Well the Chinese have been able to successfully contain the disease after a 60day lockdown so it shouldn't take more than that. Unless of course there's an agenda we're not aware of.
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?
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.
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...
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.
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. :(
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...
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.
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.