Here is evidence why it works: new cases/day decreasing dramatically since February: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ESywcEKUwAADhcQ?format=png&name=...
What China did is a complete shutdown and isolation of whole cities, cancellation of public gatherings, prohibition of attendance at school and work, massive mobilization of health and public health personnel as well as military medical units, and rapid construction of entire hospitals.
Wuhan, Iran, Italy have shown us that the health care system simply collapses under the huge number of patients needing hospitalization (20% of infected.) So mobilizing healthcare workers, springing up new "hospitals", and limiting spread with extreme responses is the way to go.
Unfortunately I predict that western governments are going to be less likely to suggest, deploy, and enforce such massive quarantines. Quarantines impede on civil liberties, and people in the West are very protective of freedom and liberties. I think the average American will NOT be okay with his government telling him he is only authorized to exit his house to go shopping once a week...
https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/health/100-a-day-for-...
Apparently -- and this is unconfirmed scuttlebutt -- somebody already landed in hot water for neglecting to tell the authorities about their visits to a red light district. (Which, this being Singapore, are both legal and closely regulated.)
Or you can see that in the past week alone we got 27 cases, starting from 2 planes. And the number is low because we vigorously chased people down to test them all and quarantine them. Had we let them go loose those 2 cases alone could spread to hundreds.
https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/full/10.2105/AJPH.2004...
Extreme measures without a plan and a data basis will certainly make matters worse. We need a plan, which Western countries have. What is somewhat lacking is the basis to implement it. Aggressive testing of everybody would provide this basis, like South Korea does.
Which increases my critique points of the response to a total of two, a viable social media campaign to inform people and prevent panic reactions, which could totally provided and carried by tech companies. So, Google, Twitter, Facebook, if you are listening do something good with your social power! And the aggressive testing of people, everyone, starting with contact persons, people having traveled to risk areas and ultimately everyone.
Other than that I am quite satisfied, in Europe at least. The US seem to be a different story.
Coming 10-14 days will display how the most of the rest of the Europe will actually handle the critical situation.
Only country that appears to be doing something right is Germany. They should tell others what is their trick to keep most of the people alive. Of course they have highest number of intensive care places in EU https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00134-012-2627-8#... so perhaps just brute force is how they do it but I have heard (but was not able to confirm) that they are also isolating their elderly such that they will just receive food and other goods behind their doors. I do not know how right this is but this would make sense.
People are calling 116117 but getting hang up on, and the weaker central government (due to obvious historical reasons) means that the response differs state to state. Much like in the US.
Regarding school closings and such things, at last Bavaria is prepared for that (my sons school is over 1,000 students and might be clsed in the next one or two weeks regardless of cases due to that number of people there, but that is just a snapshot, so).
Given the mortality rates by age bracket, this makes a huge amount of sense. Subject to their mental and emotional needs being given every consideration, of course.
Assuming (1) a large amount of the public will eventually be infected, (2) infections are (generally speaking) only fatal in older people... why not best protect the most vulnerable among us?
At this point, nursing homes and assisted living facilities should be staff-only, guaranteed paid sick leave, with teleconferencing equipment set up for families.
Wait until new case rate peaks, then start looking at relaxing the restrictions.
At least, that's the hope as I understand it. That's what I'm trying to help do by staying home and seeing only close friends and only in 1:1 settings.
You want to give the old folks, among who I am myself in this respect, something to live for. Attention is the catnip.
Want to kill the olds in droves? Isolate them.
I'm bloody serious about this and believe it's tort that needs a Court hearing for the human sake alone. You don't know anything until you friend all died. Mine did except for who then exited into a new world of economic paranoia and now hides in a regular job after increasingly failing to deal with isolation in the context of a young loving family around him at home at least. I'm so intensely proud of my buddy but he's a truly impractical link back to life for me
Events over 1,000 people are cancelled, how that applies to larger schools is currently being discussed (source: my sons school is over 1,000 students).
Communication is a little bit of an issue so, we found out about the high risk zone declaration by chance, more or less. On the other hand, case numbers are really low, so I think it's kind of trade-of thing. In denmark the increase in cases triggered the response.
In France on the hand, everybody with any symptoms resembling Corona are sent on sick leave for at least a week, over the phone. People not needed in the office work from home.
I could not find demographic breakdown of infected in Germany. This could suggest if these assumptions could be true.
Not in Italy. Our government changed emergency plans at least three times since Sunday and as far as I can tell is not aggressive enough in finding contacts and isolating them. The current trend is just to lock most of the people up and hoping the curve flattens.
There is a lot that could've done better than the current approach.
There were a few errors done in my view:
1. First, no preparation at all was done at any level. Other countries are now prepping their ICUs to prepare for the incoming tsunami.
2. Horrible communication and execution. The PM can't be both the head of the government and the one enacting the emergency measures (as in putting them into practice short of giving orders), at least not in bureaucracy-land like my country, and this PM in particular is weak and not particularly capable (and made key communication errors like blaming the hospital where the first case was recorded).
