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Comment by mrb | Hacker News Reader

Well, look at this chart which speaks volume about how successful China is in containing the outbreak, with new cases per day decreasing dramatically since February: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ESywcEKUwAADhcQ?format=png&name=... And look in particular how cases in other countries are starting to explode since the last week or so.

Or look at cumulative deaths (outside China): https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ESyyxfiUMAEwMVa?format=png&name=... The growth follows a perfect exponential curve, which suggests other countries have so far been completely unable to even bend the epidemic curve a little bit. It is obvious given this data that we will see 10k deaths outside China by March 20. I have a perfect track record at making such predictions in the past: https://twitter.com/search?q=from%3Azorinaq%20%23PredictionW... (short-term predictions are easy to make, long-term not so much)

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You also have to take into account that China probably took the right actions, but their big failure was in timing them poorly. If they'd implemented travel restrictions before Chinese New Year, we probably wouldn't be talking about a pandemic right now.

Or, ya know, they coulda just prevented wildlife trade via regulation in the first place.

Yes, we all know that once regulation steps in, the thing regulated is completely stopped!

Regulation doesn't have to be binary. The point of it isn't to eradicate behavior, just lessen it so the risk can be mitigated and contained. Perhaps I should have said "lessened wildlife trade" to be more specific.

Regulation sucks until it saves your life.

Considering the lack of action, or the very delayed manner in which we, the West, start to put up measures to prevent spread, I very highly doubt so.

Consider the incubation time of 5 days avg, 14 days max during which you're already infectious. Even if China had reacted quickly, not trying to cover it up, we still wouldn't have known about that for a while. Even without the Chinese new year, I'm pretty sure given how dense and large Chinese cities are, this would have spread eventually either way. And I doubt the rest of the world would have reacted any different in that alternate reality than now. We still have travel with China and Italy today. Why would that have been any different had China handled that differently? It would have been slower, but it would have spread to other countries, I have no doubt about that.

> Consider the incubation time of 5 days avg, 14 days max during which you're already infectious."

I have seen several comments like this on this thread suggesting people are contagious during the incubation phase. Do you have a source for this? AFAIK this has not yet been confirmed, other than perhaps a few anecdotal cases.

I'm also just aware of a few anecdotal cases, but I guess this is very hard to scientifically confirm by its nature. There have been several cases in the US where it could not be traced back where they could have been infected (which could or could not be asymptomatic, or just incomplete knowledge of contacts). The first case in Germany was also asymptomatic spread[1]. Even if this just happens in few cases it would still be devastating, especially if it also happens with those that go completely asymptomatic for the entirety of their infection, which is currently said to be about 10 to 20% of all infections.

I check out John Campbell on YouTube every couple days. He has this unique style of presenting current developments and research papers in a no-bs manner and commenting on them, currently urging for more proactive measures mostly.

[1] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2001468?url_ver=Z...

This guy from the CDC claims this. Can't remember the source. I think it was a study from germany https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZFhjMQrVts

People need to stop talking about this as a binary yes or no fact. It is almost guaranteed that it is possible to infect someone else while not showing symptoms and this probably has actually happened. The question is how common it is. Most credible sources I've seen seem to say that it is unlikely/uncommon.

It seems likely that if we fully controlled most of the cases that had visible symptoms, the spread would stop, even if we failed to control the cases which did not show symptoms.

The same is true for spread via surfaces: while I'm sure it's possible and happens, it seems like the primary mechanism of infection is breathing infected respiratory droplets from someone else.

Sources: https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/about/transmission...

Last guidance I saw from the CDC was that people without obvious symptoms were likely to only be contact-infectious, as opposed to airborne-infectious (droplets) once symptomatic.

If true, social distancing, hand hygiene, and not touching ones face would bring asymptomatic transmission down to almost zero.

Hindsight is 20/20. It’s hard to know ahead of time whether you should cancel your nation’s equivalent of Christmas + Thanksgiving because you have preliminary and incomplete information about a disease outbreak somewhere.

Number of deaths is a lagging indicator while number of PUI (patients under investigation) would be a leading indicator. But since number of deaths is the number that can be easily aggregated let's hope in a few weeks we will find out that the curve has already started to bend.

> The growth follows a perfect exponential curve

You don't think that's a testing kit production curve?

Well, it's not hard to test if someone's dead.

They are probably counted as dead from COVID-19 only if they were tested.

Do you believe epidemiologists can’t account for that?

> new cases per day decreasing dramatically since February

some good news

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