It may well seem that way in retrospect. When it does, just remember that those same authoritarian governments are the ones who played down the threat, lied, covered up to save face, imprisoned whistleblowers, and refused to let international experts in.
Basically I don't expect the west to be able to react to this any better if it gets big. Their populations are uncontrollable (for mostly good reason) but in this particular case that feature will turn out to be bug.
Look at Italy right now.
> Or will instead, in the interest of "the economy" (ie, money) keep too light a hand on things.
Sure, but this has nothing to do with authoritarian states vs democracy. You'll find a ton of authoritarian states doing exactly the same. It's just a matter of who's the ruling class, and in most places in the world (100% of liberal democracies but also most authoritarian states), it's the business owners, so of course they will try and save their business before their people.
> Basically I don't expect the west to be able to react to this any better if it gets big. Their populations are uncontrollable (for mostly good reason) but in this particular case that feature will turn out to be bug.
Western people aren't uncontrollable. The one who are, are the one who are pissed of by their plutocratic governments and have lost all faith in them. I'm pretty convinced that Switzerland will be fine, and I'm not surprised Italy is in the same kind of shit than Iran.
I'm French, and we've been lucky so far, but I expect chaos when it's going to start. The government has long lost all political legitimity here, and people absolutely distrust them, so I don't think they will not peacefully comply to government attempt to limit the propagation.
When or if this hits the US or elsewhere in Europe, and it becomes obvious that despite the quarantine in Italy, the virus still continued to spread, they will question the measures being taken. As time goes on, the West will become critical of government response and may be difficult to control.
In China when the government tells its citizens to do something, they just do it. They don't ask why. They don't deliberate on whether it's the correct choice. They simply follow the directions. In the West, everything is up for debate. People don't like to be told what to do.
Here is the other thing with Italy: differently from other neighbor countries, they have been testing people without symptoms.
Numbers: until February the 24th, Italy performed ~8500 tests (mostly on people without symptoms, but that were in contact with confirmed SARS-CoV-2-infected patients), while UK did ~6500 (focused on people with influenza-like symptoms), Germany ~1000 and France ~500.
This is better from a safety point of view (you get to discover all problematic patients earlier and you can quarantine them before they spread the infection even more). But is makes "your stats look worse" (cit. The wire) because now you look like the epicenter of the infection.
Guess what? The testing method has now been changed ("aligned") to what the other countries are doing, so that the numbers do not look that much worse.
Source: https://www.ilpost.it/2020/02/25/tamponi-coronavirus-italia-...
How is this relevant? For all we know, they might have only tested 200 people by 22nd, when the panic (quarantine, news) first started.
Sigh, this is so cliché… I don't know where you're from, but the “west” as the unified entity you describe doesn't exist. When it comes to authority and how people comply with the rules, France and Germany are more different than China and the US.
This is a different matter, people will comply for their own safety. If goverments or other agencies send the right message things could be okay imo.
How so?
> in England, everything which is not forbidden is allowed, in France, everything is allowed even if it is forbidden
Can speak of Hamburg for about 15 years now, and since maybe about 10 years i have the feeling that at least 50% of traffic participants are absolutely insane, again no matter which mode.
Isn't slowing it the best we can hope for? I mean, I'd rather the pandemic slowly take its course so that there's maximum chance a ventilator will be available if I need one when I get it in six months time. If everyone gets it on the same day.....
If containment slows the virus then it might be wise to slow the virus if any of the following is true:
1. You expect to develop some treatment for it.
2. You think a slowly growing group of infected will allow you to study the infected and possibly discover a treatment (related to 1 but not exactly the same)
3. The virus is not expected to be a problem in the summer.
4. A slowly spreading virus means that you can better ramp up your facilities to take care of the infected. (related to 1 and 2)
Work on SARS resulted in cadidate vaccines, but was abonded before human trials because of succsefull containment.
Work on MERS resulted in a vaccine that is currently showing succsess in humans.
Work on SARS-COVID-2 is starting from those, and already has canditate vaccines based on modifying ones we know showed signs of success against other corona virus.
Maybe this will turn out to be another HIV, where a virus proves ellusive, but I haven't seen anything to suggest that.
There's a bit of a description there about why this approach is different.
<sarc />I guess that's how we in the USA managed to reject the TSA full-body scanners and pat-downs.
It seems to me that most of us complained a lot, the government ignored us, and we knuckled under and complied.
this is immensely racist btw
No, they do not. Chinas propaganda machine just tells you they do. That is why china- even with all its measures couldnt clamp down. Behind the waver thin authoritarian theater presented lurks the same chaos as in africa and india.
Didn't make them right about what?
>The fact that millions of people are still racists nowadays doesn't mean we should accept that either.
You do have to share a country with them, and may rely on them some day to save your skin, so it would probably be a good idea for you to treat them like equals, unless you're looking for a civil war.
>Hopefully, Nazis will be defeated in the long run, but it looks quite far ahead of us unfortunately.
What does that even mean? There are no Nazis today. There's a tiny smattering of people that go around playing dress-up, probably mostly undercover government agents or informants, but the NSDAP is a defunct political organization.
Interestingly enough, this argument works equally well for immigrants. Some fascists have no problem with the idea of a civil war in that context though…
> You do have to share a country with them, and may rely on them some day to save your skin, so it would probably be a good idea for you to treat them like equals, unless you're looking for a civil war.
See I actually think that it's a good thing to call for, say , "stamp out racism". Cause I don't think it's real healthy for a population to just accept racism because, well, you gotta share a country with them.
Would you say this if you believed there was an actual possibility that, one day the target of their racism would be you?
Just imagine that you're living in your country, born there etc, but the brewing racist population happens to not include your particular ethnic group, and it may not be right now, but there is really no reason why they would not continue being racists, well you know, they per definition don't like sharing a country with anyone.
Everywhere in the world and history where such a situation occurred, it happened with some amount of tension and suffering (ranging from economic inequality to holocaust).
I can only imagine someone saying "well they may be racist but you gotta share a country with them" if they were certain to expect to come out on top, given such tensions.
There will also be groups that come out on the bottom, badly. But apparently it doesn't matter if you treat them as equals and share a country with them?
> There are no Nazis today. There's a tiny smattering of people that go around playing dress-up, probably mostly undercover government agents or informants, but the NSDAP is a defunct political organization.
While you are technically correct about the NSDAP ...
I think you're underestimating the amount of neonazis today. Not all of them are quite as on-the-nose with their logo as these guys, for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dawn_(political_party)#...
#/media/File:Meandros_flag.svg){kind=link}
These are not just people playing dress-up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dawn_(political_party)#...
Does stamping out racism to you involve preventing people from freely and equally participating in the political process? By which I mean being able to utilize the same means to advocate for their interests and political beliefs as any other law-abiding group would be - able to gather in public spaces without fear of physical retaliation, able to utilize the services of major companies that provide electronic resources like payment processing and social media communication and other internet services, and things of that nature.
>Would you say this if you believed there was an actual possibility that, one day the target of their racism would be you?
Yes, I would still say what I have said.
>Just imagine that you're living in your country, born there etc, but the brewing racist population happens to not include your particular ethnic group
Certainly I would not want to share a country with people that thought that way about me. You must be able to rely on your countrymen in times of serious crisis, and obviously I could not rely on those people. I would advocate for physically removing them if I believed that they posed an existential threat to people of my ethnicity and if I believed that such a removal would be feasible. If it was not feasible due to their numbers or influence or whatever I would get out of there for my own safety.
What I would not want under any circumstances is for them to remain in my country but be prevented from advocating for their perceived interests in the same way that everyone else is able, or in other words for them to see that the interests of others are being openly and plainly put ahead of their own perceived interests - if they are not themselves able to advocate for their perceived interests, why should they trust anyone else to further their interests for them, least of all people that are preventing them from advocating for those interests? That is a recipe for civil war, and that is the outcome I would most seek to avoid if I believed they were too powerful to be physically removed.
>but there is really no reason why they would not continue being racists
How many people are you talking about? Enough to influence the outcomes of a democratic government?
>Everywhere in the world and history where such a situation occurred, it happened with some amount of tension and suffering (ranging from economic inequality to holocaust).
What do you think that telling certain people that they can't advocate for their interests using the same means as everyone else is going to do to tensions?
>I think you're underestimating the amount of neonazis today. Not all of them are quite as on-the-nose with their logo as these guys, for instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dawn_(political_party)#....