3. Laws given without clarity of "appropriate" or "not appropriate" behavior, which required constant clarification from the government
4. The leak of the "executive order" (inappropriate wording, hard to translate it to the actual Italian way of doing it) draft before it was completed, which caused mass panic and exodus (and instead of blaming the "idiots", people should investigate why that happened).
5. Total lack of clarity of how long the lockdown measures will last (if they don't change yet again).
It's not like changing measures every day will change the curve immediately (first lockdown on Sunday, then another on Monday, then more restrictive measures within a few days).
Lastly, all of this flurry of activity from the PM, aside pressure from other involved parties (like local governments), is, according to rumors, done because the current PM is likely to be asked to step down sooner or later (the country was at a political paralysis before the outbreak, and his handling of the crisis made matters worse).
How is Italy testing so?
There is evidence that a lot of people contract the virus and have no symptoms or very mild symptoms.
Reported stats out of various countries/egions also do not account for things like the severity of regional air pollution (Wuhan, Tehran, and Milan have BAD air pollution) or the other key statistics, like "do they smoke?" (lot of smokers in China, Italy, and Iran... just saying). Bad air pollution and smoking tears the crap out of the lungs and makes it much easier to contract respiratory infections.
Caution and concern are completely warranted.... significant action needs to be taken to protect all of us, especially our elderly and immune suppressed.
But we need to be careful about pushing information that causes a descent into panic.
1. 38% of nurses have children at school. Shutdown the country and 1/4 of the US healthcare industry will choose their children over work in a blink. We don't want to put any more pressure on the people working in healthcare.
2. 75% of US companies have now a disrupted supply chain. Yes the cons of outsourcing core economic functions like manufacturing drugs, hospital supplies etc... Mass mania followed by ongoing shopping sprees will set in further draining a crippled supply chain.
What we need more of is hygiene education (with strict fines) and detailed data about who, where and how they are affected by the virus. Being politically correct in a time where the world is at the brink of chaos is not going to save anyone. Sometimes hard debates need to be had and tight restrictions enforced. It's sort of like the Trolley problem.
The initial cover up didn't help either. Once they instated the lockdown, they could test the backlog of people. That took quitea while. But now the spread has pretty much stopped, while everywhere else on this planet it increases day by day.
After the initial cover-up got public, the West couldn't get enough of reporting about it, and how this is the reason it could spread so fast, how irresponsible it was, and how it's typical for evil China. Now we have that virus here, plus two month of knowledge about it, and we're still mostly being reactive instead of proactive. In China's defense, when they tried to cover it up, much less was known about the disease, like it's asymptomatic spread. Now the cards are on the table and we're being ignorant, as if ignoring a problem makes it go away. But hey, when things are getting really really ugly for us, we can still go back to blaming China for their initial cover-up.
Watch Italy closely the next days, and compare it to China when they were at a similar stage. It will tell you what's to come in your country too. Another thing that's suspicious about Italy is the high CFR of around 6%. It most likely means they're not doing enough testing, only the severe cases, so the rest wanders around the country happily spreading it further.
It's worth noting that South Korea also was able to engage in such mass mobilization. Moreover, if the trends continue for a few weeks, China's not going to have an order of magnitude more death anymore.
Italy's high CFR sounds like a health care that's broken far more than the Chinese health care system, a system which essentially isn't taking any specific extreme measures (which would be building more hospitals, importing more health care workers, etc).
Korea CDC has raw numbers it looks like. https://www.cdc.go.kr/board/board.es?mid=a30402000000&bid=00...
https://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/f2jiyz/uclo_jun...
However once things get even more overwhelmed, you have bad cases become critical leading to more fatalities.
The going figure seems to 20% are badly impacted, with 5% of that critical. Some of that 15% will become critical without treatment that might not be available. Thus impacting people <70.
I think you're combining two largely-unrelated factors. The news in any country is only going to be interested in the most salacious stories in countries 12 time zones away. This is just how the market operates. A tiny percentage of china dying from a new kind of flu is not as headline-grabbing as people dying due to govt misbehavior.
Meanwhile our govt isn't blind, they have people and plans in place for everything and they think they are ready and in control. Then, it turns out it's a clusterfuck anyway that takes way longer than expected to implement. They need to have dealt with the exact same disaster in recent years to get it right. It's a problem with implementing a large-scale system you can't test until it's needed.
But in fact I doubt there really is a plan in place at all. It seems most countries ignored this, hoping they'll be spared of this, then stumbled along with adhoc measures, and only now slowly start to listen to experts.
Saying there is nothing we could have done better from just looking at what unfolds in China is very questionable.
> The news in any country is only going to be interested in the most salacious stories in countries 12 time zones away. This is just how the market operates.
... for about a month, and still bringing it up to this date.
