HK, Taiwan and Singapore all acted extremely early on, to the point where HK knew before the news broke out in China. And the culture allows you to wear mask, which seems to be something most western nation are completely against.
Most part of Europe and UK reacted very late in the cycle. Since the Virus has an extremely long stable period before any symptoms appeared or to the point where you could be infected but showing no symptoms at all. It highly likely they are already in wide spread. 500 people each inflecting two, do that 11 times and we have 1 million infected.
Then there is the death rate, at least so far it seems to be extremely mild for anyone below 50.
Not saying I totally agree with Herd Immunity, but judging from the current data and situation it is possibly the best route to go.
It’s certainly not easy, but it seems possible and it’s not clear this would be much worse on the economy in the long run. Plus it saves half a million lives, so it seems like a moral imperative to at least try.
If your population already has lived through similar outbreaks, sure.
But look at the US. There is a sizable portion of the population who thinks this thing is a hoax, who simply don't believe in this pandemic. How do you lock down those people? They're going to completely ignore government recommendations, and they'll scream bloody murder when government cancels events and restricts travel and assembly.
But let's say you manage to lock down the US to contain the current wave, and that you manage to ramp up testing so that you can be more sure about actual infection rates. Once it dies down in the US, then what? Ease the lock down? What about other countries where it's still rampant? What if it flares up again in the US? Go into a second lock down? You've already spent an enormous amount of political capital getting the first one through, good luck getting a second one.
> Plus it saves half a million lives
You pulled this number right out of your ass by multiplying a guesstimated death rate as measured in China, where the virus spread unchecked through an entire province, and where the medical system wasn't prepared, and you're assuming that the demographics of the people catching the virus in the UK is going to be the same.
But if your medical system is prepared, if you're quarantining vulnerable people, if you have good testing, then letting the virus roll thorough the remaining un-quarantined population won't lead to the same death rates, or the same hospitalization rates, because all the underlying factors are different.
You will need a Lockdown AND Mask, or you will simply just need Mask and not even lockdown. I would argue social distancing only is not enough. But somehow even people in Italy refuse to wear mask. So I think a culture issue is also a problem there.
If you are healthy, you only need to wear a mask if you are taking care of a person with suspected 2019-nCoV infection. Wear a mask if you are coughing or sneezing. Masks are effective only when used in combination with frequent hand-cleaning with alcohol-based hand rub or soap and water. If you wear a mask, then you must know how to use it and dispose of it properly.
https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2...
The mask also protects you from bad actors who are not doing any standard hygiene procedures such as washing your hands.
Besides that, I think that especially in times like this, it is important to stick to the recommendations of experts. Here in Germany, the expert recommendation is akin to the parent comment. These recommendations are crafted by people with a lot of expertise on the subject and who care for the health of people, and I think it is not productive to fundamentally questions their advice.
That is the only valid argument I could possibly understand. Although I would argue we could have ramp up production line. And Medicals get priority with Mask.
>I think it is not productive to fundamentally questions their advice.
I dont know, but Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, ( We exclude China for comparison ) 200M+ Population together has far fewer death than just Italy with a population of 60M. Let alone Europe. And people are dying.
But hey, I guess as long as the people in Germany and Italy and UK are happy with what is being done then that is fine.
Sorry I wasn't being clear enough. We knew very early on N95 doesn't work.
Take London. We could introduce a system of tracking and isolation within the M25, and that might work to lock down community transmission within the London population, but millions of people flow into and out of London each week so it would be completely pointless and ineffective. Meanwhile that level of tracking and isolation simply can’t work across the whole British isles. It’s administratively and logistically impractical.
Was curious about this point in particular - checked the numbers, and Heathrow has essentially equivalent traffic as Hong Kong International.
All of which have tiny populations compared to the UK.
For larger nations, there simply aren't enough tests available, nor enough treatment facilities for those who are likely to become very sick if the virus spreads rapidly through the population.
Why? If your nation is twice as big, then all else equal, your government has twice as much money, twice as many resources, and hence twice as many tests. China now has more tests than they need and they're the 2nd most populous nation in the world.
China has huge resources but has managed so far to keep the infection mostly contained to one specific area. It's not clear how long they'll be able to sustain that or whether they'd have enough resources to go around if all of China were the same as Hubei.
Of course all of this also assumes that tests are effective and that you can then do something useful if you confirm that a patient is indeed infected.
Is 66 million really that qualitatively different than 24 million?
Even so, assuming that strategies that appear to have been relatively successful in a smaller, more densely populated country will necessarily also work in a larger and less densely populated one seems to be dubious. We know that we don't have the resources we'd need to implement that strategy in the UK right now, and I haven't personally seen any experts arguing that it's a viable option for us, so I'm cautious about extrapolating too much here.
