If China looks like they "fucked it up" then the people become more restless and start questioning the party. Also, they care deeply about their worldwide reputation and that the world sees that their "system" (top down authoritarianism) is seen as more effective than western progressive liberal democracies.
It makes them look a hell of a lot better if they can say to their people, "Look guys, look at how well we handled this crisis compared to the Western countries, this is why having an authoritatian one-party state with absolute control is better for you guys!"
Looking like the idiot country who totally fucked this up doesn't help the CCP at all, which is why they tried to silence the guy who was originally trying to blow the whistle on this whole thing.
But people not doing stuff basically means a recession, if not depression is guaranteed.
Only someone who had never visited China and seen the scale of the place woukd say such a thing. It's like saying I locked down all the termite colonies in Australia.
The U.S. is steering itself toward a year-or-more-long issue that has people fearfully avoiding stores, deliveries, workplaces, and the consequences of this will ricochet. A recession happens when people and businesses restrict spending and hiring, and that's exactly what this scenario causes in a chronic way.
But who knows? Maybe Gilead's experimental antiviral will be approved within a month or two, and maybe that will be enough to make people not fearful and regain economic confidence.
I do think there will be a point when going out becomes less of a concern and there will be a lot of pent up demand for travel. The recovery will likely be sharp (V-shaped).
To relate the strategy to that formal definition of a recession, if everybody stayed home for a month this quarter, we might lose 1/3 of the quarter’s GDP. But if that break is structured so that it’s expected and we resume normal activity afterward, then in the next quarter we would see the GDP “grow“ a ton, if only back to normal because people are working and spending for the full three months, and we would cleanly avoid this formal definition for a recession.
There was a theory that the virus doesn’t fare well in hot climates and that seems to be playing out.
A good example of this is Vietnam. Nearly all their cases have been in Hanoi which has quite temperate weather in the winter versus Ho Chi Minh City which is tropical all year around.
It’s not the only factor, but it does appear to have an impact.
Also consider that in India, there is not only a massive population, but access to tests per capita is probably quite low. Furthermore, the background noise of other infectious diseases is higher there, so many of these cases may go unnoticed or just attributed to common ailments. Death by infectious disease, while tragic, is somewhat more normalized there, and it might be hard to convince a lot of people not to go about their daily lives.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1099662/china-wuhan-coro...
India: 1.3B population and right next to China. Greece 10M population and no close land links to China.
These numbers don't pass the common sense test.
In terms of Greece, it's more like Japan or China than a tropical country.
In early stage of Wuhan(Jan 2020), there's hiding numbers, and there's lots 'rumours' widely spreaded on social network, e.g. Lots messages from medical staffs in Wuhan, so we known the numbers of Wuhan is not correct. But in recent weeks there's no such 'rumours', the gov may have strong control on many things, but it's not possible to control all(most?) 'rumours'..
From WHO stats in the last day China has 50 new cases.
Let's take South Korea instead, they have tested more per capita than anywhere else on Earth by far and conduct over ten thousand a day. Since yesterday they've had 100 new cases.
Sorry to disappoint the doomsayers but all these big grandiose predictions seem far off the mark with a proper response.
It's exactly the argument that gets made here from time to time about doing maintenance and paying down tech debt.
The people that do it get called over-cautious and reactionary because shit never actually hits the fan.
How does that make any sense if you take a moment to really think about it? It's clear they are either deliberately not testing or skewing/hiding their numbers for political purposes. It's a bit similar to India's numbers. India (population 1.3B) has fewer cases than Iceland (Isolated island of 300k people), again, how does this make any sense? It only makes sense if they're not testing people or hiding numbers.