Compare [1] to [2]. Notice anything? Western, especially US media is becoming more and more of an echo chamber trying to strengthen that simplistic world view that we are the good guys and they are the bad guys. But it's not overly surprising really, considering the financial struggles of traditional media over the last decade. As you said, the focus shifts more and more towards stories and headlines that sell, even for once renowned outlets like the NYTimes.
Do you recall the international coverage of Hurricane Katrina? It was dominated by the stories about rape gangs and anarchy which all ultimately turned out to be false rumors. Media everywhere sucks like that to some degree. As an american, I probably notice the bias towards stories that make the US look bad a lot more than you might.
Though I get what you're saying. US media may be one of the worst in the developed world. I don't even look at it anymore. Lucky I learned about coronavirus from here and adjusted my plans for it. And the NYT in particular seems to be really anti-China since they got blocked in China a long time ago.
The issue has to do with preparedness and healthcare capacity. South Korea has 3x the number of hospital beds per capita than Italy.
It’s Simpson’s paradox
Or look at cumulative deaths (outside China): https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ESyyxfiUMAEwMVa?format=png&name=... The growth follows a perfect exponential curve, which suggests other countries have so far been completely unable to even bend the epidemic curve a little bit. It is obvious given this data that we will see 10k deaths outside China by March 20. I have a perfect track record at making such predictions in the past: https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Azorinaq%20%23PredictionW... (short-term predictions are easy to make, long-term not so much)
Consider the incubation time of 5 days avg, 14 days max during which you're already infectious. Even if China had reacted quickly, not trying to cover it up, we still wouldn't have known about that for a while. Even without the Chinese new year, I'm pretty sure given how dense and large Chinese cities are, this would have spread eventually either way. And I doubt the rest of the world would have reacted any different in that alternate reality than now. We still have travel with China and Italy today. Why would that have been any different had China handled that differently? It would have been slower, but it would have spread to other countries, I have no doubt about that.
I have seen several comments like this on this thread suggesting people are contagious during the incubation phase. Do you have a source for this? AFAIK this has not yet been confirmed, other than perhaps a few anecdotal cases.
I check out John Campbell on YouTube every couple days. He has this unique style of presenting current developments and research papers in a no-bs manner and commenting on them, currently urging for more proactive measures mostly.
[1] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2001468?url_ver=Z...
It seems likely that if we fully controlled most of the cases that had visible symptoms, the spread would stop, even if we failed to control the cases which did not show symptoms.
The same is true for spread via surfaces: while I'm sure it's possible and happens, it seems like the primary mechanism of infection is breathing infected respiratory droplets from someone else.
Sources: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/about/transmission...
If true, social distancing, hand hygiene, and not touching ones face would bring asymptomatic transmission down to almost zero.
Regulation sucks until it saves your life.
You don't think that's a testing kit production curve?
some good news
I believe the argument to be made here is that most parts in China, excluding Hubei, has a lot less cases than Korea or Italy, when Korea's population is about 3-4% that of China. In most provinces in China there were 0 deaths.
Ideally, European countires like Italty are far further away and should have fewer cases than those regions closer to the epicenter, but reality suggest otherwise.
When talking about China's coronavirus response, the numbers really have to be split up into Hubei and non-Hubei.
I don't know if you were being colloquial, but this isn't true. China has 80k, Italy 12k cases and the latter is seeing rapid increases.
The US should be looking at China as a case study on how not to handle the early stages of a pandemic. Instead it seems like we're making the same mistakes (though thankfully at least some areas are being proactive about e.g. shutting down schools).
The earliest case was found at the start of December but it wasn't correctly identified till the end (they went back and tested existing patients).
It wasn't confirmed as being able to spread person to person until the 17th although there was some evidence that it should have been identified on the 11th. (So a delay of either 5 or 10 days rather than 2 months)
The doctor didn't raise public concern. He told a few friends and told them not to tell people. The official announcement was made the following day.
If you look at the timetable it is significantly better than the SARs response or the N1H1 response so we seem to be learning and making progress which is good.
----- BEGIN WIKIPEDIA QUOTE -----
(30 December)
On 30 December 2019, genetic sequencing report of the pathogen of a patient indicated inaccurately the discovery of Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (SARS coronavirus) in the test result.[15] After receiving the test result, multiple doctors in Wuhan shared the information via internet, including Dr. Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist at Wuhan Central Hospital, who posted a warning to alumni from his medical school class via a WeChat online forum that a cluster of seven patients treating within the ophthalmology department had been unsuccessfully treated for symptoms of viral pneumonia and diagnosed with SARS.[20][21][15] Because these patients did not respond to traditional treatments, they were quarantined in an ER department of the Wuhan Central Hospital.[22] In the WeChat forum, Li posted that this cluster of patients appeared to be infected by SARS. Dr. Li posted a snippet of an RNA analysis finding "SARS coronavirus" and extensive bacteria colonies in a patient's airways according to a chat transcript that he and other chat members later shared online. [...] Dr. Li is widely known for the statement he gave before his death exemplifying how the Chinese government botched the containment of the Wuhan coronavirus, stating "There should be more than one voice in a healthy society."[20]
The Chinese National Health Commission announced later that evening that 8 doctors engaging in this WeChat forum had been arrested by Wuhan Police and charged with "llegal acts of fabricating, spreading rumors and disrupting social order."[25]
Wuhan medical authorities forbade doctors from making public announcements and ordered them to report cases internally.[26]
[...]
