Wuhan coronavirus: From silent streets to packed pools | Hacker News Reader

Wuhan coronavirus: From silent streets to packed pools

bbc.com

85 pointsdazhbog175 comments

I'm confident Wuhan does not have community spread of Coronavirus. To eliminate the virus, China tested all 11 million residents of Wuhan for coronavirus in just 14 days [1]. That's more than 500,000 people per day. Dozens of asymptomatic carriers were found, who were then quarantined. Wuhan hasn't had new cases in weeks.

China used a similar mass testing strategy in Beijing. When an outbreak appeared at the Xinfadi wholesale market in June [2], the government had a short (several weeks long) lockdown and tested more than half the city's population. Some days they did ~400,000 tests per day [3]. This was possible because they sent in testing resources from across the country to Beijing. The outbreak was eliminated within a month.

I believe mass testing is an effective way to reign in the coronavirus. It's impossible to have a widespread outbreak if you preemptively test and isolate all carriers.

[1] https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/05/30/asia-pacific/sc...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinfadi_Market#COVID-19_outbre...

[3] https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-07-08/One-Million-Tests-a-Da...

> I believe mass testing is an effective way to reign in the coronavirus.

Yep - and then wait for the rest of the world to catch up =(

An additional measure that is effective at keeping people isolated but that would be unthinkable in the West where even tracing apps raise issues:

Everyone has an app that displays a QR code to identify them. Then, they put people at the entrance of buildings, buses, etc. whose job is to scan everyone. This is not only a track and trace technique because the tablets of the people doing the scanning are linked to a central database in real-time: If you're listed at risk, when they scan you their screen will display an alert, they will prevent you from getting in the building, on the bus, etc., and the authorities will immediately know that you are not self-isolating as told.

Basically, if you're told to self-isolate you have no choice.

Taiwan also quickly put a very extensive location tracking system into place for quarantined invdividuals and they also seem to have very impressive results.

"The monitoring system in Taiwan is described as a “digital fence,” whereby anyone required to undergo home quarantine has their location monitored via cellular signals from their phones. Venturing too far from homes triggers the alert system, and calls and messages are sent to the confinee to ascertain their whereabouts. Anyone caught breaching their quarantine can be fined up to NT$1 million ($33,000). As the National Communications Commission, which was involved in setting up the tracking system, put it: “They’ll find you and fine you.”

https://qz.com/1825997/taiwan-phone-tracking-system-monitors...

Is this individual tracking legal in the United States?

No, but your wireless carrier has all the information, and if you have an Android phone with location services turned on, then Google has it all too.

So don't bring your phone during your excursions?

They regularly call to check you have it with you.

Right, but the point is that all this hand-wringing about people's privacy is ridiculous when the data is already there anyway. If anything, the refusal to use it for a public good seems like it may be more about not causing a panic where everyone simultaneously wakes up to what a privacy fiasco it is carrying a modern phone on your person.

That applies to people put under quarantine. I'm not sure if the US has a similar tracking system in place, but they can heavily restrict your freedoms if you're under quarantine. Presumably you'd be given a choice of the aggressive tracking or be locked up somewhere.

Sounds similar to Korea. I suspect that mainland China might be doing the same as well. The system I describe also allows to prevent people from having close contacts with others instead of catching them after the fact, which really is key to stop the spread of the virus.

Another way is to post codes at the entrances to public spaces, and insist that people beep in when they enter. Example from New Zealand:

https://www.health.govt.nz/our-work/diseases-and-conditions/...

Obviously you need an alternative workflow (paper guestbook?) for those without devices, and either way without a person stationed there it's harder to police if people are actually complying with it.

Like a lot of the Chinese solutions to Covid-19, this is interesting because it really shouldn't work. We know that these kinds of swab tests have a fairly substantial false negative rate - initially from Chinese research, and then I think confirmed pretty much everywhere else - especially when trying to detect pre-symptomatic carriers of the disease. (Also, based on other results elsewhere, I think we'd expect to see a few people out of a Wuhan-sized outbreak testing positive even if they'd long since recovered from the disease and were no longer infectious.)

