China, Singapore, and Qatar seem to have less-lethal strains if their recent numbers are to be believed. Perhaps in lieu of an early vaccine we might see weaker asymptomatic strains as providing a safer path to herd immunity. Someone here from these countries might be able to explain their low death rates in more detail.
The bigger loss will likely be from whatever business/scientific travel is truly necessary. If that gets harder you may see some long run economic harm.
As for China, not obvious they have a lower fatality rate? Their official stats show a 5% CFR.
Singapore and Qatar have their cases amongst the mostly young migrant workers, which should have a much lower fatality rate due to age. I’m skeptical that any countries have a much less lethal strain. Unless we see nursing homes with widespread infections but few deaths.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-05/as-virus-...
Sinapore and Qatar are clear cases of a lower IFR, but not obvious to me that China is. Every place has undiscovered cases, the question is how many.
When nobody was testing, and nobody was expecting it. Testing and tracing infrastructure will only get better, not worse. You won’t see cases in Hong Kong suddenly go from zero to thousands.
> Unless Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Australia, New Zealand, iceland, luxembourg, monaco, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Belize, China plan on never reopening to the World, the virus will spread again.
I suspect they'll reopen with mandatory testing and isolation of travelers. Many of those countries already have varying versions of this.
This will go until a vaccine exists. Then once a vaccine exists you’ll need proof of vaccination to enter.
Tourism is nice for economies, but not being in lockdown and not paying the costs of an outbreak is even better.
Why exactly will it be impossible for those countries to use this system for 1-2 years until a vaccine is ready? The alternative on offer in countries with outbreaks is hardly compelling.
Perhaps we’ll discover a treatment in between that will make this unnecessary, but barring that the world may divide into cold zones and hot zones.