A neo-nazi is not a Nazi, and only the dress-up types actually call themselves neo-nazis.
Neither fascists nor Muslim terrorists deserve those rights. And if you say it's not comparable, please reminds that for the past 12 months, there has been more terror attacks committed by white racists than Muslim jihadists in Western countries.
Some manifestations of it are in some jurisdictions. How is that an issue with my reasoning?
>You're talking about freedom, but for good reason you wouldn't give the jihadists the rights you're claiming. Neither fascists nor Muslim terrorists deserve those rights.
Do you want a civil war against these "fascists"?
>And if you say it's not comparable, please reminds that for the past 12 months, there has been more terror attacks committed by white racists than Muslim jihadists in Western countries.
How many white racists do you think there are in Western countries?
Ideally, we put ourselves into a situation where it's not a matter of 'giving rights', but removing the ability to remove the ability for people to communicate from people.
You aren't implying anything racist are you?
BTW I way less worried about thugs than about antivax mums and other fakemeds enthusiasts believing about conspiracy theory involving “big pharma”.
Many of mine were also flagged, despite me being extremely polite.
Where do you get that? All I suggested was you express your opinion clearly, rather than euphemistically.
If people in some society like the way their society is, more or less, why should they want to import a whole bunch of people that think very differently from them, who will make their society very different in a way that they are not interested in it becoming? How would that benefit them?
I don't know if you're using this argument to convince the 'normies', and actually you don't like brown people because they frighten you, or if you actually believe it. People often believe in self-contradictory things, but then again, people with unwarranted self-regard often think they can convince other people with obvious nonsense. Perhaps a bit of both?
That doesn't mean you have to want people who happen to think very differently to come in. You can like the fact that people in your country are free to think how they like, and also like the fact that most of them happen to like to think certain ways.
>people with unwarranted self-regard often think they can convince other people with obvious nonsense.
Projecting?
You really have no choice but to phrase yourself in a way that's only recognizable to the in-crowd. Even here, with the polite expression, he is catching flak.
Personally, I don't discuss politics in real life anymore. Risks are too great. Just the Internet, where on some forums (not this one), you can be honest about what you think.
The first few weeks of an outbreak are absolutely crucial, and the Chinese authorities actively obstructed efforts to address the issue in that period precisely because of their authoritarian system.
So what country gave China info from the start? Japan and SK had a lot more info with regard to the disease (human to human transmission, asymptotic transmission, 14 days incubation period, hell even the RNA sequence was done on the virus) than what China had at the beginning.
Having more info once contaminated people got reported doesn't change the fact that weeks went by with potential carriers spreading everywhere unchecked.
The situation for other countries is completely different. Someone could fly into Japan right now from anywhere in the world carrying the contagion at any time. It was brought into Japan by multiple carriers at different times and different places. You can contain one incoming source, and three more will spring up. It's a completely different problem.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/feb/26/the-re...
What?
The great circle distance between Koltsovo Airport (USSS) and Wuhan Tianhe International Airport (ZHHH) is 5000km:
* http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?&DU=km&P=USSS-ZHHH
And here I thought you were serious... until I looked at a map.
Why do you think it comes from Koltsovo, in Russia?
Why are conspiracy theories so irresistible to so many people?
There's also evidence that people with lower levels of schooling particularly like conspiracy because it allows them to make sense of a chaotic world. Instead of feeling powerless and hopeless, they have a truth not even the smart and powerful have.
It is of course not true, but therein lies the appeal.
He tells you that he knows people in the chines government and other stuff.
You know what the problem here is? You just don't know who is posting.
Koltsevo-Harbin route was used regularly by tourists.
>Will the governments ban conventions? Close restaurants and bars? Shut down shopping malls?
So Yes.
I'd guess the UK government have told them not to report quarantine in order to keep the UK population calmer.
You are poorly informed. The Italian government did precisely that this weekend.
This will be hard for the average person to understand, and people think much more critically in the West.
Historically they haven't been proven particularly tough to lock down, stir up by authoritarians (Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, etc), be surveilled, sold lies, and so on...
As for those "obedient" Chinese, they got this authoritarian party they have today by doing a whole revolution thing first...
>people think much more critically in the West.
That's what uncritical westerners are told...
People are actually eager to be told to stay home and not go to work. They don't have to be forced. Especially if it's for their safety.
From what I've seen, the majority of the people anywhere don't think very critically.
I'm not sure if you just haven't heard of these things or if you're intentionally ignoring them to make a point.
Wearing masks, avoiding crowded places, maintaining good hygiene, staggering work hours, working from home and stocking up on supplies.
I mean, where does this idea come from that people need a dictator or they’re completely lost and as you’re saying, freedom in this case is a bug?
You might find because people have access to free information and good services means they can look after themselves and they just might ?
this is childish. "the economy" is the thing that makes everything you have, and the food you eat and medicines you need. there's very good reason to not just turn it all off.
I guess a lot of "what if it started in another country" scenarios can be debated, ranging from "another government wouldn't cover up the real situation so the virus would be quickly contained" to "western governments wouldn't have the balls to quickly enact proper quarantine measures so the virus would spread much more quickly" but is it really productive? At this point these debates are pure speculation.
Honestly my main concern in the United States is the complete and utter panic that will be caused by something that is only marginally less dangerous than getting in one's car to go to work each morning.
A government concerned with "not screwing up" can at times take drastic "emergency" measures with an overly cautious basis (at best) and with malintent (at worst), and we should be skeptical and continue to push for reasons for any actions. I don't see how this turns out to be a bug. They can have more impact on peoples actions with a press conference presenting skewed data than with any sort of attempt at straight-up bans or enforced quarantines.
If the fatality rate of COVID-19 is 2% as feared, that is dramatically more dangerous than getting in your car every morning.
The flu kills somewhere around 20-30k Americans every year. The common flu has a fatality rate of around .1%. So for something that is potentially 20 times as deadly, we're looking at hundreds of thousands of deaths. By contrast, car accidents only kill around 35k Americans per year.
I'm really hoping we get more data on this so we can figure out what's happening. With the lack of testing / confirmation and light symptoms it must be impossible for our science community to track things right now.
> [..] played down the threat, lied, covered up to save face, imprisoned whistleblowers, and refused to let international experts in.
Diverting a sensitive topic to a false-equivalence seems to be a go-to tactic of those in favor of China (Chinese government to be precise, the actual Chinese people are the biggest victims here).
I would have had to go to a convention/trade show in Paris next week, but luckily it got postponed for two months. So far people are getting more cautious.
Between the two standard criticisms "too little, too late" and "unnecessary panic" there is very little margin, especially in public opinion.
Here in Germany, people are starting to stock up on supplies, which is reasonable unless they completely plunder the supermarkets. Otherwise, it's all wait-and-see over here. Of course it doesn't help that Europe is also in the midst of flu season...
Institutions in developed countries are far better equipped to deal with this level of crisis than China has been. Australia, where I'm from, has had infections since mid Jan but has been able to effectively quarantine people and prevent community transmission thus far.
I'm scared that it will become a lot worse than that. The pandemic gives them a real-life stress test and lessons to harden the surveillance state and further improve technical controls and tweak the technology to become more effective. It's another step on the road to integrating and normalizing intrusive and outrageous ideas for government to retain control. (-> both in China and the West!)
From the videos I watched from Chinese pigs (aka LE) in uniforms beating old people not wearing a mask and welding the doors shut of giant apartment blocks where people live like ants (or slaves), I tell myself this will not happen in the West. Then I look at our current research and Europe's own ambition to create a central biometrics database (along with tweets from the UK LE which ask you to report anything people see online that may look like terror and all I think is "STASI!" neighborhood watch. These days I see a uniform and my first reaction is disgust mixed with fear, the sort of claustrophobic feeling normally only Orwell brings up in me.
I get that quarantine laws (locking people in their homes, issuing a curfew, rations etc) can be harsh but important to combat a deadly problem. But looking at the authorities in charge in the West I wouldn't trust them for a second and think it's also a play with fire. There are lots of edge-cases everywhere for this to be a massive human rights violation (elderly care facilities, prisons, migrants, the homeless, and more power to the rigged justice systems and corrupt EU institutions and generally everyone already wielding lots of power)
The CDC and WHO have utterly failed. Why are there no hand-outs of free face-masks and other PPE - oh because there are no stocks! - instead the problem is downplayed (by both WHO and the dear leaders). Why is there no transparency (constant news) about how many people an individual country is testing? Oh because we don't have adequate testing right now. Instead medical professionals were arguing on France24 yesterday whether the game between Juventus/Lyon should go ahead and they felt that they're not qualified to make a statement on a complex subject like this. Instead Italy and other countries are reminding us not to press the panic button just yet and media should be "more responsible in their reporting".
