Hacker News Reader

Comment by irq11 | Hacker News Reader

There’s not much evidence that the extreme “lockdown” decisions made by China had a significant impact on the outcome either way.

Social distancing, contact tracing and isolation of the sick work well, and that was almost certainly the critical portion of the response.

For example, this paper makes a solid argument that the travel ban delayed the epidemic across china by only a few days:

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2020/03/05/scie...

View on HN

The problem with local, less aggressive measures is that people act in their self interest to bypass them for convenience or safety, and they make the problem worse. Recent examples:

- Lockdown in northern Italy: People ran to the south taking the virus with them. - Schools closing, folks asked to work from home in Madrid: Families drive to the coast where bars and restaurants are full.

I agree that in a place where compliance with social distance measures is high (I'm thinking South Korea, Japan), that would be enough. But that doesn't work everywhere.

The big issue we have seen with contact tracing in this pandemic is that it doesn't catch everyone. Those contacts you didn't find start new chains that you need to find and disrupt, but doing that requires more tests than are available: People who haven't been traveling are simply denied tests. So you never find those chains, and you get out of control community spread.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com