(31 December)
Qu Shiqian, a vendor at the Huanan Seafood Market, said government officials had disinfected the premises on 31 December 2019 and told stallholders to wear masks. Qu said he had only learnt of the pneumonia outbreak from media reports. "Previously I thought they had flu," he said. "It should be not serious. We are fish traders. How can we get infected?"[29]
"Chinese state television reported that a team of experts from the National Health Commission had arrived in Wuhan on 31 December 2019 to lead the investigation, while the People's Daily said the exact cause remained unclear and it would be premature to speculate."[28][29][38] Chinese state broadcaster CCTV reported that a team of senior health experts had been dispatched to the city of Wuhan and were reported to be "conducting relevant inspection and verification work."[30]
Tao Lina, a public health expert and former official with Shanghai's Centre for disease control and prevention, said, "I think we are [now] quite capable of killing it in the beginning phase, given China's disease control system, emergency handling capacity and clinical medicine support."[29]
[...]
(1 January)
According to the Chinese state-sponsored Xinhua News, the Huanan Seafood Market was closed on 1 January 2020 for "regulation."[22] However, in the Consortium's report of 24 January 2020, it was stated that the Huanan Seafood Market had been closed on 1 January 2020 for "cleaning and disinfection."[36]
[...]
(2 January)
On 2 January, 41 admitted hospital patients in Wuhan, China, were confirmed to have contracted (laboratory-confirmed) the 2019-nCoV (Wuhan coronavirus); 27 (66%) patients had direct exposure to Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market.[8] All 41 patients were subsequently relocated from the hospital they had originally been diagnosed in to the Jinyintan Hospital in Wuhan, China.[8]
[...]
(3 January)
On 3 January 2020, Dr. Li Wenliang, the Wuhan ophthalmologist who had been arrested for spreading false "rumors" on WeChat, was summoned to the Wuhan Public Security Bureau where he was told to sign an official confession and admonition letter promising to cease spreading false "rumors" regarding the coronavirus. In the letter, he was accused of "making false comments" that had "severely disturbed the social order". The letter stated, "We solemnly warn you: If you keep being stubborn, with such impertinence, and continue this illegal activity, you will be brought to justice—is that understood?" Dr. Li signed the confession writing: "Yes, I understand."[21]
[...]
(4 January)
The head of the University of Hong Kong's Centre for Infection, Ho Pak-leung, warned that the city should implement the strictest possible monitoring system for a mystery new viral pneumonia that infected dozens of people on the mainland, as it was highly possible that the illness was spreading from human to human. The microbiologist also warned that there could be a surge in cases during the upcoming Chinese New Year. Ho said he hoped the mainland would release more details as soon as possible about the patients infected with the disease, such as their medical history, to help experts analyse the illness and to allow for more effective preventive measures to be put in place.[43]
[...]
(7 January)
Since the outburst of social media discussion of the mysterious pneumonia outbreak in Wuhan, China, Chinese authorities censored the hashtag #WuhanSARS and were now investigating anyone who was allegedly spreading misleading information about the outbreak on social media.[51]
[...]
(18 January)
On the same day, the Wuhan City government held an annual banquet in the Baibuting community celebrating the Chinese New Year with forty thousand families in attendance despite the officials' knowledge of the spread of the Wuhan coronavirus. They shared meals, plates and ate together.[83] On 21 January 2020 when Wuhan mayor Zhou Xianwang was asked on state television why this banquet was held even after the number of cases had risen to 312 he responded, "The reason why the Baibuting community continued to host the banquet this year was based on the previous judgment that the spread of the epidemic was limited between humans, so there was not enough warning."[26]
[...]
(21 January)
After 300 confirmed diagnoses and 6 deaths, Chinese state media warned lower-level officials not to cover up the spread of a new coronavirus.[40] Officials declared that anyone who concealed new cases would "be nailed on the pillar of shame for eternity", the political body responsible for law and order said. Local Chinese officials initially withheld information about the epidemic from the public. It later vastly under-reported the number of people that had been infected, downplayed the risks and failed to provide timely information that experts say could have saved lives. In its commentary published online on Tuesday January 20, 2020, the Communist Party's Central Political and Legal Commission talked of China having learned a "painful lesson" from the SARS epidemic and called for the public to be kept informed. Deception, it warned, could "turn a controllable natural disaster into a man-made disaster".[40]
[...]