CDC and WHO are probably not perfect but saying they "utterly failed" because you're angry over not getting a free face mask is a bit disrespectful toward the many people their working their asses off in times like these.
my partner is a health care professional and there aren't enough masks for them (this is central Europe btw). but yeah tell me about how hard they work and how I don't appreciate them.
Having said that, I don't think it's the responsibility of the WHO to distribute masks to health professionals like your partner.
Whether they should or not is a different story.
So it looks like perhaps they have stockpiled. Until there's no recommendation to wear masks, any shortages are just private businesses that have run out. No failure of govt or WHO.
it's the CDC's who acts on advise and recommendations made by the WHO. The WHO has in 2018 warned about a disease X[1], so the CDC and local health ministries would have had 2 years to prioritize and make sure there are enough stocks for PPE in the country. It's not only about the masks for a theoretical pandemic that may or may not play out. There are shortages in other areas as well on a daily basis which are more complex and require structural cahnges. Take Germany as an example that hires Eastern Europeans as health-care workers (mostly for disabled people and elderly facilities) with salaries of ~€600-€800/month where they are placed on contracts from Slovenia and Poland to avoid paying the local insurance. (so some of the people working in healthcare can be put on crazy shifts under what is for EU standards a slave-labor condition). I won't even mention the health-care facilities in Croatia, Romania, Slovenia where elderly facilities buy drugs illegally because they want to pocket the difference, or where somebody who is hired as a nurse has actually never had any training as a nurse.
I know of some elderly care facilities in Croatia which are run by a lovely Albanian couple that branched out into this (their other businesses is bars/cafes). The wife of the entrepreneur/owner drives a fat Mercedes and goes on holidays to Paris, but the residents are lying in their own shit and swallow counterfeit drugs - also their employees are paid cash because they are usually elderly women themselves who have a lot of private debt - so this is the only way for them to survive.
This isn't whataboutism but an example of the places which won't stand a chance when this disease really hits. They aren't rare either, we just don't see them because it's disgusting and easier to look away.
As you said the price of masks has increased (in my experience by a factor of 10x !!) because people see an opportunity.
That there are no facemasks available to the general public is a result of people plundering the stocks of private businesses.
European disease control agencies aren't even recommending that people wear masks. Until they do and they can't provide any I don't see any failures on their part.
Source: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/hcp/respirator-use...
Yes, but given the incubation period and so on, how do you know you don't have the virus?
I'm not going to wear a mask in Central Europe (at least not yet) but I probably would in Asia just in order to not be selfish.
They aren't perfect because you still need proper technique when removing them and they "leak" along the sides etc. Still better than nothing, especially in crowded places.
They may help you to minimize the spread if you are already sick, sneezing and coughing. Droplets are big enough to be stopped by mask. This is actually the reason why surgeons are wearing masks in the first place - not to contaminate the patient.
Unless we are talking about something more advanced. Like above mentioned N95.
The key insight, though, is that water droplets carry viruses; viruses can travel through masks, but they can't travel by themselves without hitching a ride on a water droplet.
This is why flu season is during the cold winter, when there isn't enough heat to instantly evaporate the moisture in the air. And this is why even a regular surgical mask can offer some protection for a healthy wearer.
I have asthma, and even a few hours of wearing a procedural mask, let alone an N95 mask are very taxing. Maybe for brief periods in public... But sweat transmitted by hand onto a surface is enough. Sewage in a building is enough to infect residents that don't otherwise encounter each other.
While this may not be beautiful and might be slightly less effective than a standard surgical mask, it should be good enough unless one is spending significant time inside with infected, coughing folks. In which case one should be doing more than just wearing a face mask. My 2c.
(Source: Family member who worked in the operating theater for 30+ years.)
That's a pretty bold statement. As someone who grew up in a less-well-off part of the world where medical supplies were not always available I have personally seen makeshift masks made and used by both doctors (rarely) and visiting relatives (more frequently).
The key problem with homemade masks is durability -- they do fail much quicker than a professional surgical mask that lasts many hours. But then, unless you are a medical professional, you do not need to wear them for hours. Wearing one in the open air environment is almost always an overkill.
First link that comes for me (below), when Googling for evidence, seems to indicate that homemade masks in some small trial were worse than professional but still pretty decent (1 hour with homemade ~ 3 hours with professional mask), although I barely skimmed it and might have misunderstood the results.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/258525804_Testing_t...
This sort of editorializing immediately makes your whole opinion moot.
If this is how you talk about people you don’t know it’s unlikely your opinion is valid or even remotely unbiased in any other regard.
Additionally using epithets and dehumanization of any group no matter what they've done is a road to more hate and violence and will never resolve anything. I find it pretty ironic that some on the left are ok with insults and dehumanization as long as it's of the right group of people that they've deemed "undesirable" even if that group of people really should stop what they're doing, using insults and animal comparisons is a road that takes you right back to what they claim to be fighting.
This got kinda long winded and preachy...
tl;dr calling cops "pigs" is a slur like any other and will only cause more problems.
... is also the kind of editorialising we don't need, when describing political views that don't align yours.
Shall we stop, or what?
The other pigs I met were happy to take bribes and one (in Ireland) even bragged about how much he loved to use his pepper spray every time he gets a chance (he rarely does).
fwiw, pigs in colloquial english is not just a slur but silly slang, unless you are bold enough to call a whole class of blue-collar people (who hate pigs) problematic. Maybe read Orwell (Animal Farm) or the later Irvine Welsh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filth_(novel)
Never ever trust a uniform whatever country you're in. Btw I also do consulting for LE and the "sane" ones usually don't deny that they have a problem with racism. I'm not even talking about the videos from China where people get beaten with sticks or dogs get clubbed to death by men in blue while their colleagues are laughing before they move on to terrifying citizens.
I don't think getting upset about what is "natural language" in blue collar surrounding is going to do any good. I know the pigs are OK with it. (watch out for those who are not though)
Great.
There are some indications of officials playing down the threat and lying, but this was also reversed quickly by higher levels of the same authoritarian government. Did this lying have a significant impact, more so than presumably-less lying in South Korea and Italy, that resulted in the same order-of-magnitude in explosion of cases, even though the world media was already on high alert?
Don't be so overconfident at fitting world events and a few selected media stories into your prejudicial ideological convictions.
The quarantine came in too little too late to control the situation in Wuhan, and only helped to contain the virus in other provinces of China, not fully contain it.
The people infected in Hubei are at about 60k or so now. Actually slightly lower. Were you trying to say something else??
60k is pretty impressive considering all the other apocalyptic "worse case" scenarios being published in various academic journals a few weeks ago based on "conservative models".
And 60k is not pretty impressive considering that many people already died without a proper diagnosis and was not included in the official counts. There is no trust that the reported numbers are reflective of the situation on the ground - in fact it is likely to be the tip of the iceberg.
> There is no trust that the reported numbers are reflective of the situation on the ground - in fact it is likely to be the tip of the iceberg.
The numbers are confirmed test cases, which will always be an underestimate of the true situation regardless of the government supplying the numbers. There's no indication to suggest that it's the "tip of the iceberg" especially since the "current case" numbers have been consistently decreasing for the past several weeks.
It rather seems that you've been so convinced by the sheer amount of anti-Chinese-government-propaganda, that even positive facts can't change your prejudice that everything they do is negative.
That's not to say other countries will fare much better. But China had by far the best chance at containment, and they blew it. And the rest of the world has to deal with the fallout.
I explained in my comment - the sudden increase in cases in Wuhan in January, was not that much worse that what we're seeing in S Korea, Iran and Italy right now. These latter countries are also less dense than Wuhan, and also had plenty of warning time. Nobody was imprisoned in Italy, yet despite that we still have several hundred cases today. This suggests that this single imprisonment didn't have a huge effect on the epidemic in Wuhan.
> by far the best chance at containment
What does it mean to have a "chance" at containment, and what makes one "chance" "better" than another "chance"??
> the rest of the world has to deal with the fallout
If you acknowledge there's a possibility that no "other countries will fare much better", why maintain such an accusatory tone? No government can control where an epidemic starts.
