Nothing will stop the spread. The goal of government and health organizations is only to slow it down so that the number of critical cases at any one time doesn't exceed the capacity of our hospitals.
While I am neither a tinfoil hat wearer nor have anything against China, the fact that they were silencing a Wuhan doctor who was trying to alert people and authorities to the virus all the way back in December makes me skeptical of their reported status.
Thanks for sharing, I really appreciate it.
Please correct me if I misunderstood, but the wording makes it sound like they were ordering them from China, i.e., buying, not receiving it as a donation. Which is exactly what I was afraid of. Money is money, and I can totally see some governments, especially the PRC one, prioritizing that over the actual help for their own citizens. Especially in the scenario where they know they are screwed no matter what, so might as well make some quick bucks.
Which is exactly how we get all those leaks and info from silenced doctors.
That does not look like the kind of news you'd fake, or would risk doing purely for propaganda reasons.
Read the WHO/China report. Or look at South Korea.
I'm not convinced yet. This would not be the first time a communist authoritarian regime lied about a bad situation - far from it, it's standard if you look at history in the Soviet Union for example. Authoritarian regimes cannot work without being respected and/or feared by the people, so they are incentivesed to lie to save face and simultaneously punish anyone who questions the lies.
Especially considering that the longer this drags on, the more likely nations and corporations alike are to pull production from China permanently.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/08/china-...
Like guns or not, that's the 2nd Amendment at work.
People own guns for defense. There's reason to believe that if people are being trapped in a building against their will, they may use them.
I understand that this is NOT the flu, but it seems like the best data we have puts the most pessimistic CFR at about 0.6% if you look at the South Korean data (who have done, by far, the best job testing en masse).
I agree that slowing the spread of the virus to help our health care workers avoid being inundated with admissions to the ICU is worth while, but I'm extremely skeptical of embracing what China has done.
Check your stats. 0.77% of South Koreans who tested positive for the virus have died already, and more of them will die in the future. The CFR is likely to be above 1%.
When those same experts see numbers coming out of Italy, they believe very strongly that the number of infected is far higher than being reported because testing is not as widespread.
1) But # infections were growing exponentially, we need to use numbers from the same cohort, which implies much lower # infections & higher CFR. Naive CFR will go up once infections grow more slowly. (It already is higher than 0.6%).
2) South Korean confirmed cases are much younger than their median age, mainly between 20-29 years old (perhaps because of where superspreading events happen—that church). This age group has a much lower fatality rate from Covid-19.
3) # hospital beds per capita in South Korea is second highest among OECD countries (1st is Japan) and ~4 times that of the US. They already have patients waiting for beds. Most countries will do much worse if they reach the same # infections per capita.
But it has a key context: that's the CFR for when all patients are treated. In most of China, there were never enough infections to trigger a healthcare system collapse: that's why in all but one province, the CFR was indeed ~0.4%.
In one province, Hubei, the medical system did collapse.
Its CFR jumped to 3-4%. That is worth going to extreme measures to prevent. In the USA, that would amount to ~10M dead.
That is not a seasonal flu.
I think a superior approach for most of the world is one along the lines of Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea: extensive testing and contact tracing and limited but real quarantine measures. But, yes, everything should be on the table to prevent the nightmare healthcare system collapse scenario.
If they can keep it below 1, it will die out. It's possible there are many more unknown cases, but if unknown cases are increasing, confirmed cases should be too.
It would require very drastic measures but would undoubtedly save a huge number of lives. Amazingly, leaders in all democratic countries seem to be too cowardly, too dumb, or too short-sighted to take the action required.
They want to exchange lives for money. And it might not even be a good trade. Letting 70% of a country get infected, even over time, might end up costing more lives and more money.
All this to say, yes, of course shut downs must occur to stop acute problems in healthcare systems and try best to protect elderly. And this should absolutely be prioritized over financial markets (though risks here still matter). But it is going to spread.
- Virus has exhausted itself with the majority of the population. - Vaccine is developed and universally available. - Virus is eradicated from quarantine (so incredibly unlikely).
I am not an epidemiologist, just writing based off of common sense.
There's really no great alternative to attempting to contain it. We will most likely trade lives for money and then lose the money anyway. Better to just lose the money by paying a big price early on with a radical containment strategy.
If the quarantines last long enough, the virus will be dead. The hosts will either be dead or will have successfully fought the infection and destroyed the virus. Unless it happens to behave like some viruses that can hide in the nervous system and similar – but there's no indication that that's the case.
There is no country on Earth that is gonna lock up all its citizens indoors and starve them to death. Governments aren't that stupid.