(28 January)
China's Supreme People's Court ruled that whistleblower, Li Wenliang, had not committed the crime of spreading "rumors" when on 30 December 2019 he posted to a WeChat forum for medical school alumni that seven patients under his care appeared to have contracted SARS. In their ruling, the Supreme People's Court stated, "If society had at the time believed those 'rumours', and wore masks, used disinfectant and avoided going to the wildlife market as if there were a SARS outbreak, perhaps it would've meant we could better control the coronavirus today," the court said. "Rumours end when there is openness."[221][222]
----- END WIKIPEDIA QUOTE -----
So:
> The earliest case was found at the start of December but it wasn't correctly identified till the end (they went back and tested existing patients).
By that timeline, it wasn't even correctly identified by the end of December (though the "rumor" Dr. Li et. al. disseminated about it looking like SARS ended up being pretty close).
> It wasn't confirmed as being able to spread person to person until the 17th although there was some evidence that it should have been identified on the 11th. (So a delay of either 5 or 10 days rather than 2 months)
There's evidence that it should've been recognized as at least potentially spreading person to person by the 3rd, at the very latest (given that not all cases were connected to the Huanan Seafood Market).
> The doctor didn't raise public concern. He told a few friends and told them not to tell people.
He told an online forum of his fellow alumni, and he (among others) posted transcripts online, drawing the ire of authorities.
> The official announcement was made the following day.
Yes, after those "rumors" about SARS forced their hand.
> If you look at the timetable it is significantly better than the SARs response or the N1H1 response so we seem to be learning and making progress which is good.
True, and that's commendable, but even China admits it done goofed. It's great that (as far as we can tell) they've course-corrected and are getting a handle on things, but let's not gloss over how their kneejerk tendency toward censorship and their casual "well we don't know for sure if it spreads human to human so let's pretend we're all safe" attitude around the outbreak directly contributed to what's now officially a global pandemic.
I don't know why Wikipedia is missing a lot of the public information that happened before the 31st. The local government was notified on the 28th. The National government was notified on the 30th. Other hospitals in the region were notified around this time as well.
His "leak" came while a lot of people were being notified about this problem. It "looks" like they would have notified the public and WHO a few days later once they had more information.
We still don't know if the original source is the seafood market. The fact that not all the cases came from there doesn't mean much. The SARS expert (Guan Yi) from Hong Kong said that there was no proof of human to human transmission on the 3rd.
You've counted time before anyone knew it existed in your 2-month delay. The first death was on the 10th. Less than 50 people have the virus. The probably should have done something then or on the 15th (second death).
There was a delay but more like 2 weeks compared to 2 months. If you are saying that they should have done something before they knew it existed then ... what should they have done?
As it is people are constantly bashing them for doing something.
What do you think they should have done and when?
Not kneejerk-censor anyone "spreading rumors" about it, for one.
So far.
Once countries get to about 150 cases their trajectories are very similar. So far the USA has not been too different to Italy.
Such an impressive single day drop, it's almost like they stopped testing people..
Meanwhile, I recommend relying on vastly more credible and less easily falsified sources to judge how China is recovering.
If you trust your eyes, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tf-4zQADLS8
If you trust TomTom, https://www.tomtom.com/en_gb/traffic-index/wuhan-traffic
I don't get how people can simultaneously think "China instituted unthinkable totalitarian measures to isolate and quarantine people" and "all the numbers out of China are false, it has to be undergoing exponential growth like other countries."
You can choose one or the other, but not both: they're not self-consistent.
I can see why people are extremely resistant to believing anything the Chinese government says, but there seem to be indicators that don't rely on their statements.
Because I certainly don't know it, and there isn't anybody around here talking about this for some reason (and ok, even if there were, it would be hard to know if they are reliable - and yes, the entire world knows the reason, China prohibited talking about it).
If anything that makes the number more believable.
Not saying I have a strong opinion on this; I really have no clue. But at least from what I understand even just slowdown might be worth quite a high cost.
With that in mind, the larger impact is going to be the lack of medicine, food, etc. that comes from a large-scale heavy response. We are just at the beginning. Push for social distancing, but over the next two years we're just going to have to learn to deal with this. It'll mutate, we'll find ways to mitigate damage and we'll have a large loss of life.
Push out higher production of medical equipment and push out the best possible safety gear for healthcare workers. On a personal level, try to stay fit, get lots of rest, and try to quickly take care of any other conditions. Stay home if you are sick (to avoid spreading any illness).
That's about the extent we can do.
Closing schools, closing offices, shutting down the economy is going to be far more damaging than this disease will be.
There are approximately 20 full-service ventilators per 100k population in the united states. Let's say 1% of cases require hospitalization and ventilation. That means we can sustain a sick population of 200 per 100k, or 0.2% at any given time.
