australia and New Zealand also had COVID fully contained for a long time (not as long as China). It was possible but very difficult. We just weren’t up to the task. The hope was that the vaccine would make COVID like Measles, i.e. a few cases here and there, but you get your shot and basically never worry about it again. Unfortunately the vaccines aren’t good enough/COVID evolves too fast, so we are just living with massive death and disability.

ekianjo 4y ago

> . It would have been totally feasible to completely stop the thing in a matter of week You must be dreaming. There was not even any way to assess who was infected in the early days. Nobody was able to contain it either so your expertise needs to face hard facts

godelski 4y ago

For people wondering how this could happen, epgui is assuming action happened early on. April 1st 2020 there were 18k new daily cases (<200k cumulative) and <460 deaths (<4k cumulative). The reproduction rate was already in sharp decline (US even had <1 by May 3rd). To oversimplify things: you can't spread a virus if there's no one to spread it to. (we also learned a lot though, like how viruses spread through central ventilation systems in apartment complexes) Sources: https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus/country/united-states https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus/country/united-states https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explorer?zoomToSelection=true&time=earliest..2020-05-03&facet=none&pickerSort=asc&pickerMetric=location&Metric=Reproduction+rate&Interval=7-day+rolling+average&Relative+to+Population=true&Color+by+test+positivity=false&country=USA%7EISR%7EFRA%7EESP https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...

mikevm 4y ago

> So this is pretty close to my area of expertise. Oh great, another "expert". Yeah, if only we put you in charge things would've been totally different, right? I think it's pretty clear by now that the reaction to the disease has been grossly mishandled by the so called "public health experts" which acted against evidence that was already available at the time (children not in serious danger from COVID), or which made up evidence (vaccines stop infection, etc..). > However, that would have required very decisive/heavy-handed and coordinated action across the world. This did not happen, and so there was no stopping the thing. Exactly. So whatever you said about stopping the spread is unfeasible in the real world.

epgui 4y ago
Vaccines do prevent infections at the population scale. (cue: how many minutes until commenter replies with some bad counter-argument that ignores exactly half of the words I used in that sentence? I'm even going to tell you which ones ahead of time because I don't want to bother replying to your upcoming reply: at the population scale.)

_hypx 4y ago

I'm gonna guess that there was significant silent transmission. I.e. people who were asymptomatic were spreading the disease. If that's the case, then there is no stopping once it went beyond a few dozen people. The last date that we could've stopped it was probably in 2019, before anyone even knew there was a problem. The Covid-19 might have been one of those few examples of the future being totally ordained and completely unchangeable.

epgui 4y ago
There's no need to guess, we know that for sure. That (along with the k-factor) was a curve ball, but it doesn't change what I wrote at all, and it is totally false that we did not have the capacity to stop the spread. You don't necessarily need to identify every individual case, although being able to do so definitely helps.
- _hypx 4y ago
  Even among identified cases, we did not put even a small dent in the rate of new daily cases until the very end of 2020: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/worldwide-graphs/#daily-cases https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/worldwide-graphs/#... Since that was about the time we had vaccines available, that suggests that none of our isolation strategies were capable of stopping the outbreak. It could only have slowed it down.
  - epgui 4y ago
    It's so tiring engaging with the public about this. No. Literally the only indicator you need to look at is R_t, and R_t was less than 1.0 at various times in various places throughout all of 2020. All you need to do to make an infectious disease go away is keep R_t below 1.0 for long enough (this depends on the lifecycle of the pathogen, but in this case we're talking weeks).
    - _hypx 4y ago
      But it simply didn't happen. At all in fact, once you look at the whole world. And all of this is based on reported data. We never got a clear picture of what unknown transmission looked like. If I had to guess, it was many-fold worse.

