I've been telling my wife and friends I expect this to last well over a year. I've been told I "sound like an idiot" and that my negativity isn't helping. We'll see.
Then, in early March, right when SF starts it's social distance / lockdown, and SXSW and stuff like that starts getting canceled -- the Spring break thing we wanted to do in Miami is canceled, too. No surprise.
Immediately after, my friends try to convince me that we should do this thing in Chicago in early May. Flights and hotels are stupid cheap right now, they say. We should take advantage.
I'm like, guys, there is enough data from China, SK, Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Italy, and Iran to know that this is going to be at its worst by early May.
They think I'm insane. This will be over in a week or two at best, they say.
Now there's yet another event in October. They're trying to convince me to do that now! I'm like, GUYS! Hopefully the world is somewhat back to normal by then, but who knows? Why don't we just wait a bit. The deals will be around for a while.
It really seems like Fusion energy. Instead of always being 40 years away, everyone seems to think Coronavirus is always 2 weeks from just going away in its own.
As far as I'm concerned, violating lockdown right now is basically civil disobedience - I normally run about once every 2-4 weeks, but if they close the park next to my house I'll make sure to go do it as often as my legs allow.
This is a bizarre misunderstanding of the vaccine development process.
The reason you need to wait so long is to prove its efficacy. By definition, you make a vaccine to give to everyone who is healthy and does not have the virus. So the absolute worst possible outcome would be to inject 95% of the population with a vaccine and discover in 6 months that it causes some horrible side effect.
The catch will be if we attribute a drop off in hospital admits as successful containment or as the result of natural immunization/ herd immunity.
The police here have in some cases been acting with ludicrous heavy-handedness, such as posting drone footage of 1-2 people walking over an empty moor, claiming they shouldn't because it's "NOT ESSENTIAL!". The actual laws actually seem quite reasonable, and leave room for common sense - hopefully the police will stop this nonsense, or their behaviour may cause people to lose respect and start flaunting the rules.
I believe it's the same situation across most/all of Europe now.
This difference between the law and the government guidance seems to be causing a few teething troubles as police adjust to it.
I'm highly skeptical of the "economy will just unpause" theory.
before there's a vaccine deployed or everyone has been infected and paid the personal cost of their viral lottery ticket.
Best bet might be a modifier herd immunity plan, of infecting healthy people with a miniscule viral load and hoping the immune system can handle it better than a heavy load from getting sneezed on or spending all day at a hospital.
Though they did seem to delay action, when they took it they went hard. Some of the US is past the point that China threw the brakes on, and the rest of the country continues to accelerate. We can't expect the timeline to align in any way.
The WHO has had a large team of disease experts, public health experts and others in China since late January, and they say China has been totally transparent.
The unfortunate truth is that authoritarian regimes are better suited to dealing with a pandemic, particularly competent, technocratic regimes like China's.
Genetic analysis indicates a single index patient sometime around mid-November. In late December, there was a large cluster of pneumonia cases with multiple patients at the same hospital in Wuhan, which were mostly linked to the Huanan Seafood Market.
And this is exactly what you would expect. One case in mid-November, 2-3 cases a week later, 4-9 cases by early December, 16-81 cases by mid December, and maybe a couple hundred cases by late December. And among these cases, only a minority are going present to a hospital for treatment. Most will get sick, but simply stay home.
On December 31st, the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission became aware of the Huanan Seafood Market cluster and issued a notice to local hospitals. That same day, Li Wenliang made a statement to friends about the unknown pneumonia cases, which was shared by friends to social media. Local authorities arrested Li Wenliang and made him sign a statement acknowledging a misdemeanor, and ordered him not to talk about the illness publicly.
Later that same day, Chinese officials notified the World Health Organization of an outbreak of pneumonia of unknown cause.
On January 1st, local authorities closed the seafood market.
On January 7th, Chinese researchers identified SARS-CoV-2 as the causative agent in the outbreak.
On January 12th, Chinese researchers shared the viral genome with the world health community.
On January 22nd, with about 500 confirmed cases, China locked down Wuhan, and all of Hubei Province the next day.
There were clearly some local efforts at suppressing information about the virus, but at a time that very little was known about it, and apparently all at the local level.
Somehow this is seen by some in the West as state-sanctioned efforts at suppression, but the President of the United States saying it's just the flu, nothing to worry about, there are very few cases, most of them are getting better, it's totally under control - that's not suppressing information, just efforts to project calm.
The reality is that China's response to this novel virus represents a new gold standard for emergent disease response. In terms of both speed and efficacy, it was the best response the world has ever seen.
As I've written before, "a powerful flu like corona" was circulating in SE Asia already by Dec. 10. So the Dec. 31 WHO notification was pretty slow.
I'm lukewarm on congratulating China since they were the epicenter for SARS-1 in 2002/2003, and various bird flus since. I wonder how many hospital staff Wuhan lost in Dec. 2019? Must have been dozens - did that make the press?
Here's an article from Feb 11th in the SCMP which notes 500 health care workers in Wuhan were infected with the virus:
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3050077/leas...
Americans are not wearing masks universally.
There are no bans on movements between hotspots like New York and the rest of the country.
And Americans expect to successfully contain the disease in weeks.
Proof:
1. China's numbers simply do not match models that take all their measures into account.
2. China only tested syptomatic people, and did not classify pneumonia sufferers as COVID: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-china-...
3. Wuhan crematoriums are seeing way more deaths than reported: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/88435z/wuhans-crematorium... http://www.asianews.it/news-en/Wuhan,-endless-queues-for-ash...
China's new outbreak: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/04/china-fears-wave-covi...
The goal of the lockdown must be getting the case numbers low enough that contact tracing works again. To do that you need to get the replication number well below 1 and hold it there for two months or so. The measures we're currently taking are totally insufficient for that. R is still closer to 3 than to 0.5.
But at the same time, as in the US, reported infection rates are probably much lower than the actual rates, since both countries' administrations have an interest in minimizing the reported rates, or when that fails, minimizing the timeline for normalization of life.
Public health authorities are the only people who have no incentive to exaggerate or suppress information.
In China, province/local government leaders would be jailed for speaking against the party line.
Local officials have credibility right now from being the actual local boots on the ground. Their voices have cornered the administration into admitting, however begrudgingly, the scale of the problem.
Given the administration's incentives, it's good that the institution aggregating the numbers right now is John's Hopkins, and not the administration's VP-led task force.
I'd also be scared if you were welding people into homes too. For a different reason.
There really isn't a great solution here other than masks for all, and people behaving responsibly. Which isn't going to happen. :(
Can you imagine this happening in the US? What happens if this is what it takes to avoid the 60-80% infections required before herd immunity kicks in?
So what? The rest of the world is still a hot zone. As soon as one infected person slips through your net—tomorrow or six months in the future—you have an outbreak again.