> Like a lot of the Chinese solutions to Covid-19, this is interesting because it really shouldn't work.

Are you suggesting China is putting out propaganda?

Antibody tests like this are very limited. They only detect positive after you've had the virus for several days and they have a significant false negative rate. They are very poor at identifying if this person right here has the virus.

However if what you're doing is trying to assess the prevalence of the virus in a population of hundreds of thousands, or millions, they could be very useful. They will help identify clusters of infection so you can then use the PCR test on known associates to pinpoint cases.

I think this is what the Chinese government did in Beijing, they used mass antibody testing, but PCR testing of everyone in the food market where they knew there were cases.

I think that the commenter you are responding to is not talking about antibody tests but rather rt-pcr test (swab tests) as have been used in China.

You test as much as possible and for any positive you ask the candidate and all associates to self-isolate. Maybe X who is infected gives you a false negative, but if you also test X's mother, husband and son you are likely to get a positive and just isolate the whole household. Similarly a false positive just means you isolate one for no reason - no harm to the community.

Even with a fairly substantial false negative rate, mass testing is incredibly effective for a disease that is contagious while you are asymptomatic.

Suppose the test only caught half of the asymptomatic cases and that anyone with symptoms was properly self quarantining. Then you would stop the spread of the disease by half! and if you had an R0 of 2, then you'd half it to 1.

Obviously, reality isn't as simple as this. It could be thought that these tests have false negatives when the viral load isn't high and when people are less contagious.

The fact that the US hasn't used antigen tests on every person in the country or at least in communities with high amounts of spread should be considered one of the great scandals of our day. A great article on the subject, https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/08/how-to-te...

Also, the fact that we don't do mass pooled tests in communities at the beginning of an outbreak like they did in the Xinfadi and later Wuhan outbreaks is also disappointing.

We could have had this under control by now.

No. I don’t want to live in a country where the government can force people to have any kind of test.

It’s one thing to have misconceptions about vaccines and tests but government mandated medical treatment is totally different and completely unacceptable.

It's a little bit more nuanced than that, since vaccines are mandatory in the US. The US government can't force kids to be vaccinated, but it can require that children attending public school be vaccinated. Which seems reasonable - if you want to use public resources, you have to be part of society, which includes protecting other people in the society with you. Most places with a society operate the same way, to different degree, and the only choice is either to opt out and live out in the wilderness, or find individuals who share your stance on, eg, vaccines.

>if you want to use public resources, you have to be part of society,

It’s funny how quickly HN becomes full-fascist as soon as the lightest of real adversity actually arrives.

Why? The government compels you to do all sorts of stuff.

My body my choice.

Your choice can literally kill multiple someone elses during a pandemic.

And how many people can be killed by a government which is mandated to enter the bodies of it's citizens by force? The people should be convinced to take vaccins and medicines (has worked pretty well thus far), but force is a slippery slope I would not like to see the bottom of.

Well, orders of magnitude fewer than 1000/day.

When it's something deadly that affects others, then the difficult question of forcing others comes up. What if smallpox got started again. That kills millions of people. Today most of us in the west don't have personal experience with things like that.

It's like masks. You should be able to make laws that force people to wear masks if there is a deadly disease that will kill other people in large numbers, in my opinion. For those that argue about undue force, what about driver's licenses, taxes, health checks at restaurants, food inspection, building codes, rules on water lines, seat belts, etc? Seat belts mostly just affect people in the car, yet masking and cv19 affects others, so it should be an easier thing to understand the impact.

My guess is our tortured political situation convinces people that somehow the situation is different than these other things.

I think being very specific about language is important here. There's "forcing", and there's "disallowing things if people don't agree to do something".