VirusNewbie 4y ago

Is this parody? You do know about china?

epgui 4y ago
A stronger example would probably be New Zealand, just because stats from China are very difficult to ascertain. (China did a lot of things right, but they also did a lot of things very wrong.)
- oska 4y ago
  New Zealand, a small, wealthy nation that is famously isolated and has no land borders with any other countries. It's an almost completely useless model to apply to countries like Bangladesh or Peru.

oska 4y ago

I used to think this but I don't any longer. Two reasons : 1) asymptomatic, airborne spread makes infection control much harder and 2) your own admission that it would have required "very heavy-handed and coordinated action across the world". This second reason made it impracticable to stop the spread in March 2020. There are countries in the world where you simply cannot apply such heavy-handed action; there is not the level of control of or essential support for the population available. Btw, I've looked through your earlier replies to others under this comment and I have to remark that you took a very patronising tone, which I found unfortunate.

simondotau 4y ago
Not to mention that we massively underestimated the spread of COVID in other species. It’s all well and good to pretend that we could lock down humans, but good luck getting wild animals to socially distance. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/how-so-many-animal-species-contract-covid https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/how-so-ma...

gizmo 4y ago

You can't stop the spread because a large percentage of the workforce simply has to keep working to keep society functioning. Electricity, water, garbage pickup, supermarkets, hospitals, fire department, etc. You can't do without those. And people who work in those vital industries need to bring their kids to daycare/school, otherwise they can't work. If literally everybody stays home you can stop a disease like covid19. Otherwise, even with draconian countermeasures it will take way too long to snuff the thing out.

foobarian 4y ago
The lockdown idea is appealing but the devil is in the details, you have to limit group sizes. If the transmissible window is say 3 days, and the group size limit is 5, that's a 15 day lockdown. In practice big households are impossible to limit so in theory if you don't lock down for O(household members) you waste time.

tomp 4y ago

This is 100% delusional thinking. The only countries that somewhat managed do achieve that, are Australia and New Zealand, which are islands with long-term restrictive border control (completely a no-go in the US). And even they needed months of lockdowns. And ultimately failed.

simondotau 4y ago
Australian here. It didn’t “ultimately fail”, it partially succeeded. The practical point of lockdown wasn’t a vain attempt to eradicate the virus. It was to buy the population time for vaccines to get tested, manufactured and injected. The statistics leave no room for doubt that thousands of deaths were avoided as a result. The only question is whether the lives saved was sufficient to justify the economic, social, and psychological consequences. Good arguments be made both ways.
- nickpp 4y ago
  Wasn’t Sweden's excess mortality over the whole period smaller than Australia's though? And smaller than most of the lockdown-happy countries as well.

roenxi 4y ago

That seems very implausible and needs a better argument than an "area of expertise". By March 2020 there were cases popping up everywhere [0] and it wasn't just travellers from China. It'd take a handful of undetected cases in India and Africa and then how exactly would you plan on stopping COVID spread? > However, that would have required very decisive/heavy-handed and coordinated action across the world. This is infeasible. If we had a system for global heavy-handed coordinated action we'd be much worse off than what COVID did; the political ramifications of that sort of measure would be disastrous. We went in to COVID with economic concerns and a bit of turmoil in the world and came out the other side with a rolling economic crisis and a potentially brewing WWIII. Having a reliable mechanism for triggering that sort of thing would end poorly. Also the US already spies on everyone, having mechanisms to be able to enforce its whims would only make the situation worse. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_COVID-19_pandemic_in_March_2020 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_COVID-19_pande...

sudosysgen 4y ago
It's a very simple argument. If you hold R_t under 1, the number of cases decreases exponentially. Eventually, you can unlock localities while restricting movement, and after some time the whole thing is dead in its tracks. This is something that almost every country eventually got around to doing anyways for probably longer on aggregate than it would have taken, it just wasn't timed right. There is no need for digital mass surveillance to enforce a quarantine. It's been done before computers were invented.
- roenxi 4y ago
  Ooh! Oh we have to keep R_t under 1! Nobody thought of that. I wish the experts had spelled that out for us. Sorry to drip sarcasm but that is upsetting me. How do you intend to achieve this miracle? Will the plan involve Maoist policies? How will the plan be hardened to prevent its being used for Maoist policies? Any mechanism that could possibly coordinate a worldwide lock-down of everyone is eventually going to be used to implement a "common sense" policy that starves ... these days it could be a billion people if coordinated globally. That is a much worse idea than the COVID pandemic which, apart from the lockdowns, was nowhere near as bad as a system that could allow global coordinated action to disable the world economy in coordinated fashion on demand.