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But if every government had acted much earlier, when the probability seemed to exceed 10%, there wouldn't have necessarily been any total shutdowns like what we're seeing now (except for the initial containment in China). There would still be some economic harm, but it'd be far, far less.

What would've been there instead of a shutdown and how could that have avoided a shutdown? (Specifically thinking of the US here.)

The 40,000 people who left China to the United States after Trump's limited travel ban could've been intensively interrogated, monitored, and quarantined as need.

> The 40,000 people who left China to the United States after Trump's limited travel ban could've been intensively interrogated, monitored, and quarantined as need.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/08/science/new-york-coronavi...

Yeah, there is probably nothing that the US could have done unilaterally which would have contained this. Italy was still reporting something like three total cases in mid-February. There was no more reason to quarantine or monitor travellers from there than there was anyone else in the country.

You mean 3 total confirmed cases?

Note that even South Korea was apparently monitoring everyone and suddenly 1 person slipped through and infected like a thousand people (read this recently, don't have the link handy).

Patient 31: https://graphics.reuters.com/CHINA-HEALTH-SOUTHKOREA-CLUSTER...

But the ending to that story is very different. South Korea did have an outbreak, but they contained it. That’s the counterfactual to “nobody could have prevented this.”

Note that Patient 31 is only the index case that caused the thousand-person cluster to be discovered, she's almost certainly not the cause of it despite various media reports that try and make it look that way. She had no recent overseas travel and no contact with known cases, I don't think anyone knows how she got it, and apparently she didn't even meet testing criteria and only got tested because some doctor ignored them on a hunch.

She probably wasn't even the first person in the Shincheonji Church in Daegu to be infected. The timeline of her infection is just too late compared to the cases at the hospital in Cheongdo potentially tied to other church members, most of the membership is much younger than her and therefore likely to display mild or no symptoms, and some of them had in fact travelled to China. If anything, it seems likely that she caught it from there rather than the other way around.

Cool that would have given the US another 4 weeks to ignore the problem before it got exactly as bad it is now. You can't solve an exponential problem with a constant size reduction.

>You can't solve an exponential problem with a constant size reduction.

Isn't that exactly what we're doing with social distancing?

If we took those measures every time there was a 10% chance of a pandemic would we be better off overall? Honest question I don't know the answer. It's easy to say we should have acted sooner, but should we have also done more for ebola, zika, SARS, MERS etc in the US as well, even though those didn't end up having much of an impact here?

We had this expectation that nothing was really important enough to interrupt international travel. Even as Hubei was put in lockdown the Chinese were allowing their citizens to travel the globe, including direct flights from Wuhan to international destinations, and applying extreme pressure on countries to not restrict their entry.

Basically the system has too much delay to respond, even to a strong signal. Even significant local deaths in the US is not strong enough to change politics and media. If Ebola had broken out we would have had the same problem.

I think we are stuck in a local maximum. It takes a significant push for the system to escape oscillating back to where we are.

Ebola has an African name so I bet it would have panicked westerners into a stronger response if covid was called ebola.

> Even as Hubei was put in lockdown the Chinese were allowing their citizens to travel the globe, including direct flights from Wuhan to international destinations

What? I remember Hubei was shut down with airports, and the rest of the world had to scramble evac flights to retrieve their citizens from the area.

They announced the lockdown before it was put into effect, leading to a bomb burst of potential carriers escaping in the next 24H. Even after that, international commercial flights were allowed to depart.

Oh, so just like everyone else.

I remember suggesting here and elsewhere that lockdowns should be announced on the spot, and quarantines should be applied retroactively. I.e. if at 18:00 the president/prime minister gets on air and announces a lockdown, that lockdown should be active from 18:00, and everyone coming into the country in the 14 days before the announcement should be quarantined.

I remember being shouted down as suggesting something extremely undemocratic. After all, the law isn't supposed to work backwards (all the cases where it does notwithstanding).

At no point did I imply the Chinese were worse than anyone else at responding. I agree, the lockdown should be immediate, and exceptions should be publically documented -- 'incident 782: flight xyz with 10 pax was granted clearance to land as a medical transport flight, under authority of XYZ, regional medical coordinator'. I don't see requiring retroactive effect though -- just require those people to confine themselves and their co-habitants, and stand by to be contacted for contact tracing.

> should we have also done more for ebola, zika, SARS, MERS etc in the US

Obviously yes, and not only in the US. The complete lack of any preparation for this kind of events in most of the world is what makes this specific event so disastrous, and the extent of that disaster is going to be more visible only once everything settles -- we're still far from that.

I honestly at least in US culture we'd end up with a 'boy who cried wolf' situation if we had tried to even encourage social distancing during past pandemic scares. If we had done that in the past when a pandemic didn't occur we would have had an even harder time getting people to take this one seriously, and it would likely have been worse.

Very unfortunate, but true, point. Most of those past ones were much more deadly and much less contagious for a variety of reasons, which played a role. Another silver lining is that this event might reduce the chance of future wolf-crying/false alarms occurring when we actually do need to take something seriously.

It's certainly possible that an existing, or, more likely, new ebola/filovirus strain could become a pandemic, too, though. Hopefully we'd be able to spot it early enough. (And there are some vaccines, which may or may not work against a new strain.) And of course it could really be anything.

There wasn't a 10% chance of a pandemic once cases were in the US - it being a "pandemic" didn't matter. The nature of virus, it's incubation time, and the mortality rate all meant the US needed to go into lock down the moment cases started turning up state-side.

This wasn't a long range problem by the time there were cases in the US - it was the early stage of the catastrophe starting, when it could have been much more cheaply prevented.

> I know the instant reaction is "people predict things all the time, some are bound to come out right", but this seems so specific that I think it's not just pure chance... we're just not heeding some of the warnings.

Right. I had not seen this paper. But then, I'm just some anonymous coward who writes a lot about anonymity and privacy.

But if I were, say, an epidemiologist specializing in viral diseases, I would likely have remembered this paper, as soon as I heard about the Wuhan outbreak.

So what stopped that paper's authors from raising an alarm? And what about all the experts who had read it?

And about TFA, given that it doesn't cite that paper, and so explore how it got ignored, it's hard to take it seriously.

I wouldn't say that they should have shut things down preemptively, but their job is to have up-to-date contingency plans and be ready to implement them when thresholds are crossed.

> A lot of people, some for good reason and some for bad, just don't trust their governments (or the media) enough

One only has to look around HN for posts about using the current crisis for various unrelated political and economic goals to understand why this might be. Why, just in the last three minutes on HN, I came across media sources advocating everything from nationalizing Amazon (now that it's "a public good" because of the crisis) to permanently banning the use of vehicles in cities (now that the crisis has shown how lovely the inner city air is when both cars and factories all stop).

Nobody's willing to let a crisis "go to waste", and so nobody trusts anybody to be giving them true information untainted by their ulterior motives.

Not trusting that the government and the media have your best interests at heart is simply being aware of how things are.