However, a caveat is that antibody tests might have high rates of false positives, which would be a particularly large problem when very few people are actually positive. So read this with a grain of salt. The paper isn't peer reviewed yet etc.
It would point out that actual Covid-19 mortality could be close to that of seasonal flu, as it tells us the number of people infected is 50X-85X than the number of confirmed cases.
Assuming the data is reliable, of course.
https://www.nationalreview.com/the-morning-jolt/chinas-devas...
My point was just that with the information we had in December, there was no way politically to enact the extraordinary (and extraordinarily damaging) measures that would have been required to prevent an epidemic.
Not only was it politically untenable (Trump was only acquitted on February 5th!) but it was simply scientifically unsupported and unjustifiable at that time.
IMO even with hindsight being 20/20 I can’t say given the information we had on January 1 that we could or should have done any differently than the travel ban on January 31st, which itself was extraordinary. Everything post January 31st however is an absolute boondoggle of the highest degree.
As far as PPE and testing capacity, I believe those are both systemic issues which needed to be dealt with years ago. Good luck with the US trying to procure a billion masks from China right at the onset of their own health crisis — imagine how that would play out with 1,000s of deaths in Wuhan and 0 known cases in the US. We would have been accused of hoarding and causing the spread in China.
The testing issue was mainly an easily foreseeable and preventable regulatory problem at the FDA which has existed for some time. It took too long to remove the regulatory hurdles, but that there was not already a pandemic regulatory response framework ready to activate is totally inexcusable since we already went through this in 2009.
SARS-2 was circulating outside China in SE Asia before Dec. 15.
BlueDot warned subscribers Dec. 30.
WHO notification was Dec. 31.
Disneyworld Shanghai was closed Jan. 24.
You can't hear anything when you don't listen.
I think not.
The Lancet reported on January 24th the Time of Onset of the earliest known patients in Wuhan in a nice graphic [0]. The first case onset in Wuhan is reported as December 1st.
"Chinese epidemiologists with the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention published an article on 20th January 2020 stating that the first cluster of (~40) patients with ‘pneumonia of an unknown cause’ had been identified on 21st December 2019". [1]
Much later, just in the last few weeks, new reports have come out trying to trace earlier possible cases of COVID. Here is one such case dating back to November 17th, in Hubei [2]. This was not known in December or January.
There is a pre-print available as of April 8th claiming to have found an earlier case through genome tracing dating as early as mid-September in Guangdong, a southern coastal province in China. [3]
> SARS-2 was circulating outside China in SE Asia before Dec. 15.
Citation needed.
My other dates are straight from the National Review, and I believe they are accurate.
The first known case in the US was discovered on January 21st.
Here is WHO writing on January 5, 2020 [4];
"On 31 December 2019, the WHO China Country Office was informed of cases of pneumonia of unknown etiology (unknown cause) detected in Wuhan City, Hubei Province of China. As of 3 January 2020, a total of 44 patients with pneumonia of unknown etiology have been reported to WHO by the national authorities in China. Of the 44 cases reported, 11 are severely ill, while the remaining 33 patients are in stable condition. According to media reports, the concerned market in Wuhan was closed on 1 January 2020 for environmental sanitation and disinfection."
I claimed that there was nothing that could have been done by the US in the December time frame, and I believe that is self-evident from the timeline. Looking at that statement from the WHO on January 5th, there is nothing in that which could possibly motivate a national quarantine response at that time. Not even in China, but certainly not in the US.
[0] - https://els-jbs-prod-cdn.jbs.elsevierhealth.com/cms/attachme...
Full Text:
(https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...)
[1] - https://bfpg.co.uk/2020/04/covid-19-timeline/
[2] - https://www.livescience.com/first-case-coronavirus-found.htm...
[3] - https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/04/07/2004999117
[4] - https://www.who.int/csr/don/05-january-2020-pneumonia-of-unk...
Obviously mitigation efforts still play some part in limiting the spread, but I would not bet that all of those communities were able to suppress such a contagious disease before a big chunk of the population was exposed to it.