Forcing would be literally forcibly entering people's homes and testing or vaccinating them against their will, or jailing them or removing them from the country if they refuse. But you could disallow people from entering certain kinds of property or areas if they don't agree to show test results / vaccination status or take a temperature test or wear a mask.

Once a vaccine is officially approved and rolled out, I don't think vaccination should be mandatory for residents of the US, but I also don't think people should be allowed to enter my place of work or education if they aren't confirmed to be vaccinated.

Or maybe freedom is simply the wrong frame for this question. There are others.

Public health. Commonweal. Morality. Consideration for the disadvantaged.

> It's like masks.

It is in fact exactly like masks. You’re not forced to wear one unless you want to be around other people.

Are you sure? Ask your body not to grow old!

Treatment != testing.

I didn't mean to say anything about force, but remember that people have a right to not associate with those who refuse to be tested and, for their own safety, should be given the right to know who has and hasn't been tested or at least the ability to demand someone be tested before they do business with them.

People got used to alcohol tests in traffic

You're right that this could in theory reduce R. The trouble is, it only has that effect for as long as you regularly continue to test everyone, and only within the area where you're carrying this out. The moment you stop it returns to normal. China did this once in Wuhan and once in Beijing, covering roughly one percent of the country's total population each time. That shouldn't do very much at all.

(Also, pooled testing has fairly narrow usefulness. It only really works if the actual positive rate is very low and testing is constrained solely by the ability to process swabs, not by the supply of swabs themselves, the availability of staff and testing locations, or the other processes around testing. This is not generally the case in Western countries.)

You are right that if you stop testing then the R0 goes back up. That is why you test everyone every time there is a new breakout. If keep a breakout from spreading among the community, then the R0 goes to 0. The R0 is probably not very high to begin with in cases where there is a breakout in China because they do very strict lock downs, wear masks, and are in general very careful.

It also helps that anyone visiting China has to undergo 2 weeks of quarantine before going among the community. If you have the disease under control in your community the only threat is outsiders.

Also, you are right that the positive rate needs to be somewhat low for pooled testing to be effective, so that's why you do it at new breakouts before there has been much spread. I had heard that there are, at least in the US, issues with proper swab and reagent shortages, or at least there were delays due to supply chain issues. I thought there were issues with a lack of PCR machines could be wrong. I don't know what the case is in China, though it is clear that pooling is what they did to test people with lower risk of infection (it's in the last article linked in tristanj's comment).

China did a lot of things beside testing. Extremely strict lockdowns in affected areas, a near-total shutdown of passenger transport to and from affected regions and very rapid contact tracing.

China isn't a unique outlier in this respect - South Korea and Singapore followed a similar strategy and got similar results. New Zealand faced a different set of circumstances and used a somewhat different strategy, but they're down to about a dozen cases per day.

One feature that is overlooked from the Chinese response is the rapid contact tracing on a community level through the communist party's Neighborhood Committee. This could be duplicated in the west without authoritarianism through more effective community engagement. For more information, read this article by a New Yorker journalist:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/08/17/how-china-cont...

Yep. When I was in China in January, a person from the neighborhood committee called us and asked us whether we've been in contact with anyone from Wuhan, or whether we have any symptoms. Very simple, but contributes to tracing. In contrast, when I went back to the Netherlands 2 weeks later, nobody asked me anything. Even after I called the public health service, they told me I couldn't even voluntarily get tested even if I wanted to. Two months later, COVID-19 cases in the Netherlands surged sky-high.

This has been one of my largest mental blocks on all of this. Per the main reports we see about how this can spread, it feels like that nothing that has worked, should have worked.

Such that I'm sceptical of pretty much all coverage on this now. And I don't think that is a healthy thing to be. :(

They should still be wearing masks and distancing until it has been removed everywhere. It is most certainly in China proper and could re-infect the city. I only play an epidemiologist on the internet, but this is highly improper dancing.

