If this becomes a true epidemic it’s going to be bad, but societies have been dealing with epidemics for a long time.
That's absolutely true, even in Wuhan the %age of infected people on the total population is relatively small, but much larger than the # of ICU beds that existed.
And the virus had a long time to spread around there before any countermeasures were taken.
Even so, ventilators and ICU beds are not normally all available either.
> Quarantine has been surprisingly effective in China, though at significant economic cost.
It would have been a lot more effective if they had done it sooner.
> That seems to be a much larger concern than the capacity of heathcare systems.
Yes, and I'm sure that at some level that's the right trade-off, I'm just not sure what that level is and whether or not we are already past it.
> If this becomes a true epidemic it’s going to be bad, but societies have been dealing with epidemics for a long time.
In Italy they went from 0 dead and a handful of cases to 7 dead and > 200 cases. Most of them are old people and people that were already ill.
Historically the way we deal with epidemics is by developing medication. That takes time and in the meantime the damage could be substantial.
Effective medication is a very recent thing. Variolation dates back to the 10th century and was moderately effective, but quarantine is thousands of years old. Avoiding cannibalism and thus prion diseases is also from antiquity, but that’s simply another type of avoidance.
China startet radical measures after a rather low number of mystery lung issues. I really doubt that any other government would have taken decisive action much earlier. What would you expect, martial law whenever a doctor isn't quite sure about a diagnosis?
The initial silencing of the first public reports is very unfortunate and puts the government rightfully in a very bad light, but I'm not sure that it had any influence on the speed of countermeasure implementation at all. I see that more as a case of one part of a huge organisation not knowing what the other is doing, not as a government-wide attempt at ignoring the problem. The authoritarian version of a PR department still sending out denials while the rest of the company is already working on a fix (and too busy to rein in the PR department/thought police)
After SARS a month of inaction is too long.
Yes, but we’re still often left with millions or tens of millions dead.
Try one in ten thousand. And that's in the most developed countries with the best healthcare.