And were there not videos of government agents welding bars on windows and destroying food to punish quarantine breakers recently?
I think you're dramatically oversimplifying how this all works.
First of all, you have to schedule a specific time slot to go shopping, to ensure that the store never gets too crowded. Secondly, you aren't allowed within two meters of anyone at any point. All of the store employees are wearing protective gear (gloves, masks, etc.). When you checkout, you push your cart up to them, they ring everything up, set it back down, and then you pack your bags yourself while they go away (to maintain a distance of two meters). They might be changing gloves with every checkout, too.
I have less knowledge of China, but I think it's similar. I saw a video of a ranged thermometer being used on every person before being allowed inside. Maybe Italy is doing similar. If and only if you have a fever or a confirmed infection then are you not allowed to leave your dwelling at all (unless it's to go to a hospital); that's when you get your food delivered.
With containment measures this drastic, you can definitely keep the infection rate below 1, which is all you need to stop an infection. And it's exactly these kinds of measures that need to be taken, because food is essential. You cannot have people starving to death en masse. Grocery stores are essential, and it's possible to allow grocery shipping while largely mitigating the spread of disease. Needless to say, all gatherings are banned, most stores are shut, and restaurants are to-go/delivery only (if they're even still open).
And I'm not drastically over-simplifying things, unless you somehow think that "shut down almost everything except for grocery stores and healthcare" is "over-simplified". This is working in China. They are stopping the spread of the disease while simultaneously maintaining access to food and healthcare.
The food production aspect though is more problematic; it can involved larger groups of people and more human contact.
Economies aren't just playthings for little pieces of multicolored paper -- they're the process by which we live a life different from that of a wild animal.
Life without an economy would be smelly, brutal, and short.
Personally, I pray that the US won't try this idiocy, and further pray that people won't stand for it if they try.
The whole supply chain is guaranteed (and related companies allowed to work).
Source: I'm italian and directly affected by this
At this point if you don't have at least a week's supply of rice on hand you're just being careless. It's dirt cheap and large sacks are readily available everywhere.
But in all seriousness, general guidelines are already that, even without stuff like Corona or not.
One advice from the supply chain perspective, so. If you have to stock up, do so in small quantities across multiple stores. reducing the number of stock-outs at the point-of-sale has an unbelievable efeect in stabilizing supply chains. and the last thing we want is unstable supply chains right now. As rediculous as it is, if something like th toilet paper scare happens to more life-ciritical stuff things turn a lot less funny rather quickly.
That's not really true. South Korea and China have proven that this thing can be stopped and R0 can be driven below 1. It just requires decisive action by the state (either heavy quarantining or mass testing coupled with behavioral changes by the population).
really, that's the best solution to saving lives?
if you were really worried about preventable deaths, why don't you direct your fear-mongering and authoritarianism toward eradicating distracted driving, since car accidents kill a million people a year?
otherwise, wash your hands and keep a little distance from coughers/sneezers. if you get sick with (1) a high fever and (2) a dry cough, don't go out for 14 days after you feel better, unless you're so sick you need to go see a doctor.
that's it. stop with the hysteria.
You flat out do need to shut down most things to get the spread rate below 1.0. Cancel all gatherings of people, shut down non-essential businesses, etc. That's all that works.
we're apparently collectively ok with 30K americans dying of flu (or alternatively, auto accidents) every year, so it doesn't make sense to go nuts on stopping this virus that's looking more and more like it's a little worse than the yearly flu.
the point being risks need to be properly assessed and proportionately addressed, without hysteria.
the underlying question about whether we value human lives enough is another matter we certainly should continue to discuss (for the record, i think we should value human lives a little more relative to economic considerations, and the response to something like covid-19 would correspondingly be a little more proactive, but still not hasty and panicked).
You're spreading ignorance.
Every medical expert is saying it is 5-20x deadlier than the seasonal flu, because that's what the data says. They're predicting 40-70% infection rates.
A low estimate of 0.05% mortality rate with 40% infected is: 640,000 dead in the US alone. It could end up being a 1.5% mortality rate with 70% infected: 3,360,000 dead in the US alone.
Please do some reading: https://www.flattenthecurve.com
Of course, this would never happen, since we as a society would enact major policies to slow the spread long before it got anywhere near that bad, just as Italy is doing for example. It just doesn't make any sense to wait for things to get worse to start enacting policies to slow its spread; if we're going to have to do it at some point, might as well do it early and reduce the spread.
That is quite an assumption. We shall see, I hope you are right.
It's a pretty good assumption to make.