They apparently did some cover up attempts but was there virus denialism like in the west? I hear that among the older people there’s denial of germ theory and general distrust to western medicine but they seem to be able to tackle down the Sars-Cov-2 spread very well.

The west, especially USA denied the Covid-19 at highest level until there were too many victims to deny, which is very disappointing. The west was supposed to be the one acting on reason.

Alternstive medicine is big business in China...but not like it doesn’t have a big hold here in America too. Administration of the coronavirus vaccine will be a big hurdle since so many Americans are afraid of vaccines.

> Administration of the coronavirus vaccine will be a big hurdle since so many Americans are afraid of vaccines.

Source? Afaik anti-vaxxers are a loud minority and in no way representative of the majority of Americans.

Polls suggest that about a third of Americans don't want to get a coronavirus vaccine. (https://www.usnews.com/news/health-news/articles/2020-08-14/...)

Note that this probably isn't measuring something else like "I think the virus isn't real", because similar polls show significantly higher support for things like masks and social distancing.

Well yeah, I don't want one yet either. I'll take a flu vaccine any day of the week, but who wants to be first in line for a new type of vaccine? Makes you feel like a guinea pig. I'm going to wait until other people try it out first.

I'm really only willing to be first in line for the same reason I'm not that scared for my personal health in the first place: I'm relatively young, in acceptable shape with no serious health issues, so the chances that I'm the one to hit some serious undetected side effect are well below what I'm willing to risk for the social good. My parents are thinking along the same lines as you and I don't blame them for it.

Hmm, I'd be fine with getting even an experimental vaccine, it's far more likely to fail by being ineffective than to actually harm me. Not that I'd want to discover it wasn't effective of course, but our immune systems are challenged all the time by all kinds of viruses and bacteria.

The exact question was: "If a vaccine for the coronavirus is made available to you, will you choose to be vaccinated or not?".

From my viewpoint the vaccine makes perfect sense if you are old enough and have one or more of the comorbidities known to cause serious issues. This also applies for younger people although the data suggests that it is not very likely to cause major problems for them. And then those who want to be on the safe side.

One interesting thing about the answers is that Blacks and Latinos have 45% saying No, while that number is down to 30% of White people saying No. Not sure why that is, as data suggests Blacks and Latinos would benefit more from a vaccine. See for example https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/05/us/coronaviru....

One more result from the poll is that 63% of Republicans say it is a good idea when asked: "Due to coronavirus, do you think it is a good idea or a bad idea to allow children to take part in local or school sports?". This number is only 9% for Democrats.

While I think tru anti vaxxers are a loud minority, I think they have help create vaccine skeptics or at least a slight distrust in vaccines. My cousin who believes in vaccines said he spread out his kids vaccines instead of getting them all at once in order to "reduce risk". This wasn't something the doctor recommended or is recommended on a medical level, as far as I know. But the distrust is there and present in what I believe is a growing portion of Americans.

I have never heard of people denying germ theory or western medicine, but there's wide belief in the effectiveness of Traditional Chinese Medicine. They take a syncretic view to medicine just as they do to religion.

Supposedly, at first, older people didn't take it seriously and didn't wear mask. Younger people did take it seriously, en encouraged their elders to wear masks.

I've never heard of anybody deny germ theory. Germ theory is pretty well accepted even if they don't think all diseases are caused by germs. Many people trust traditional Chinese medicine a lot, but I wouldn't go as far as calling it distrust of western medicine.

Probably not an advisable strategy because there are many ways it would adversely affect certain groups, but as a thought experiment, what if a pre-requisite for future COVID stimulus checks in the U.S. (individuals or businesses) was taking a covid test or antibody test?

This plan assumes that tests in the US are readily available, cheap, and fast. I can assure you they are not, with public testing facilities in short supply, private tests costing hundreds of dollars, and test results taking upwards of a week.