The quarantine measures, once introduced, do seem to have been viewed favourably by the experts and do seem to have been remarkably effective. This assumes we trust the reported statistics, which I acknowledge as a possible risk in this instance.
On the other hand, it may be that China has been able to achieve that in part by pulling resources from all over to focus on the main region affected. That isn't necessarily an option that will be open to other nations, particularly if their outbreaks are distributed across their whole area almost immediately.
We have explored a little whether the population of Taiwan being somewhat closer to the UK's than the other two named countries was significant in a sibling thread.
In addition, in the UK, which is the subject of this discussion, it is certainly the case that we do not currently have sufficient resources to cope with a widespread, uncontrolled outbreak. There have been a number of further announcements today regarding how the government is hoping to acquire new space for treatments, acquire essential equipment like ventilators on a much larger scale than is currently available, and bring in more trained staff to make use of these resources to help treat coronavirus patients. Even if these plans work out as is hoped, all of them will require at least several weeks to make a large difference. This isn't my opinion, it's coming straight from senior government figures and their senior medical and scientific advisors.
Instead of criticizing my tone, which was in fact fairly restrained, you should thank me for taking the time to correct you. For instance: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22580049 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22569806 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22529609 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22505631 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22504690 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22370446
It is true that the UK does not have sufficient resources to cope with a widespread, uncontrolled outbreak, lacking for example one to two orders of magnitude in ventilator capacity; but, as should be obvious, this is not a result of the UK being a large country — the UK is much smaller than China, slightly smaller than Japan, the same size as South Korea, and slightly larger than Taiwan. But this conversation would be of higher quality if, instead of containing such your obviously false assertion and also fact-based rebuttals such as these, you had not posted the assertion in the first place (perhaps because you had read enough to see that it was false), so no rebuttal would be necessary.
Is it your contention that the countries you mentioned do have sufficient tests and treatment facilities available to successfully implement the "third strategy" advocated by knzhou in the comment I first replied to? I can see little evidence that would support such a claim so far, in this discussion or otherwise.
China's recent official statistics may not be entirely trustworthy: they showed the expected exponential growth curve earlier on, but then levelled off remarkably quickly. In any case, its strategy has so far been primarily one of containment, with resources focussed on one specific area, Hubei, where the outbreak was also concentrated at the start. It is not known whether China has an effective testing or tracking regime in operation at this point, nor whether it has sufficient resources to treat large numbers of people if they became seriously ill in the absence of that containment, as may yet happen when the heavy quarantine measures are eventually lifted.
Japan's official statistics have also attracted scepticism, with the suspicion that they aren't testing widely enough to get an accurate picture of how the virus is spreading.
South Korea has had possibly the most successful response so far in terms of credible raw numbers and as such it is certainly worth looking at, but the strategy there has also been primarily one of containment. Again, that doesn't tell us anything about whether SK has the resources to look after much higher volumes of intensive care patients than usual if those containment efforts fail, or if heavy lockdown measures were not attempted and instead that "third strategy" of test, track and treat were used.
The UK isn't just "slightly larger" than Taiwan, it has almost 3x the population and almost 7x the land area. As I already acknowledged in the other thread long before you replied to me, I may have chosen too strong a word when I described three countries including Taiwan as having populations that were tiny compared to the UK, but my fundamental point stands in that we should not assume a strategy that could work at the scale of Taiwan would necessarily also work at the scale of the UK.
You argue for fact-based rebuttals, but where is the evidence that your examples are countries that do have sufficient testing and treatment facilities available to employ that test, track and treat strategy rather than the stronger quarantine measures that most countries are attempting?
I don't know enough to say that the UK strategy is correct (i hope it is - i live here, and more importantly, so do my parents). But i think the situation isn't cut and dried.
Hopefully, we will get a lot more detail in the next few days, and then the real experts can come to a consensus.
The UK approach here is basically just accepting that a majority of the population is going to get infected by design. That's fine. It might even be true. (It obviously will be if you don't do anything to stop it, but even in aggressive lockdowns I mean)
But it benefits nobody to have it spread quicker. Maybe life in the UK gets back to normal a little faster for people who are not at-risk or aren't treated at risk but we live in a very global society and if everyone else is locked down then it's hard to see much benefit for the UK itself.
And your parents and the portion of the population who are most vulnerable are more at risk.
An imperfect defense is better than not even trying.
Amongst other problems, the term "expert" is ill defined (see discussion above about mathematicians) and there's always value in contrarianism for people who aren't directly making decisions. If they're wrong nobody will remember and there's nearly no reputational impact. If they're right, they can win fame and glory.