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Comment by nyolfen | Hacker News Reader

> “As Lawrence O. Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University, put it: “The truth is those kinds of lockdowns are very rare and never effective.””

uh, except... the one we all just watched be successfully implemented in wuhan?

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Except what was really implemented in Wuhan was really not just quarantine, but was also an extreme form of social distancing, where essentially the whole province of Wuhan was locked down.

*Hubei

We'll need to wait 10 days to see if it was effective in Italy too, but other countries should start implementing it ASAP.

Lot of EU countries / USA are already late with respect to our timeline, aka they may have it worst if they don't act fast.

China did not prevent Covid-19 from spreading.

They simply did not test for Covid-19 in other states. US repeated the same strategy: no testing for Covid-19 - means no information about Covid-19 cases.

>uh, except... the one we all just watched be successfully implemented in Wuhan?

China have successfully paused the epidemic, but they haven't stopped it. Unless we fully eradicate the disease globally (highly unlikely given the presence of asymptomatic carriers and the spread of the disease to low-income countries), they'll be back to the beginning of the exponential curve as soon as the lockdown is lifted. That's better than nothing, but it's a million miles from a solution.

It's not about stopping the pandemic altogether - it's about reducing the number of people in critical condition at a given time. Italy it's already at peak capacity in it's ICUs, and only thorough social distancing it's possible to reduce the number of people at risk getting infected and clogging an health system that is already short on ventilators and hospital beds.

59 million people in Hubei province. 67,000 confirmed cases, 3000 deaths.

Lets assume all cases were identified. 59 million did not get the disease. It kills 4%.

A vaccine will take at least 18 months to develop. Can China keep Hubei locked down at the current rate for 18 months? Could we do that in the West?

If the answer is no, what happens when we reduce the social distancing?

  A vaccine will take at least 18 months to develop.

You can argue that a vaccine would take 18 months to test and deploy, but candidates already exist and are under trial. Moderna (MA, USA) shipped theirs three weeks ago, for one.

The idea is that you have say 1000 ICU spots available. Based on your numbers 4.5% of the cases are deadly, but let’s say 10% are severe-to-deadly and require two weeks of ICU care. So that’s 6,700 people or roughly 94,000 man-days of ICU time. In other words if you slow down the rate of infection enough you could fit that 94k into the 1k of beds over time. But if all of them get sick on day one, you are fucked.

Social distancing is about slowing down the spread, not eradicating the disease. What will eradicate it one way or the other is the immune system or death: once you’ve had it you are unlikely to get reinfected or you will die. To avoid the latter case you need ICU time or eventually a vaccine. Also consider that buying a month of time means an extra month to provide more ICU beds, better testing capacity, better understanding of what is effective prevention, etc.

> In other words if you slow down the rate of infection enough you could fit that 94k into the 1k of beds over time. But if all of them get sick on day one, you are fucked.

Average ICU stay is about 2 weeks, so that's 3.6 years to filter everyone through.

In a police state

except it may not be successful yet

you are just taking for granted the data provided to you by an authoritarian state

You don't need to rely on the data by the Chinese government, for several reasons:

1) Lots of epidemiological papers about the Wuhan epidemic use data from phone carriers (not the government) to track the spread and make predictions, and they were generally pretty good with their forecasts. The numbers reported by the government are consistent with the forecasts from scientists.

2) The numbers reported by China are also consistent with the spread observed _outside_ of China. You can't lie about the numbers because every other country would detect an anomalous number of imported cases. (Case point - In Canada, we're importing way more cases from the US than you'd expect if there were actually only 1200 cases in the US. This is rather because the US is lagging so far behind in testing, rather than outright deception.)

The absolute numbers don't even matter that much - what matters is the trend and the number of new cases going to zero. Look at epidemiology paper - they always assume only like 10% of infected cases are tested and confirmed. The epidemic really is coming to a close in China, still gaining momentum in Europe, and coming in a big way soon to North America.

I think the point is that you have to wait until the city gets back to normal to judge the efficacy of the lockdown.

> Lots of epidemiological papers about the Wuhan epidemic use data from phone carriers (not the government) to track the spread and make predictions, and they were generally pretty good with their forecasts. The numbers reported by the government are consistent with the forecasts from scientists.

Please provide a source for this. I have not seen any of this data used. The data I see used is from the CCP's official data.

> You can't lie about the numbers because every other country would detect an anomalous number of imported cases.

This is absolutely false. Because flights have been suspended from China to most countries, and China itself has been on lockdown, the number of imported cases to other countries does not reflect the growth of the virus inside of China.

> The absolute numbers don't even matter that much - what matters is the trend and the number of new cases going to zero. Look at epidemiology paper - they always assume only like 10% of infected cases are tested and confirmed. The epidemic really is coming to a close in China

Please provide proof that is not coming from CCP.

No offense, but there's no reason to believe you on this without providing sources. Most of what you have said smells like BS.

It's uncanny, because the various testing regimes implemented in the places where there have been outbreaks ought to be providing wildly inconsistent data, but the data from around the world is all showing a strikingly similar pattern. Once there's a community outbreak, the starting gun is off and it plays out like clockwork. The best you can hope to do is gum up that clockwork with draconian quarantine measures, because the starting gun is off all over the continental United States. Wash hands across America.

Might wanna read the news.

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