By your logic, if the epidemic had started in the US, the government would be at fault if it prevented the epidemic from spreading to any other countries? Is that what you're saying? That's an extremely high bar, probably unrealistic.
This doesn’t address the commenter’s claim that China did the best job of completely shutting their infrastructure down and quarantining the virus effectively. They did make their bed, but they also laid in it as well.
The lesson from WW2 should have been that people are all the same when pushed to extremes. This includes the people who make up the communist party leadership in China and every moral philosoher in the west as well.
My armchair belief is that China has ended up absorbing at a global scale, all of capitalism’s externalities. It is an integral part of the world that gives us many things we take for granted like cheap iphones and many others. We do NOT have the convenience to look away and scapegoat one aspect without taking into consideration the whole.
This ended up kinda ranty but every time coronavirus is used to bring up something whose purpose is to draw an “us vs them” line between the world and China I want to throw something.
A couple of my friends kid me about it, but I meditate almost every day for world peace and the reduction of suffering in the world. It can’t hurt and it makes me feel more connected to the world at large. I live in a small town, volunteering at the local food bank is one of my favorite activities, but I tend to think too much about just local life. I have a difficult time getting too excited about national/global politics, etc. Meditation on peace is the most effort I put into the global situation.
Look at any government institution in the US - despite not having a profit motive, there are still plenty of incentives to grow the budget - increased influence in the government, funding pet projects,etc.
And not to mention shutting down a hospital likely means lost wages for a lot of people.
Yes, I'd expect them to be overridden in times of emergency, but nonetheless - do Japanese hospitals really have scope to spend at will without constraints?
But in this case we'll see. China's problems don't end if they successfully contain the outbreak to Wuhan. Eventually everyone else will get sick too and re-infect the chinese via other roads.
The time when Chinese doctors screamed there is something wrong but instead being helped were downplayed or even threatened would be enough to prevent it from snowballing it to the size we face today.
China's authoritarian government is largely responsible for the severity of the initial outbreak. Their extreme quarantine efforts happened more than a month and a half after the first case was detected, well after it was too late to effectively contain, and only when covering up the situation proved impossible. The government sponsored a 100,000 person banquet with shared plates 3 miles from the epicenter with people who travelled to get there/would travel back while it was arresting doctors and media reporters for talking about the virus. If major sectors in freer countries weren't shut down until weeks after it spreads, it would be an improvement over China.
Here is a succinct summary of the timeline: https://youtu.be/hSIt496d82s?t=62
Last time I checked they were still barring members of the CDC from going into China to help asses the situation. Crucial information such as mortality rate and recovery rate are only being discovered now, as the numbers from China are not accurate.
This virus appears to be something any government would have difficulty containing due to the long incubation period, and some of the false statistics coming out of China are simply a result of a system that has become overwhelmed. Any system in a similar situation as the Chinese now find themselves in would have trouble dealing with this, and I think it may have reached currently levels even with a more transparent system that tried to contain it earlier, but I heavily disagree with your statement. They were extremely irresponsible about early containment during the crucial period when containment had the best chance of working.
I don’t want to let them off the hook for down playing this thing early on but I’m not sure how much more effective containment would’ve been if this happened in another dense country. Say Japan, India or somewhere in Europe.
I do agree that China and especially Wuhan could have acted faster - perhaps by 2 weeks though not month and a half. 1st December there was a case of pneumonia admitted to a hospital - that happens probably more than millions times a year. After 3 days it was clear that it's a viral pneumonia. That's more severe but still not uncommon. Only by the middle of the month it became clear to doctors that there are more and more such cases - but still spread through different hospitals of the 11 million Wuhan.
Obviously it takes time for this information to get to the bureaucrats. They should have done something - but then again, what? There are perhaps ~50 cases of viral pneumonia in a city the size of small country during an influenza season. If China hasn't gone through SARS it would take months to act on this information.
Well, arresting the doctors that were comparing cases in a group chat seems like a good start.
/s
I checked and the WHO team led by a Canadian epidemiologist has been working in China for more than two weeks, since Feb 10.
I fail to see why they are obligated to allow in a team from a nation that’s been openly hostile for a long time just because they asked and used the word “help”. Sounds like arrogance to me.
And in this case it'd be justified. You're talking about the rest of the world at stake. This is no place for cover-ups and minimization. Transparency is critical.
1. Testing only 400 cases across the whole country.
2. Defective test kits which will only be fixed until Mid March
3. Hawaii now asking ask Japan(which by itself is doing a horrible job at handling the situation) for test kits because they have none, and test 0 people so far.
Doesn't seem first world to me honestly. Might have South Korea gives them some lessons as how to deal with the pandemic situation. Maybe they are transparent and honest, but I really don't want to understand much more about how little they can do.
I am watching the development almost hourly everyday and so far CDC is only giving me more reasons to panic.
The CDC can legally issue emergency tests that can be distributed the way we need to. But for these to be used the FDA had to issue an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA). And that couldn't happen until the Health and Human Services Department (HHS) declared this was an emergency. All of which happened.
But When the HHS declared an emergency the situation is legally considered to important for LDTs to be used, which would normally be fine. But the original CDC tests had a reagent that was incorrectly manufactured. That's being fixed but last I heard the working testing kits hadn't been distributed yet.
This is sort of a huge problem because testing for a particular viral RNA sequence isn't especially hard and it should be within the capability of even a large hospital to develop their own tests, though there is a chance they'd mess up the way the CDC did. Our whole bureaucratic structure in the US isn't set up to deal with a new disease emerging quickly and we really need to fix this.
The difference in transparency between China and the US is hard to overstate.
The idea Trump would open his response to an epidemic up to international inspection is just laughable - and I say his, rather than USA government's because that's how things appear to work there.
Or do you think a president subverting the will of the legislature of their country for personal gain isn't corruption?
I wasn't expressing my opinion.
You are expressing your political opinion about someone you dislike. You are not expressing fact. Just stop.
Imagine a Chinese provincial government openly (key word openly) going against the CCP’s wishes. Or a judge, or a prosecutor.
If only “openly hostile” was limited to “petty emotions” that can be waved away.
CDC: Center for Disease Control - a US Federal agency.
WHO: World Health Organisation - a United Nations organisation.
The 'first case' of what exactly though? Nobody knew it's effects, transmissibility, etc. etc..
I actually believe that even if said doctors were not sanctioned, not much would have really changed.
I think the delay to the authoritarian clamp-down would have been roughly the same.
In the West, we have responsible actors but they're neither entirely knowledgable (nobody is) neither do they have the widespread authority to do what China is able to do.
But much worse are places like India, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines ... these to me are the scary spots with high concentrations of people, crude medical practices, not a ton of gear, and no legit central authority to really turn the wheels on the disease.
And since the cat is out of the bag ... it doesn't look good.
Also, if no "known" cases are present in a specific country, the awareness to check for specific symptoms is probably lower.
That's also the curious thing about why usually the detection rate in a country rises fast in the beginning - when the first infected patient has been found, as by then doctors start to specifically test for the virus.
Coming back to Japan; however, people seem kind of unconcerned in comparison. The airport was business as usual and no visible increase in mask usage.
I went to a GP just this morning for a shoulder injury and noticed some of the staff weren't wearing any face protection, and a few wearing them incorrectly. It was a bit unnerving, to be honest.
I have a feeling Tokyo is about to have a huge outbreak any day now. I'm not one to fear-monger, but knowing how casual people can be when out and about (unchecked coughing/sneezing, subpar handwashing in public toilets), it almost seems inevitable especially given how crowded this city is. As a resident, I'd like us to step up our precaution game before we hit infection levels that we are seeing with our neighbors -- but I'm afraid it might already be too late.
It’s mostly foreigners I see walking around without masks now, but I agree it’s still ramping up. I honestly don’t see the US getting close to this level of prevention, so if it fails here it’s going to be devastating there.
Going from airport (ICN) to airport (HND) amid this really drove it home.
But yes, I am definitely noticing some measures happening here. Mask shortages, a few companies shifting to remote work, etc.
Beyond that, if it REALLY hits here, you're going to have entire businesses shut down temporarily. I saw a CDC estimate that if it goes pandemic, we should expect 40% - 70% of the population to contract it. Imagine your place of employment, but with half of its employees out sick.
I can survive 2 weeks without work, but I simply can't pay a bill like that no matter what I do.