You underestimate just how unprepared we are for this situation. It is not possible to "bend the curve" enough to keep everyone safe (infected below 2% of the population). Full stop, that little chart from bendthecurve.com with the nice flat blue curve that goes under "medical system capacity" will not happen. That's fantasy.
By all means we should do everything we can, the more we can slow the disease the fewer people will die, but the happy fantasy scenarios about everybody washes their hands and doesn't go to the sportsball game and we bend the curve enough that our medical system's capacity will be sufficient is just a fantasy.
Further, the lower we reduce the reproduction rate, the longer this crisis will last. This is a crass observation, but if you let it burn through the population it'll be done in a few months. If you really "bend that curve" and substantially decrease reproduction rate, then it'll take correspondingly longer to exhaust its susceptible population. That means sustaining quarantine measures for a longer period of time.
Researchers point to Coronavirus peaking around June or July. That means it will remain a serious problem through at least August or September ("peak" doesn't mean it's done, it just means it's slowing down). Interventions will extend that further. We need to consider the possibility that quarantine will be required for an extended period. How will this work if we need to turn our economy off for 6 months? Nine months? A year?
Grandparent is probably correct that if China loosens its quarantine measures that it's going to bounce back. And in fact that is a problem that everyone has to consider.
https://www.ketv.com/article/unmc-models-suggest-covid-19-ca...
https://www.itv.com/news/2020-03-03/coronavirus-government-w...
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.12.20022566v...
You lost me here.
I hope we never do them in the USA, but the extreme measures taken by China absolutely halted the spread of the disease.
I’ve seen the videos coming out of Hubei. If you tried to weld someone’s door shut in the US you stand a good chance of being shot by the resident and both their neighbors. Maybe not in the big cities, but virtually everywhere else.
No. We knew the R0 of this thing in late January, and we knew, at least approximately, the fatality rate and ICU/ventilation requirement rate, in very early February.
Every single "just the flu bro" type has indirectly killed people since that time, including the WHO Chief and US President. These things should not be forgotten, and consequences should be meted out, lest we doom ourselves to repeat the mistakes of complacency in the future.
Even in a time like this you choose to make snide comments towards religion? Really?
In China, a lot of people can be left at home to die and they cannot do any protest against their government. In the most serious period in Wuhan, citizens were limited to stay home and there were not enough means of transport to do necessary transportation, such as critical patients and food. At the expense of this, another large proportion of people can keep alive.
But in the US, people have weapons and they are very tough. In addition, the information is transparency, so it is impossible to hide such tragedies.
Something that we westerners take for granted and why I would guess the virus won’t propagate as quickly. Long term, these kind of things are more important than shiny sky scrapers and HSRs.
Meanwhile, I’ve spent significant time in NorCal and NJ residences with extremely crappy heating, too.
It stems from a decision Mao made more than 50 years ago. First, people expect the state to be responsible for heating, which is weird to us but follows the soviet model. So the state decided to provide central heating to people in the north but not in the south.
Now you could provide your own heat, but the majority of Chinese live in apartment blocks that are poorly insulated between units. So to heat your home you have to heat all of your neighbors also, which isn’t going to happen. It works fine in northern China because they just pump hit water through the whole building. So people are left with local heating options, eg the kokatsu.
So my wife and her family own a couple of apartments in hunan that we’ve thought about renovating for heat. No one local really knows how to do it because it isn’t done. Coupled with the fact that walls in China are concrete slabs, not wooden posts with room for insulation in the middle, so you have to add something on top of the walls and maybe do heating from the floors. Anyways, it is expensive.
And it’s not just your home, but where you work. The last time I went to the HSR station in my wife’s hometown, the girls selling snacks at the station were really bundled up and if you weren’t wearing gloves your hands with hurt...inside the brand new train station.
Indoor heating is a requirement in much of the states, even in LA (you can skimp on AC, but you can’t rent or sell a unit without heat), and building codes have improved a lot over the years so it’s unlikely you’ll freeze your butt off in something built within the last 30 years.
Central heating is lacking in southern China in all but single family homes and high end apartment buildings for sure, but the air conditioner is considered one of the essential household appliances, alongside the refrigerator, television (this one might be on the decline?), etc.
> Now you could provide your own heat, but the majority of Chinese live in apartment blocks that are poorly insulated between units. So to heat your home you have to heat all of your neighbors also, which isn’t going to happen.
Apartments I lived in and visited all have AC (usually more than one unit for moderately sized ones) and I’m pretty sure I never benefited from neighbors’ AC at all, nor did mine benefit them. Insulation may be bad but not that bad. If you were planning in-floor hearting then yeah, you’re probably gonna provide for the household living downstairs too.
> Workplace & HSR station
Ones I’ve been to (Beijing, Shanghai, numerous ones between Shanghai and Nanjing including ones at small towns, etc.) all have indoor AC. Haven’t been to Changsha but kind of hard to imagine it lagging behind too much. Every single office building I’ve been in, too, but I suppose I’ve hardly ever been in a really crappy one.
