Re:Ask HN: Is UK government insane or genius?
by tim333 on Saturday March 14, 2020 @09:39PM
(#22580389)
China doesn't have a small population and has it under control. I don't think it's a population size thing.
Re:Ask HN: Is UK government insane or genius?
by Silhouette on Sunday March 15, 2020 @09:49AM
(#22583464)
China does seem to be on of the most interesting cases so far.
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.
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.