We are talking about quarantines. In other words, forced. Containing the virus as much as possible is well within the sphere of national security concerns. I don't know what the answer is, but if the CDC, HHS, and the government writ large are going to be serious about containing it, they are going to have to come up with some sort of solution that most definitely does not discourage people from self-reporting illness, and also doesn't bankrupt the populace.
Imagine you have no insurance, had contact with a coronavirus case, and are now feeling ill. What do you do?
If you do the right thing, you're looking at a 100% chance of having your financial life permanently destroyed.
If you just stay home and ride it out, it looks like you've got an 80% or so (correct me if I'm wrong?) chance of being perfectly fine in a week or two.
Consider Korea. Two weeks ago, 28 cases, same as they had has for weeks. The current outbreak in confirmed cases only began growing one week ago, on Feb 19th.
The country is now entering lockdown, and some countries are banning flights from Korea.
If your flight leaves, say, tomorrow, you risk the same happening by the time you leave.
If it leaves further in the future, you have the good fortune of being able to wait and observe. If it gets worse you maybe able to get refunds on flights/hotels. Either directly or via cc. (As flights may be cancelled)
If it gets better, you can keep it. But if you leave now you’re taking a gamble you won’t have a lockdown before the end of it. This is moving fast, and japan is reporting new cases daily.
Note: the risk profile of being in a place is different from living in a place. If you live in a place you can just stay home. If you travel you have all manner of dependencies, and none of your usual supplies.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/26/opinion/coronavirus-japan...
Japan has very poor rankings on press freedom, reporters are routinely fired for questioning the government, and Abe has a long history of being a dishonest, self-serving, authoritarian.
https://www.latimes.com/world/asia/la-fg-japan-press-freedom...
They should be responding like Korea has been, but instead are just ignoring the situation.
Be prepared for travel disruptions. My connecting flight was canceled when my destination country decided no more flights from not only China, but a few surrounding countries.
Had to buy alternative tickets last minute to take a detour and get where I wanted to go.
In my city, not on your itinerary, all elementary and junior high schools are being requested to close. All community volunteer oriented events and classes are being cancelled for whole month of March. All government employees are being asked to wear mask. All events in government buildings being asked to close.
Things are moving rapidly since government came back from long weekend.
I have noticed a high number of Chinese tourists in the Niseko region on vacation though and overheard some families from Hong Kong talking about vacationing outside of China to avoid the virus. Not sure this is something to be that worried about - I'll leave it up to you.
Tokyo is where it’s the worst, right now
On the other hand if you are young and fit and capable of following the standard precautions I don’t think you have too much to worry about.
I say this as I’m about to depart from Thailand for Taiwan
Or indirectly to other fit people who eventually down the line infects a high-risk person.
So I think it is quite selfish to expose yourself unnecessarily. I don't think we should stop everything we do, life still goes on, but just be considerate of others.
Why are you going to japan/what do you want to do there? If it's not essential for you to go, then it's probably an unnecessary risk. With how quickly the disease is spreading, 2 weeks is a long time for things to get worse, and there's always the risk of you becoming a vector for disease so it's more than just your own health to worry about in terms of safety.
https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/travel/notices/alert/coronavirus-japan
The difference is that maybe South Korea is in "panic mode" and Japan is yet to get there. They are less than half of Japan population and had 10 times more new cases in the last 24 hours.
When I traveled through Japan their hygiene culture came across as theatre more than anything. It's more of a social performance than a practical reality. I think 'very tidy' better describes Japan (if you ignore the beaches).
However, things are starting to change? At least my lab cancelled a conference we planned to organize (call for paper deadline next month, and conference itself in August).
There's a bit of "anxious hesitation" in the air, but apparently not enough (yet?) to warrant more direct prevention...
How so? Like covering their mouth but not nose, or something?
(I'm just wondering if it's something like that that should be obvious, or if there's something more subtle I'm unaware of)
Also, as an fyi, if you are using some of the common paper masks, make sure the strings are on the outside.
I think slowing the spread is the best we can hope for now. The main problem is healthcare throughput. Some quick back of the envelope calculations:
I live in an area of aprox 1,000,000 people, for which probably about 75 ICU beds that can support people on respirators, maybe we can double that in an emergency, but with widespread shortages of basic consumables we are going to be lucky to maintain existing capacity. If ¾ of that population catches the virus and 5% of those need intensive care, the average stay in Wuhan is around 3 weeks, we can calculate the burden on healthcare: (((7500,000 / 100 ) x 5 = 37,500 ICU patients ) / 75 ICU beds) x 3 weeks = 1500 weeks, or nearly 29 years at current capacity to treat everyone.
Obviously there are many simplifications and assumptions in there but my main point is that given existing conditions there is not enough capacity for more than a small fraction of patients. Therefore everyone working to slow the spread of the virus will aid healthcare throughput and save the maximum amount of lives.
"Do Your Part: Work From Home!"
I don't buy this argument at all. After various failures in handling the early phases outbreak, the authoritarian measures introduced at the later stages meant to contain the outbreak may have increased the infection and death toll in the areas that are quarantined, especially with the type of quarantine that China introduced. As the transmission of the virus is via vectors such as sewage and ventilation, forcing millions of people to stay at home in densely populated cities may actually increase the chance on infection within these communities.
I see lots of people attacking Japan's handling of the cruise ship quarantine, but these same people hardly bat an eyelid when China locks millions of people into their high-rise tower blocks which are as dense.
It may have prevented further transmission outside of Hubei, but are they not able to achieve the same by securing the borders of the region as opposed to locking in the local population?
HIV, SARS, MERS, Ebola, Zika, COVID-19...
For some reason it feels like a "only in the history books" event -- and yet it's actually quite common. The average-aged American (38) has lived through multiple epidemics -- including one that has killed 30 million people (HIV) -- and yet we barely talk about it.
Especially HIV. You don't catch HIV by boarding the subway, eating in a restaurant, or running a marathon. For most people, avoiding unsafe sex is enough to avoid HIV. But if COVID-19 spreads to their country, people's daily lives will be significantly disrupted.
SARS, MERS, Ebola, Zika are a little more like COVID-19, except they never propagate that far.
Sure you can catch COVID-19 more easily, but it seems like having HIV is a far worse outcome.
Otherwise there relatively little day to day impact other than the stigma.
I should caveat that I'm referring to countries with a modern and available health system.
It’s almost exactly like every other respiratory virus, except that the case fatality estimates for old and sick people are higher.
There’s nothing mechanistically new about the infections we’re seeing. It’s a pretty bog-standard respiratory virus, in terms of its transmission and overall virulence.
”But if COVID-19 spreads to their country, people's daily lives will be significantly disrupted.”
If so, it will be primarily due to blunt attempts to prevent transmission of the virus in order to protect the sick and the old. For most people, this virus is little more than a mild chest cold.
Once this becomes a true pandemic, we will see a rapid shift away from quarantines and travel bans, and an increased emphasis on protecting vulnerable populations directly.
1. I find the lack of concern about dramatically higher mortality rates for the old and the sick to be reprehensible. They’re people, even if they’re older or sicker than you.
2. It doesn’t make the slightest bit of sense for China to shut down the economy over something so minor.
3. The hospitalization rate is a serious concern that you’re overlooking.
4. Most importantly, your premise that it’s no more dangerous than the flu for the young and healthy is completely false. The fatality rate for flu for 18-49 year olds in the US is 0.02% [1], and this looks to be at least 20x higher than that for that age group, based on the data we have so far.
World health officials, medical experts, epidemiologists, virologists, etc, all seem to be taking this very seriously and are quite concerned. I think I’ll take my cues from them.
1. Source: https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2017-2018.htm
0) In the case of the parent, I was saying that the virus spreads and infects people in the same manner as other upper respiratory viruses. It does, this is a fact, and fatality rates are not relevant.
1) I’ve never said that I have no concern about old or sick people. I said that young healthy people should not panic.
2) It would indeed be concerning if hospitals are overwhelmed. Currently, they are not (anywhere) and therefore, again, people should not panic.
3) Comparing tiny ratios with large error bars and freaking out over a “20x” difference in relative risk is pointless; the risk is still quite low. It also overlooks the far more relevant fact that you’re thousands of times more likely to get the flu than covid-19. At this point, you should not panic.
Get the idea? The relative risk to most people is lower than...well, most things in life. That’s why my argument is, and continues to be, that most people, in most places, should not panic.
0) In the case of the parent, I was saying that the virus spreads and infects people in the same manner as other upper respiratory viruses. It does, this is a fact, and fatality rates are not relevant.