> Indoor heating is a requirement in much of the states, even in LA (you can skimp on AC, but you can’t rent or sell a unit without heat), and building codes have improved a lot over the years so it’s unlikely you’ll freeze your butt off in something built within the last 30 years.
Not talking about freezing my butt off apparently, just uncomfortably cool to the point of having to wrap myself up even at home. Many houses aren’t built within the last 30 years so there’s that.
A concrete slab built without insulation is going to be difficult to insulate after the fact, you just can’t foam it up because there is nowhere for the foam to go. You have to maybe build a false wall and lose some floor space, or use paneling. Anyways, it is complicated.
Zhejiang and jiangsu are China’s richest provinces, and often lack the problems of the rest of south China. Jiangsu is actually north of the Yangtze so they they get heat in the cities anyways, like much poorer Anhui next door. Hunan, Hubei, Jiangxi, and I guess fujian is where the no heat in the south starts to hurt. Guangxi and guangdong also, though winter weather isn’t as bad, but touring Guilin I the winter was also a bit uncomfortable, only the five star hotels provided real heating.
Yes, I was using the phrase air conditioner (don’t think I’ve seen a unit in China without heat function) for lack of a better one, but the meaning was hopefully clear given the context.
The AC units mostly cost between 1-3k yuan (just looked up the current prices) so they’re affordable to pretty much all (urban) households, even in the poorer regions...
AFAICR commonly seen AC units can usually heat up to something like 25-28 degrees Celsius (except ones that have been sucking up a lot of dust and haven’t got a proper cleaning in a while, in which case they’d be less effective) so they’re okay.
Another thing: Yangtze actually runs through Jiangsu, with the wealth concentrated mostly in the south. I’m not sure where they start to have central heating — the cities bordering Shandong probably do, but Nanjing (sitting on top of Yangtze) and southern cities don’t have it, that I’m sure about.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22550623
Now this post has inevitably been downranked as well. I'm setting up a HN downranking-watch site right now ;-)
If you know some crowd-funding site where one can donate money to health care workers, please let me know (berthold dot alexander at googlemail dot com)
So if this may be an issue for you it might be good to start looking around to get connections. I assume the issue is that the entire family was moved out of the home? I'd be a little leery of visiting such a home without training if there's a chance the fixtures (doorknobs, fridge handles) can be carrying the virus. In particular if there's any reason to be opening the fridge for pet food because lower temperatures of 4c apparently drastically increase virus survival time to a few weeks, so handling items in the fridge may be a major risk.
Ughh, no thanks buddy. I'd rather not have any of this propaganda garbage. WeChat basically contributed to a global pandemic because it's prime instrument of Chinese censorship[1].
[1] https://medium.com/pcmag-access/china-has-been-censoring-cor...
This post right here
This is peak HN
We're facing potentially the worst global pandemic in a century and you're talking about takeout and pet sitting
And this is the top post
Wrong. You are just repeating misinformation. He labeled some of the criticism a hoax, not the outbreak.
You are right though, he did not directly call it a hoax.
Only later when he was called out on how stupid the comment was he back-pedalled and said their criticism was a hoax. That doesn’t make sense.
They weren’t really criticising him? Or they were trying to make him think they were criticising him?
The sentence doesn’t make any sense, so it’s clearly not what he meant.
No he didn't. He characterized the criticism as a hoax. That is an entirely different thing. By perpetuating the lie that he considered the outbreak as a hoax you are adding to the problem. If you disagree, please link to some sort of news account that backs up your statement.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-coronavirus-rally-re...
It isn't really hard to understand what he meant either. The President's critics say all sorts of things that aren't true. He is constantly calling them out on it. He has used the term 'hoax' for a long time to refer to the misleading stories his critics tell.
Doesn't mean that there aren't valid criticisms. Just means that much of the back and forth is just hot air. There is no reason to add to the madness though by spreading more misleading information.
Yes we should strive for clear communication but that doesn't happen by declaring particular words as off limits.
And what exactly am I defending other than accurate reporting?
The most generous interpretation of his words is that he meant it's a political attack from his political opponents.
The fact that his first instinct is his own political fortunes and has to preemptly whine like a baby about it is evidence of shit leadership.
The President and all leadership should be focused on the right response that minimizes loss of life, political fortunes be damned. I mean, seriously. If a sheriff's first instincts in every crisis were his reelection chances, he'd be out on his ass. But sadly, yes, here we are, arguing stupid shit, in the middle of a completely unnecessary distraction because he felt threatened and needed to lash out. So he pitted us against each other at the least opportune time. It is the one of the worst possible things to do in a crisis. Find a way to divide us!
The problem is that the public at large will internalise the first interpretation they are presented with, whether this be their own understanding or their favourite news outlet's. Past presidents were smart enough to realise this and therefore appointed professionals (whom they listened to!) to help them craft their messaging to be as precise as possible. Trump, for some reason, has failed to learn this lesson in his first three years on the job. It is because he continues to use inprecise language that his messaging gets corrupted like this.
