Infectious diseases spread.

If one country is doing all the right things but not enough other countries are, then that country doing all the right things won't be able to stop the spread on its own, even within its geography. That's normal and to be expected.

This is why I said coordinated action was required: I didn't say that for no reason.

> This is why I said coordinated action was required: I didn't say that for no reason.

Nobody wants more clueless WHO driving things

Nobody wants to pay taxes either, but sometimes doing things we don't want to do is the best way to optimize quality (and quantity) of life for everyone.

It all comes down to epidemiology, actuarial science and medical economics.

It comes down to a phantasy world complete with unicorns and all that does not exist anywhere except in your mind.

They have an authoritarian government -one which could weld shut windows and doors ignoring any fire safety issues to lock down a block because there was one case…

And it still spread. No, 10 days with democratic governments don’t allow one to truthfully say ‘10 days to stop the spread’. It’s either ignorance or willful misinformation/lying.

I think you should read my comment more slowly and more carefully, because if I copy-pasted it right here it would be an adequate response to your response.

Th premise is all governments would have the power to shut things down. They don't. We have civil liberties. It was unfeasible. Even absolute world-wide martial law would not stop it [you can't freeze people in place for ten days straight]. So the statement that it could have been stopped in 10 days if... No, that "if" was not going to happen.

I think you need to draw an actual timeline of all the measures that were taken, and where and when they happened. That should help clarify.

Do you recall the very early days when there was a cruise ship where a passenger caught SARS-COV2 and they anchored it in the SF bay and didn't let anyone off even while some succumbed to the disease and treated passengers as if they had Ebola? Yet, it still jumped and infected people (landlubbers). There was no way "10 days to stop the spread" was going to be effective.

Alright that's one measure, keep going, that timeline of all measures is not going to fill itself!

> keep going, that timeline of all measures is not going to fill itself!

That’s rude and arrogant. “Copy and paste my previous reply”, “the timeline is not going to fill itself”. mc32 is trying to present his argument and you reply with these short quips.

If you’re trying to present a counter-argument, this strategy works against you, as it makes mc32 appear more reasonable and knowledgeable.

Those people were then transferred into a quarantine facility for two weeks where they weren’t isolated from each other, and then sent home on planes all over America without even being tested for COVID on exit from quarantine.

It's a mistake to think "authoritarian" means "effective". It doesn't. Authoritarian governments derive their power from the appearance of power, and that amongst other things means being brutal and never admitting that you're wrong.

In China's case, it means that simultaneously a bunch of people would be welded into their apartments, but that the government would also cover up and ignore high-enough level officials who disregarded orders, or criticism that they were ignoring important vectors. China is very corrupt: whatever they announced they were doing publicly wasn't done remotely effectively - it was PR for how tough and untouchable the government is.

I'm sorry, but this just bolsters my position. There is no society where people will perfectly obey "stay put" orders. It's not possible. You have to tend to the infirm, you have to run critical systems, people need to eat (not even 50% people have ten days worth of rations stocked up; who is going to distribute more food, water and meds as they run out, etc?)

> There is no society where people will perfectly obey "stay put" orders. It's not possible.

It doesn't need to be perfect. Depending on the specific intervention in question, you only need to exceed some critical threshold of compliance to get R_t below 1.0.

i think the last two years shown that nothing acceptable from a human rights pov could have been done to stop the pandemic from spreading once it was out of the bag.

i'm not sure which example makes you think things could have been different.

R_t was under 1 in the US for extended periods of time, so your idea that the required measures can't be implemented there is empirically false.

Original COVID had an unmitigated R of about 3. All you have to do is reduce transmission 66% and you beat it. China did this very successfully. The later variants were much more transmissible though.

With BA.5 the unmitigated R is probably north of 10 and China had to throw in the towel, because reducing transmission 90+% is much harder.

"china did this successfully"

We have absolutely no idea what happened in china. We know they hid things in the beginning, and in the end ( when they stopped counting infections after opening the fates to omicron). What makes you think they told the truth in the middle ?

Because we know what a disaster it was at the end?

We got the footage and reports of hospitals and mortuaries overwhelmed when it ran rampant at the end, but in the middle we just got complaints about how much the isolation policies sucked.

Why did the propaganda masters hide all the death in the middle but not at the end? Why did it look like a disease spreading through a mostly-naive population in the end, rather than a wave-N population like everywhere else?

Doubt was a reasonable position in the middle, from the outside, but after how it ended it looks pretty clear there was very little in the way of COVID in China for two years.

If there were widespread covid on the scale of every other country, China is not so closed off that they could keep that a secret.

So the lockdowns, school closures, and authoritarian measures taken by governments were useless unless all countries on earth were aligned? So if that wasn’t possible, it seems odd that we were locked down anyway.

The initial lockdowns were intended to prevent a rapid spike in cases that would overwhelm the medical system. That was important, and largely successful. If such measure could have been taken in a globally coordinated, and fairly extreme manner, which was never realistic, then in theory the virus could've been eradicated early on. But that doesn't mean they were worthless otherwise.

After that period there were measures of varying strictness applied in different areas, some of which were beneficial, and some did more harm than good. Some were based on a mistaken notion that the virus could be locally eradicated. Others were based on good science to blunt spikes of infections, again to reduce strain on the medical system, or to buy time for vaccinations.

We can't look at complex issues as black and white.

Let's not go down this tangent please.

If you genuinely want to discuss this honestly (I am skeptical, but prove me wrong), we should do it in a more appropriate forum / context.

We repeatedly kicked it out of New Zealand, but eventually you've got to allow overseas travel.

I think it was more that it was realised (by Feb 2022) that omicron was so much less lethal than delta (and paxlovid came available).

Australia and New Zealand also had COVID fully contained for a long time (not as long as China). It was possible but very difficult. We just weren’t up to the task.

The hope was that the vaccine would make COVID like Measles, i.e. a few cases here and there, but you get your shot and basically never worry about it again. Unfortunately the vaccines aren’t good enough/COVID evolves too fast, so we are just living with massive death and disability.