1) I’ve never said that I have no concern about old or sick people. I said that young healthy people should not panic. You’re simply virtue signaling to stoke fear.
2) It would indeed be concerning if hospitals are overwhelmed. Currently, they are not (anywhere) and therefore, again, people should not panic.
3) Comparing tiny ratios with large error bars and freaking out over a “20x” difference in relative risk is pointless; the risk is still quite low.
It also overlooks the far more relevant fact that you’re thousands of times more likely to get the flu than covid-19. At this point, you should not panic.
Get the idea? Regardless of your obsessive-compulsive downvoting of factual information, the relative risk to most people is lower than...well, most things in life. That’s why my argument is, and continues to be, that most people, in most places, should not panic.
2) Hospitals are overwhelmed in Wuhan, which is why they're furiously building more and sending thousands of medical staff there from all over China. I genuinely don't understand how you can be unaware of this and be so dogmatic at the same time.
3) The error bars are large, but it's not like they overlap or come remotely close to it. And again, your personal assessment that this mortality rate isn't worth worrying about means nothing to me, especially when virtually every credible expert disagrees.
Finally, please drop this lazy "do not panic" rhetoric. No one is panicking, or suggesting panic. The only hysterical person here is you.
I’ve never said “don’t be concerned.”
Your other arguments are made up. Wuhan has built a number of facilities, but currently appears to have the epidemic at hand. No other areas have been “overwhelmed”, even within China. Representing medical facilities as “overwhelmed”, at the current time, requires citation from a reputable source.
Maybe in some theoretical future world it’s possible that medical facilities around the world will be overrun with sick patients. This is nowhere near the current reality.
Overlapping of error bars on fatality rates is irrelevant to my arguments; the absolute risk is much, much lower than the flu, for most people, in most places.
Everything you’re arguing here is a scare tactic, twisting kernels of truth to panicked ends.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/science-and-diseas...
Look at the mortality by age table.
Also note the mortality rate outside of Wuhan seems to be 0.7%, a bit more than the common flu which I think is around 0.1% but not really a massive deal.
I don’t know where these numbers will land ultimately but I can think of many reasons why people with mild symptoms that are similar to a cold wouldn’t want to show up in a hospital full of infected people, or would think they just have a cold, so I would expect the denominator of the mortality rare in Wuhan to be understated.
For the moment the panic this thing is creating, fuelled by medias eager to make some money by crying wolf, looks like the real threat to me. Lots of people will loose their job as a result of the economic impact of the panic.
[0] https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/2018-2019.html 1.8 deaths per 100000 is 0.0018%
A 30yo male has a 0.18% probability to die that year. It's a small enough number that it is irrational to worry about it [1].
Because that's the age where the actuarial table is 7x worse for a man than at 30.
A couple hundred thousand dead here, another hundred thousand dead there, and soon we're talking about big numbers.
No, both are such small numbers that you shouldn't worry about either.
There's no evidence that you are remotely likely to catch COVID-19 by doing any of those things either.
This one is different.
Edit: I found this literature review [1] that sounds similar to what you're referring to. Note that this is only a summary of previously published results on similar viruses. If you check the source data in Table I the persistence times are from hours to days, and the author's conclusion is "up to 9 days" (emphasis mine). In my opinion this is very weak evidence to say that it can survive 10 days "on most surfaces".
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S019567012...
It is SARS+, less fatal but much more infectious. In a way, it is a very successful virus (in a nightmare scenario), that aspiring to become the next flu.
The Chinese scientists had admitted that, we might have to live with this virus from this time forward. It won't go away like SARS-v1.
Also to note, fatality rate might seem low, but 20% of ALL patients will develop severe lung issue, that is what makes this virus pretty damn dangerous to us.
Source?
- 4.7% as critical and can include: respiratory failure, septic shock, and multi-organ failure.
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-sympto...
Lots of grand claims on this website too, makes it seem sketchy:
Out of cases that have been fully resolved we're now at an 8% mortality rate. 2% is counting ongoing cases, that's not the figure you should be looking at.
Additionally, it is widely acknowledged that the actual number of cases is undercounted, with the mildest cases less likely to have been tested and included in those numbers, again resulting in overly high numbers.
And finally, it would appear that Wuhan in particular is skewing the numbers higher, as being the site of the outbreak it was caught off guard and has struggled to manage the number of cases. Elsewhere in both China and the world, the death rate is far lower.
The estimate of 8% is unquestionably much too high. Exactly what the mortality rate is will still take more time to discover.
Malaria was responsible 405,000 deaths globally in 2018 according to [0].
[0] https://www.who.int/news-room/feature-stories/detail/world-m...
Malaria is not inherently a tropical region disease. It routinely plagued Europe until the 1950s. Russia for one example had a huge Malaria outbreak in the early 1920s as did Eastern Europe broadly.
"Gustavo Pittaluga (1876-1956) estimated that in 1923, 18 million people suffered from malaria in Russia, and that sixty thousand deaths occurred out of a total population of about 110 million (Anigstein, Pittaluga, 1925). Similar observations were made throughout the whole of eastern and south-eastern Europe and the former Ottoman Empire."
http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0104...
Europe and the U.S. used to have Malaria. The name -- bad air -- is Latin, the Romans thought it originated from bad swamp air. Shakespeare mentioned it time and time again in his plays.
I'm pretty sure what Shakespeare was referencing is a much more general idea prevalent in his day - that smells (not necessarily unpleasant ones) could be poisonous, and could be warded off by opposing "good" smells. This roughly coincided with an explosion of scented-good manufacturing as a cottage industry, although I'm not sure which way the arrow of causation ran there.
</digression>
2) Limiting chance of mosquitoes biting people (aircon)
3) Limiting the population with malaria (the fewer people with malaria, the less chance of a given mosquito biting someone with malaria and thus becoming a carrier)
...which actually isn't that far-fetched for a pre-medical society to conclude, given that mosquitoes breed in warm, still waters.
No. The name is Italian. It predates Italian colonies in the tropics. It's a disease which was endemic in marshlands believed to be caused by bad air Mal aria and was in Scotland amongst other places.
Malaria is not exclusively tropical. Nor is dengue or mosquito borne encephalitis. Tropical wet regions sustain mosquitos. So do cooler climates.
I agree that covid-19 seems to have a larger potential breadth, and didn't intend to downplay its significance.
Probably not. Case fatality rates don't accurately show the "deadliness" since many people have likely been infected but been asymptomatic or had mild illness that didn't cause them to seek medical advice.
> significant long term health consequences for many who survive
There is no evidence for that, and it doesn't make sense given the available data. Some number of people have long-term health consequences, and if you only compare that number to the number of people who went to hospital with serious illness, you might see a high percentage, but that's a huge distortion of reality.
We now have 4 independent estimates that place the Infection Fatality Ratio at about 0.5% to 1.7% which is between 5x and 17x deadlier than the flu (0.1%): https://twitter.com/zorinaq/status/1230977769795776512 Incidentally, this makes COVID19 comparable to the 1918 Spanish Flu (IFR ~2%) according to experts (see link above). And keep in mind the IFR, unlike the CFR, is the metric that takes into account undetected mild or asymptomatic cases.
«There is no evidence for that»
There is, see https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6... : In those who survive intensive care, [...] aberrant and excessive immune responses lead to long-term lung damage and fibrosis, causing functional disability and reduced quality of life.
I agree with this point but would also like to point out the possibility that way more people get infected by SARS-CoV-2 than the flu.
I also want to note that the flu also has the same asymptomatic or mild illness factor and that the deadliness would be only comparing people who sought medical treatment.
Also the comparison to the Spanish flu often ignores the fact that we are way better equipped to deal with the symptoms than in 1918.
Covid is very serious and we should not be complacent about it. But I think it's important to keep some perspective, especially since we seem to be on the brink of shutting down the entire global economy.
I'm not saying that we should not take covid very seriously. I'm just saying that before we allow it to shut down the global economy we ought to maintain some perspective on the magnitude of the risks society already faces year-in and year-out.
Over decades. Airborne viruses have the potential to large numbers of people in a matter of months.
By all accounts, the Chinese have so far done a good job of containing the spread inside their borders (outside of Wuhan). But I feel there's a significant lesson to be learned from how the virus exited Wuhan in the first place: containment measures applied too late, after the scale of the problem became too obvious to ignore. I fully expect this response to be the norm, across all scales from community to city to nation.