“Now, the Democrats are politicizing the coronavirus," and, "One of my people came up to me and said, 'Mr. President, they tried to beat you on Russia, Russia, Russia.' That didn't work out too well. They couldn't do it. They tried the impeachment hoax. And this is their new hoax.”
It's hard to parse that, but a reasonable interpretation is to say "this" refers to coronavirus. Notably he didn't say "criticism" at all, and referring to "politicizing" as a hoax doesn't make grammatical or logical sense (which of course doesn't mean it isn't what he meant. He said "the impeachment hoax", and he was impeached so clearly his interpretation of "hoax" is different to the normal interpretation).
Either way, I wouldn't say it's misinformation.
My initial reading was that he meant the severity of the virus is a hoax (which goes along with his "the flu kills more people" narrative).
Your reading sort of makes sense if "hoax" was a synonym for "attack". It's not, but Trump seems to use it as one, so yes I could see that could be what he meant.
It's interesting, because we end up in situations like this where you can try to read into it what he meant but that really requires guessing!
Trump surrogates said after the rally that he wasn’t calling coronavirus a hoax. “He was referring to the way he had been treated by the opposite party … in terms of taking every opportunity to bring him down,” said Surgeon General Jerome Adams on SiriusXM’s The Black Eagle with Joe Madison. And you can argue that Trump is limiting his claim to Democrats arguing he’s not prepared for the coronavirus. But the speech simply compares coronavirus to the “impeachment hoax” (which Trump describes as a “perfect conversation” that Democrats twisted into something negative), so it’s also easy to argue that Trump is saying the coronavirus itself is similarly overblown.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/3/21163388/facebook-fact-che...
There is also the fact that his actions don't make any sense at all if it were true that the President thinks the outbreak is a hoax.
Because of all we’ve done, the risk to the American people remains very low.... Hopefully, we’re not going to have to spend so much because we really think we’ve done a great job in keeping it down to a minimum. And again, we’ve had tremendous success — tremendous success — beyond what people would have thought.
and
So we’re at the low level. As they get better, we take them off the list, so that we’re going to be pretty soon at only five people. And we could be at just one or two people over the next short period of time. So we’ve had very good luck.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-pres...
I really think he is using "hoax" as a synonym for "bad" and is referring to coronavirus, criticisms of his response and the Democrats all at the same time.
Your personal relationship to this is entirely understandable, but not a sufficient reason to not focus on root causes where they first occurred.
Then it happens again...
Could you give sources to that and some of the other statements in your comment?
Send everyone over 55 s as my working phone capable of doing Skype or whatever and provide the device a data connection to a Chatroulette app setup and instructions to disable the it and use normally in big big print and grayscale not color screens please color is confusing or color only what you want clicked (NeXT could have been a revolution for just doing that) by us old people anyway...
Not relying on government is the way to go.
I think we should build a social network for community welfare which can prepare us for something like this in future. Where people build communities among themselves. Key point being internal resource availability to be exposed to the close knit network and an external pool exposed to an radius. Keeping everything to the close knit shouldn't be encouraged and there should be a proportion. Ideally the network should be split when its crossing a proportion.
Why not build a social network which helps to build close knit communities and it can have a cascade effect on the whole populace as a side effect("good"). Some of the key points for it to work being:
# Pool resources before hand so that the whole system is not suffocated.
# Internal resources exposed to close knit.
# External resources exposed to a radius.
# Cap on internal vs external resources.
# Split the community into smaller ones when it reaches a proportion.
# Point system to motivate communities.
# Ability to mobilize resource across communities.
As a Chinese, I read first hand materials from Chinese social media and friends on what life is like in a lockdown area. People there depends on deliveries for groceries and medicine, and occasionally restaurants take-outs. All those services, and a bunch of other services for small businesses are possible because of Wechat. Wechat is obviously not a popular option here in N.A. Is there something we can do to help both the people buy whatever they need via delivery and help local businesses?
In Wuhan when the entire family had to be isolated, no one was left to take care of family pets. I heard there's volunteer groups to take them but their capacities were very limited due to the short notice for them to take on such responsibilities. Can we be more prepared and maybe find a technology(-assisted) solution to this before it becomes a huge issue? I feel this will be an issue sooner rather than later because in N.A. it appears the current policy for mild cases is self-isolating, which will very likely infect the entire family.
Also in Wuhan during the lockdown many people felt so lonely, especially the older generation who can't use the internet effectively to stay connected to their families/rest of the world. Can we find ways to help people prepare for it psychologically? A lot of people will break medical suggested self-isolation because of the eagerness to stay connected to certain people/group. Instead of blaming them, can we help them find ways to stay connected yet in isolation?
I'm sure there are more things the mighty HN crowd can do to help others overcome this difficult time. Let's give it a try?