One friend is in fact a physician who was on the front-line saving elderly patients ill with covid, and they still believe that the socioeconomic costs to our future generation is too great and lockdowns too blunt a tool to protect hospital capacity.
So I'd rather people (re-establish) the arguments against your point for reasons of posterity rather than simply censor you as I am seeing similar polarisation of views over covid as I have over other important discussions of the recent years.
I am not an expert in this field so don't really have any primary sources to add, though I personally know people who died and nearly died untimely from this disease.
That said I happen to disagree with his conclusion. As can be seen from SARS, MERS and now again SARS-CoV-2 swift action by Asian nations has been effective multiple pandemics in a row.
On the other hand Ebola, Zika and SARS-CoV-2 in African, South American and Western nations has exemplified what can happen if you react too slowly and without enough force. (worth mentioning African nations mostly learnt their lesson here and used the systems developed to combat Ebola to shut down Covid19 fairly rapidly).
As a resident of Thailand I am probably somewhat biased but I see the lockdowns having been very effective here which allowed us to mostly return to daily life after only 4-6 weeks of extreme lockdown. This also follows for Vietnam, Japan, Taiwan and even China after they were able to get everything under control.
Arguing against something that clearly works and has allowed these nations to reignite their economic engines without fear of health system collapse seems disingenuous to say the least.
The West reacted slowly, too heavily (closing parks?), and then declared victory too quickly, and spent little time over the summer preparing any systems to actually beat the virus.
I live in one of the few western areas that did beat the virus (the atlantic bubble of canada) and life is much more pleasant than elsewhere. It just took about six weeks more restrictions, and actually aiming at winning.
Most of the west adopted a “just prevent the hospitals from collapsing” goal, which is a stupid goal if your only tool to do so is heavy handed lockdowns. You’re guaranteed to have yo-yo lockdowns.
The only coherent strategies are developing an effective test/trace/isolate system or local elimination. The west doesn’t seem institutionally capable of the former.
What the hell are you talking about? What propaganda or fake reporting?
China initially denied there even was a virus or that it was dangerous. Just like Europe. Just like the US.
What kind of weird conspiracy websites are you getting this information from and how did you end on this site? Don't those places have comment sections too where you can discuss with like minded people that are also shopping for confirmation basis data points for their xenophobia.
China has a very scary government but that's no reason to for us here to just make shit up. It actually dilutes from the real risks and criticisms.
China can open their firewall and let their citizens speak freely if they have nothing to hide.
This diaspora knew about how serious COVID was back in January.
If they had millions of people secretly falling sick today, this diaspora would have heard about it. It hasn't, and they don't.
For all intents and purposes, South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, and yes, China have brought the virus under control, while we are faffing about with millions sick.
> This diaspora knew about how serious COVID was back in January.
I know because lot of them were buying masks and other PPE from Australia and sending it to China. Too bad they did not care about their host country.
Not sure why you are talking about South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam they are much more open than China.
Do you have the same expectation of self-sacrificing patriotism from, say, a non-immigrant millionaire (there's a lot of those around, especially in booming real estate markets), who sits on a mountain of wealth instead of 'helping their host country'? Or is it just constrained to middle-class immigrants, who are trying to help their relatives survive a pandemic?
Christ on crutches, this has an odd air of xenophobia about it.
Christ on crutches, this has an odd air of supporting evil dictatorial regime about it
World Health Organization (WHO) estimated the annual mortality burden of influenza to be 250 000 to 500 000
Currently, around 5k to 7k people die per day from covid, and that number is expected to go up since the daily new cases are increasing (from around 300k per day end of September, to around 450k per day end of October)
Comparing it to an unusually strong flu variant is drastically underplaying the severity.
All of these numbers are despite international lockdowns and efforts to stop the spread. The numbers would be far, far higher if no measures had been taken.
And all of these deaths and infection numbers are low because we have reacted - not strongly enough - much more than we do to a flu. If we had taken the usual flu measures, the deaths would skyrocket from overwhelmed hospitals, as has been seen in early unprepared regions (such as the Bergamo region in Italy).
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...
Instead, there's a moderate increase, despite us taking drastic preventative measures. Lift the measures, and mortality will skyrocket.
... Meanwhile, in parts of Asia, the lockdowns have lifted months ago, and life is back to normal. That's what happens when your government takes this disease seriously, instead of half-assing it's response to the epidemic.
Sweden (and most of the EU and US) has done terribly compared with China, Thailand, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan measured in deaths per million. These countries took a proactive, serious approach and have successfully prevented widespread local transmission.
China has done an amazing job at preventing the spread of coronavirus, considering its huge population, long borders, and volume of international trade.
Italy and France are seeing excess mortality.
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/mrc-global-infectious-disease-ana...
https://twitter.com/imperialcollege/status/13077606155456061...
> Thanks for confirming: Neil Ferguson’s Imperial model did not point to 85,000 Covid deaths for Sweden; another researcher did. A mean time-varying reproduction number Rt estimate in March is not a prediction of deaths nor is it a model for predicting them.
dang, why are you allowing this kind of shit on here? Please step up and sort this out.
You're the one who's wrong:
SARS-1 2003
MERS 2012
COVID-19 2019
Mortality for under 30: 0.05%
Mortality for 30-50: 0.1%
And nobody believes any reports from China or the WHO.
Wuhan death fog https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/latest-news/fears-thick-dea...
Wuhan protests: Incinerator plan sparks mass unrest https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-china-blog-48904350
Chinese woman describes Wuhan virus patients being burned alive https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3881683
Video shows interior of new Wuhan 'hospital' resembles prison https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3870468
You Can Now Go to Jail in China for Criticizing Beijing’s Coronavirus Response https://nypost.com/2020/01/30/chinese-residents-face-jail-if...
Video appears to show people in China forcibly taken for quarantine over coronavirus https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/video-appears-show-people...
"They treat us like we're the virus": Africans evicted from housing in Chinese city https://observers.france24.com/en/20200413-coronavirus-niger...
This is a ridiculous statement.
China has done a good job on dealing with Covid and so have South Korea and Taiwan. Restrictions are all mostly lifted within these countries and life is mostly back to normal.
They key to their responses is not that they are awful dictatorships. They were prepared, they have taken strong and necessary measures and their population voluntarily made efforts for the benefit of all even if that meant some personal sacrifices.
The relative failures of many Western countries is due to, I think, lack of preparation, lack of leadership, and misguided refusal by many to make the necessary and quite limited personal sacrifices on the false pretext that they are a threat to personal liberties.
However, their door-welding quarantine would work if you did it on a large enough scale for 2 weeks. But then do you weld-in the welders? lol. (Apparently the CCP delivered daily takeout to the weldees. We're not setup for that in the US.)
Thanks.
https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps#z-scores-by-country
Deaths in Sweden tracking 2.4% higher than 2018, and even then explained by very low deaths in 2019 due to weak flu seasons:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-...
Our mess is listening to frauds like Neil Ferguson from the Imperial College who have a track record of consistently over-estimating deaths from each new pathogen.
The West is aging and each flu season will have greater mortality spikes. COVID at best is a once-a-decade unusually strong flu variant which we have severely overreacted to - probably spurred on by Chinese propaganda and their fake reporting.