I think that China and other large (in terms of area) countries like the US will come out of this "OK", modulo the economic impact. For the most part, intranational travel is funneled through long-distance rail and air routes, which are relatively easy to monitor and control. I have more concern for e.g., Western Europe, where there is not a significant geographic separation between the major population centers, and where there is a strong expectation of free & untracked movement.
I'm from Spain, and as soon as I saw people tested positive in Italy I knew we were going to fall too. Sure enough, we quickly had some cases in the canary islands and now it's already in the mainland, in my city (Madrid). The differences in intra city transportation are gonna be a big difference too, compared to an American city: everyone in the center uses the subway and buses, which are packed at rush hour. It's going to spread like wildfire.
And transport connections between Northern Italy and Spain are worse than the ones with France, Switzerland, Austria, and Germany.
The cat is basically out of the bag. The question now is if we can keep it subdued enough to reach the warmer season, when it might stop on its own like SARS did and/or make it easier for people to develop antibodies.
This is a BIG modulo, China alone was already a disaster but now that we can see the rest of the world will be hit, the economic consequences will be disastrous.
2008 was a walk in the park compared to what may happen.
I seriously doubt it will. Once the panic subdues, things will go back to pretty much normal. Flu kills a lot of people every year without serious effects on the worldwide economy. You'll need a mortality rate significantly higher to make a dent in global supply and demand. Of course panic is the key word here. If governments impose severe movement restrictions it could disrupt the supply chain, but nothing about this virus seems to justify it. All the measures taken so far have been extreme because the goal was to stop worldwide expansion at early stages but that has already pretty much failed. Media will get bored of it eventually, vaccine will come a little later. World will keep spinning around.
This is just a small example, but every industry is hit.
Looking further out, this and the general push back of the last few years with being so dependent on China, may be what further forces the West to start ensuring supply chains are not so dependent on China and the far East.
Companies may start seriously consider the true cost of doing business in China due to unknown events like this, and even more likely ones like military and economic confrontations occur (e.g. tariffs).
This might actually help juice the Western world for a few years as more manufacturing and supply lines are repatrioted.
I don't want to be flippant, but it's already have a "significant" impact. The question is now whether it's going to have a _disastrous_ impact.
> China will be one of the countries that dealt with the virus the best
You're talking about the country that lost precious days, if not week handling the crisis by persecuting whistleblowers.
> Countries without authoritarian governments likely don't have the means to effectively quarantine major cities
I'd like to point out that non-authoritarian countries haven't needed to quarantine major cities. India, which is both poorer and more densely populated, hasn't originated deadly epidemics while it's the second China has graced us with them. I'd argue their nationalistic-motivated toleration if not encouragement of ridiculous "traditional medicine" practices is making them more likely.
Except China's system of government got us here in the first place:
> Contrary to common belief, the killer digital app for authoritarianism isn’t listening in on people through increased surveillance, but listening to them as they express their honest opinions, especially complaints. An Orwellian surveillance-based system would be overwhelming and repressive, as it is now in China, but it would also be similar to losing sensation in parts of one’s body due to nerve injuries. Without the pain to warn the brain, the hand stays on the hot stove, unaware of the damage to the flesh until it’s too late.
> During the Ming dynasty, Emperor Zhu Di found out that some petitions to the emperor had not made it to him, because officials were blocking them. He was alarmed and ordered such blocks removed. “Stability depends on superior and inferior communicating; there is none when they do not. From ancient times, many a state has fallen because a ruler did not know the affairs of the people,” he said. Xi would have done well to take note.
* https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/02/coron...
The authoritativeness suppresses the very information flow that is needed to know what's going on. Dr Li Wenliang tried to warn people and the police paid him a visit and told him to stop:
* https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-51364382
Edit: see also Iran perhaps.
It was on Canadian television news just a few days into the new year, at the latest. I'm sure of it because I was away in Canada and that's where I first saw it.
It's been bothering me because every article a British newspaper runs since (and I thought The Times had covered it while I was in Canada, but couldn't say for sure) seems to include a graph of infections or death toll since outbreak compared to Sars, and puts day zero at around Jan 20 (can't remember exactly) like you said.
Surely it's not rampant disinformation, just an unstated definition of 'outbreak' that isn't familiar to me or matching my layman's one, but I don't get it.
Sri Lanka is/was already in season and a significant amount of their tourists are Chinese. Or would be, as Visas are now cancelled so there aren't any anymore.
Wouldn't call that low traffic or put it into a two items list.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/02/15/coronavirus-xi-jinping-...
I get the distinct feeling that many of these efforts are more about reassuring the public, than any real confidence that they can limit the spread.
[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2762130
"Aylward pointed to an analysis from Guangdong province suggesting that, at least there, most of the infections were coming to the attention of health authorities.
When the virus started to spread in Guangdong — the province where the 2002-2003 SARS outbreak began — worried people flooded fever clinics to be tested. Of 320,000 tests performed, just under 0.5% were positive for the virus at the peak of transmission there, he said — which suggests that only 1 case out of 200 was being missed.
Transmission of the virus has subsided in Guangdong, and the number of positive tests at the fever clinics has declined; now only about 1 in 5,000 people tested at the fever clinics is positive for the virus, he said."
[1] https://www.statnews.com/2020/02/25/new-data-from-china-butt...
These numbers don't make sense. What, are they assuming 100% accuracy for the tests? China is an authoritarian dictatorship with a very personal need to save face - in order to maintain order it cannot show weakness. China is lying. There is motive, circumstantial, and now with the spread in Korea and Italy, empirical evidence that China is full of it.
At least that’s my current thinking - I was in your camp until a week ago or so.
Either Wuhan is populated by perfect spheres in a vacuum or the reported numbers were based on a projection, not data.
The only suspicious part I can find is the peak at the first of February, but that just seems like that date has been used as a catch all in case the exact date was unknown.
Containment has failed. At this point, quarantine is about slowing transmission to avoid overwhelming healthcare resources.
The entire population is likely to get exposed. If it happens in a single month, that's a disaster. If it happens over a year, it's a manageable crisis.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/coronavirus-kills-chinese-film-...
> Chang's father, mother and sister also died from the disease, Chinese financial news outlet Caixin reported. His father first exhibited symptoms of the coronavirus on January 25, but was turned away at hospitals because of a lack of beds, leaving him to fight the disease at home. He died days later, followed by Chang's mother, who also succumbed to the illness.
> After caring for their parents, Chang and his sister were infected with the coronavirus; according to Caixin, Chang died on February 14, and hours later, so did his sibling. Chang's wife also contracted the virus and remains in serious condition.
I've also heard of some totally unconfirmed posts on Weibo, WeChat, etc. with similar stories of entire families being infected and stuck at home without treatment, but those are of course just rumors.
Infinite != million years.
You'll have faeces and dead monkeys everywhere.
Lets assume you have a million monkeys pressing 10 keys per second for 1 million years.
You'd get somewhere in the region of 10^21 letters, or
Lets ignore punctuation, numbers, capitals etc, and assume there's just a choice of 26 letters
You'd be insanely lucky to find "all the world's a stage" somewhere in there.
News outlets really need to cover this responsibly and not incite panic. Those that do ought to be held accountable.
This is a key part of what makes this case so much more worse than SARS
Worth noting SARS started later in the year too
Marc Lipsitch
Infectious disease epidemiologist and microbiologist https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/marc-lipsitch/
2 out of the 3 things in this sentence are not true. Incubation period is not extremely long, it's quite a normal length of time for a respiratory virus. There has been no airborne transmission. And I would say the jury is out on asymptomatic transmission.
Nepal borders China, and there are lots of Nepali workers in china/ Chinese development projects in Nepal, so this is not very surprising to me.
I personally don't think authoritarianism is an obvious benefit here. Authoritarianism is part of the reason they got into trouble in the first place.
It also leads to people covering up because of fear. That is the worst thing you can do in this situation.
Chinese cooperation with civil society is also really bad. There is so much distrust that this can end up hampering their response.
They may end up killing more people through brutal quarantine than the virus kills.
> https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.h...
Latest report (25 February 2020): https://www.who.int/docs/default-source/coronaviruse/situati...
All: https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2...
> While South Korea has run more than 35,000 coronavirus tests, the United States has tested only 426 people, not including people who returned on evacuation flights.
This bit seems important. The “only 400 tested!” statistic people are citing seems much more reasonable in this context.
I checked with my wife who is doctor at biggest Swiss hospital - currently they could host around 30 people who need respiratory assistance. Surrounding area contains 1.5-2 millions of people.
