Lot of EU countries / USA are already late with respect to our timeline, aka they may have it worst if they don't act fast.

They simply did not test for Covid-19 in other states. US repeated the same strategy: no testing for Covid-19 - means no information about Covid-19 cases.

China have successfully paused the epidemic, but they haven't stopped it. Unless we fully eradicate the disease globally (highly unlikely given the presence of asymptomatic carriers and the spread of the disease to low-income countries), they'll be back to the beginning of the exponential curve as soon as the lockdown is lifted. That's better than nothing, but it's a million miles from a solution.

Lets assume all cases were identified. 59 million did not get the disease. It kills 4%.

A vaccine will take at least 18 months to develop. Can China keep Hubei locked down at the current rate for 18 months? Could we do that in the West?

If the answer is no, what happens when we reduce the social distancing?

Social distancing is about slowing down the spread, not eradicating the disease. What will eradicate it one way or the other is the immune system or death: once you’ve had it you are unlikely to get reinfected or you will die. To avoid the latter case you need ICU time or eventually a vaccine. Also consider that buying a month of time means an extra month to provide more ICU beds, better testing capacity, better understanding of what is effective prevention, etc.

Average ICU stay is about 2 weeks, so that's 3.6 years to filter everyone through.

  A vaccine will take at least 18 months to develop. 

you are just taking for granted the data provided to you by an authoritarian state

1) Lots of epidemiological papers about the Wuhan epidemic use data from phone carriers (not the government) to track the spread and make predictions, and they were generally pretty good with their forecasts. The numbers reported by the government are consistent with the forecasts from scientists.

2) The numbers reported by China are also consistent with the spread observed _outside_ of China. You can't lie about the numbers because every other country would detect an anomalous number of imported cases. (Case point - In Canada, we're importing way more cases from the US than you'd expect if there were actually only 1200 cases in the US. This is rather because the US is lagging so far behind in testing, rather than outright deception.)

The absolute numbers don't even matter that much - what matters is the trend and the number of new cases going to zero. Look at epidemiology paper - they always assume only like 10% of infected cases are tested and confirmed. The epidemic really is coming to a close in China, still gaining momentum in Europe, and coming in a big way soon to North America.

Please provide a source for this. I have not seen any of this data used. The data I see used is from the CCP's official data.

> You can't lie about the numbers because every other country would detect an anomalous number of imported cases.

This is absolutely false. Because flights have been suspended from China to most countries, and China itself has been on lockdown, the number of imported cases to other countries does not reflect the growth of the virus inside of China.

> The absolute numbers don't even matter that much - what matters is the trend and the number of new cases going to zero. Look at epidemiology paper - they always assume only like 10% of infected cases are tested and confirmed. The epidemic really is coming to a close in China

Please provide proof that is not coming from CCP.

No offense, but there's no reason to believe you on this without providing sources. Most of what you have said smells like BS.