China, Taiwan, and a number of other states (many in east / southeast Asia) have effectively contained the virus. China did so in 6--8 weeks.

Western countries notably have not.

Well, maybe Western countries should have talked about containing the virus, not flattening the curve.

Indeed it was a massive messaging error. For maybe 20% more short term work we’d be in a new zealand/east asia situation. Summer was the time to do it.

Now we just have hard choices.

At this point, I think it's pretty clear that New Zealand's approach couldn't be expected to lead to New Zealand-style results in places that aren't relatively small islands a thousand miles or so by sea from the nearest neighbour. There are just too many infections that slip through the net even after banning most people from travelling there and requiring returnees to quarantine in state-run facilities at their own expense for two weeks - it works for them, but the same level of per-capita leakage in a country with even ten times the population would cause such a stream of imported cases spreading Covid in the community that I don't think it'd ever be able to drop below level three restrictions, let alone beome Covid-free.

In reality the UK probably wouldn't even be able to manage that - for example, we have a constant stream of lorry drivers coming in from locations throughout Europe to destinations throughout the UK, many of them with absolutely vital goods, and that's a great way to spread Covid from country to country. Somewhere like the US would stand even less chance.

I’m originally from eastern canada. They have completely eliminated local transmission. And they have truck drivers bringing in goods, including from the US.

Haven’t heard of it as a source of transmission. Truck drivers generally don’t get off their shift and then go sing karaoke.

And I live now in Quebec, which got local transmission down to almost nothing. But then they opened bars for three months. I think if they had kept them closed a month longer and told the pop “get to zero and we can have a normal winter” we could have done it. Now we’re surging again.

There was no messaging error. Everyone was talking about flattening the curve, no one was talking about preventing cases. I wonder where this gaslighting comes from. It seems like we don't even need 1984 agencies to rewrite history, people do it themselves in their heads to keep up with the current agenda...

What I mean is a lot of people, like me, said flatten the curve, but would have wanted to eliminate it if it seemed reasonably possible. So I and other people who said the same thing now feel we made an error.

Flatten the curve started as a Twitter meme and only then spread to governments. I don’t think govts wanted to eliminate, but my point is I wish those who were in the forefront had sent a different message. I was looking at this from mid feb, before western governments were generally sending any message at all.

Surely they're identical? Flattening the curve means preventing as far as possible further community infections so that the infection rate stays low. Obviously it can't do anything about infections that have already happened, nor about new infections in situations where isolation is beyond practicable.

Containing the virus is the same, preventing ongoing community infections, etc.. Different words for the same overarching activity.

Maybe "containing" would have been a better description, arguably it wouldn't have allowed laxities to be introduced for economic reasons without it being more apparent; which goes against UK governments playbook it seems.

Did any countries public service messaging refer to "containing"?

Surely they are two absolutely different things with different goals. Nobody was talking about reducing the total number of cases, where did you get this idea from?

Just look at any article when the idea of “flattening the curve” entered the news, e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/article/flatten-curve-coronavirus.ht...

Drew Harris, a population health analyst at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia that is cited in this NYTimes article, has said:

>Important to remember that #Covid-19 epidemic control measures may only delay cases, not prevent.

and

>Without a vaccine, eventually everyone is likely to be exposed to the virus. Some won't get sick, some will have mild illness, some severe, and a few will die. The goal is to put this off for as long as possible so we have time to prepare and spread out the surge of cases.

In 2020 hindsight, much could have been done better.