I used to be critical of China in this, and still hate how they handled the start. But to be honest, unless tremendous luck would be involved, I don't think most western countries wouldn't be able to contain the epidemics neither, it would just be a bit slower. Its too sneaky and effective.
(Also worth noting the single hospital you mentioned has a 50% improvement in capacity (actually much more, because your number is more specific than 'critical care', but I don't know how much more specific) over the city where people are using gutter oil. Capacity can be less when there aren't public defecation concerns, but your example is emphatically not that.)
Personally I think it was the PRC's actions that made the spread so bad in the first place. They tried to hide it at first and only stopped when they no longer could. I see no reason to expect their actions to be better than non-authoritarian governments when it's said and done, but I guess we'll just have to wait and see.
Hum... If people start dying¹, every country will. Democracy will just help ensure it's not done is a hush...
What leads to my second comment, China can not do it without massive problems immediately arising either. The only thing they can do better is hiding those problems, but you bet there are a lot of people dying there because of the measures the government has taken to stop people fro dying.
1 - That's still an "if". How much of the lethality is caused by bad health care in China? I don't think anybody can answer this question yet.
> Tufekci argues that one of the second order effects of a surveillance society is that people act strategically to minimise the chance of punishment - and so their behaviour (and the data it generates) ceases to be a good guide for policy. If there’s a strong incentive to suppress bad news, you won’t hear bad news, even when you need to.
[1] How the Coronavirus Revealed Authoritarianism’s Fatal Flaw https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/02/coron...
[2]https://www.getrevue.co/profile/mattclifford/issues/tib-103-...
> in part because it's been a fun distraction, in part because I have friends in Wuhan
I thought that the virus had mortality rates for high-risk groups. This implies healthy adults/infants also have lethality.
Edit - some kind of source - https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/commentary/hot-climate-...
The second item is true but completely unrelated.
The third item was thoroughly debunked by a hundred real scientists the day it was posted. The paper had never passed peer review, and was retracted by the authors from the preprint server it was posted on the next day.
You should stop talking to your friend, who is an idiot. Frankly, this post is embarrassing, and you were right to use an alt.
Thank you for letting me know the HIV paper was withdrawn, I confirmed this withdrawn status at this link:
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.01.30.927871v1
Could you help me do the same thing and help me find a reference that mentions recombinant DNA can be natural?
This article defining recombinant DNA uses the term laboratory in the definition:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recombinant_DNA "Recombinant DNA (rDNA) molecules are DNA molecules formed by laboratory methods of genetic recombination."
Later it contrasts the word "recombinant" with natural recombination:
"Recombinant DNA differs from genetic recombination in that the former results from artificial methods in the test tube, while the latter is a normal biological process that results in the remixing of existing DNA sequences in essentially all organisms."
Can you give a reference in English that uses "recombinant" about any natural process? However it could be a translation error, so perhaps recombinant means artificial in English (per the reference I just gave) whereas perhaps the source they translated just mentions it is "genetic recombination" (not recombinant).
The Wikipedia article uses "laboratory method" and "artificial methods in the test tube" as explicitly contrasted with normal biological processes.
Just looking for a reference that this is not so.
-
By the way the news you confirmed - i.e. "Chinese scientist made GMO human babies" IMO is much more salacious and spectacular than the news you debunked, so I am not sure why you took this tone with me.
It would be like if you debunked chemtrails and called me an idiot for asking you about it, while incidentally confirming that space aliens visited Earth but saying this has nothing to do with chemtrails. To my ears the idea of GMO babies, which you confirmed were being made in China, is way more outlandish than a GMO virus.
Thanks for taking the time to answer my questions.
Its either a bait and switch or humblebrag or just plain misunderstanding. The Chinese government and their insecurity of looking bad to the world are the reason we are in this mess. They lied about the virus, covered up the extent of infection and with all their "resources" its an American company that might just develop a vaccine. And should that be the case American capitalism might be the one that saves us from a pandemic. In retrospect it might just end up that China is great at brute force labour intensive methods but lag behind when it comes to high tech solutions.
Not when they are doing things like manipulating the numbers, as you mentioned at the beginning.
Part of the reason China has to weld people into their apartment buildings is that there is no trust, and no compliance in the society: every rule can be broken, even ones that should be obvious to any educated person.
The country's failed post-Mao culture, and worthless self-serving government organs, have conspired to make the infection dramatically more deadly than should have been necessary.
I think probably a lot of people will come away with the same impression that you did, but I think they'll be mistaken to think that China's authoritarianism has somehow saved them; after all, the government was sponsoring massive public shared-dish banquets in mid January within three km of the epicentre of the infection, televising crowds of people having religious experiences, wailing to the camera that they don't need masks, and that the government will take care of them.
Italy closed 50k people into quarantine, government talks about military and EU was deciding about closing borders. All of this days after confirmed cases. I am sure officials would have no trouble to isolate major city.
China has many internal problems, we just do not see them. Government refuses foreign doctors. If crisis continues long enough it may cause civil unrest. China also depends on foreign imports even for food.
I think US is best positioned to handle this well.
Singapore is a pretty authoritarian country and until recently had the most cases outside of China. Now most infected people in Singapore have recovered and other countries have more infected people.
WHO 'very impressed' with Singapore's COVID-19 response: https://www.channelnewsasia.com/news/singapore/singapore-ver...
Singapore has ‘near-perfect’ coronavirus detection, Harvard study says: https://www.businessinsider.sg/singapore-has-near-perfect-co...
> I think US is best positioned to handle this well.
A lot of people in the USA try to avoid visiting the doctor because they can't afford it. That single factor alone puts the USA at a massive disadvantage.
I'm about to finish my current job which wouldn't normally be worrying, but if hiring stops and interviewing becomes impossible the equation changes pretty fast.
But yes, every country will get economically weakened, for one reason or another, and usually the ones who suffer most are the poor.
https://ec.europa.eu/home-affairs/what-we-do/policies/border...
But I also wouldn't count on all of this happening too fast, there's still passenger flights arriving from mainland China in Europe.
For example, North Korea reportedly executed a guy for breaking quarantine [1]. China may not be nearly as extreme, but the government is similarly domineering. If your choice is "be quarantined or be disappeared" then you shut up and stay home. But "be disappeared" is not the alternative in many Western countries. Again, just my totally uninformed opinion as a coder sittin' at home. In any case it'll certainly be interesting to see how it turns out.
[1] https://nypost.com/2020/02/13/north-korean-official-reported...
It is the perception that the administration’s plans and officials are infallible that it is after. Not the actual actions.
An administration which can confront when its officials can do wrong, which can act on errors instead of hiding them can do well. The perception of its actions take effort and steps to explain.
The reference on such institutions is outside the scope of the current comment. When I started writing, I realised it has to be a very long.
But my opinion is that democratic countries will do well. We might hear more, but their problems will be less. I used to live in an authoritative nation, so there is a difference between the information and the common communication on problems.
Check Hayeks’ writings to see how such communication becomes controlled by marketing ‘authoritative plans’
Initial situation was made much worse because China policed their doctors.
Also I do not think that China actually shoots people. It shutdown transport and pumps money into economy. Other states could do that as well.
There are just too many factors in favor of uncontained worldwide spread at this point - within the 1st week of reporting it already looked like China's numbers were incomplete (and potentially manipulated) and the scale was greatly underestimated.
Untraceable transmission all over the place, relatively low-traffic countries like Nepal and Sri Lanka seeing cases very early on, extremely long incubation periods with airborne transmission without symptoms, false negative tests with people either catching the virus after leaving quarantine or not testing positive (both really bad signs), governments demonstrating weak and ineffective containment of potentially infected travelers (Japan: "no symptoms so they can go home!"), more infections than SARS in a small fraction of the time, the US only testing ~400 people thus far, entire families in Wuhan being wiped out. Basically everything is in place for this to be a serious pandemic.
I think when this all comes to an end, China will be one of the countries that dealt with the virus the best. Countries without authoritarian governments likely don't have the means to effectively quarantine major cities and shut down massive portions of their economy immediately without major problems arising. Given a couple weeks, sure, but by then it will be too late.
As an aside, BNO has been doing an excellent job of posting timely and sourced updates that make it easy to keep up to date with every new confirmed case (scroll down to the Timeline section):
https://bnonews.com/index.php/2020/02/the-latest-coronavirus...
Hopefully I can look back at this comment in a couple months and chuckle at my paranoia!