Maybe an incentive would mean that people would actually go get tested instead of ignoring contact tracers, but as with anything healthcare in the US, they'd probably be more concerned with taking time off work.

Is there a single democratic country that was able to respond like this?

Melbourne Australia is taking this approach right now. https://www.nzherald.co.nz/world/news/article.cfm?c_id=2&obj...

Everything closed except food retail. Unlike the US where essential was defined slightly more broadly to include hardware stores and such. Contact tracing every individual who tests positive. The highest testing rates in the world. etc.

It even gets into the extent where some sections of the city have buildings locked down completely. No one in or out. This is enforced with armed police. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8491177/Victorians-...

Americans might look at this in horror but in Australia the policy is popular and most people are accepting it as a necessity. There's also healthy competition between Australia and New Zealand here. We can't let the Kiwis embarrass us on this!

Sadly, we Americans look in horror at anything that might briefly inconvenience us. Heaven forbid we're prevented from going to Olive Garden, getting our hair done, and buying khakis. Which is why real lockdowns were never tried here, stay-at-home "suggestions" were not successful here, and we've become the epicenter.

taiwan, japan, south korea?

Japan specifically chooses not to do mass testing because they don't think it's effective.

> I believe mass testing is an effective way to reign in the coronavirus.

Prerequisite: unarmed population. Testing is not enough, you have to lock down the positives too.

Europe has an unarmed population and raigning in the virus during the summer proves impossible as everyone wants to go on vacation or suffer the FOMO of watching their friends' beach photos on Instagram instead so nobody gives two shits about the virus anymore.

So if you own a gun you suddenly don't care that your actions will kill your parents/grandparents?

More like, there's always going to be a certain % of the population who believes the virus is overblown, and the measures the government are taking is too strict and/or bad for the economy. If those people also have guns, the situation gets much more dangerous.

If you own a gun, you might be inclined to use it when the G-men come round to weld the doors to your home shut, as the Chinese government did as part of its very effective containment measures.

So they are unable to lock people up in the US due to arms?

Its not unlike China to hid details of disasterous death tolls that can reach hundreds of thousands. See 1975 Banqio Dam Failure https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975_Banqiao_Dam_failure

While past coverups did happen, I think it's unfair to compare current administrators with past ones because past administrators from the 70s have long retired.

Very true. Thanks for bringing that up

Meanwhile I was exposed to a known positive carrier and the only option I have to get tested is a chain-pharmacy like a CVS/Walgreens. Even then, it would take over a week for me to get my results back.

I’m not stepping into one of those places when I only potentially have the virus because that’s an easy way to make sure I actually do contract it.

The government handling of this and the overwhelming show of people being proud for not wearing masks makes me realize I want nothing to do with the United States and I’m actively looking to move away in less than 10 years.

The issue is the US is so big and has so many different parts. I live in a metropolitan area and I see zero complaints about masks or vaccines. If I read certain kinds of news stories that come across as very absurd to me, I definitely start thinking about maybe moving someday. But if I look at the people around me and who I associate with, I have no reason to want to get away from any of them. This just happens to be a time where the (in)action of some can affect others on a national scale.

I'm not saying I would want this, but in 100 years from now I wonder if the US is still going to contain all of the states it has now. I feel like the division we're feeling now may not ever go away and may ultimately end up in some (very hopefully peaceful) agreement where there are now two countries instead of one. I really don't know if this would be good or bad, but just practically speaking, it seems plausible.

How is it plausible? The division isn’t on state lines. It’s rural and urban areas. You have many “red” states with multiple “blue” cities in it. How would this work?

I was going to address that in the post but I didn't want to make it too long. Basically in this hypothetical scenario I think state lines may possibly be redrawn, maybe with some splitting and some merging, and maybe people moving around to be near their respective red/blue tribe. And as a result, some of the blue cities may start to turn red, and/or there may be some divisions drawn close to some big cities.

Do they not have drive through testing where you are? The ones I saw handed you a kit through the pharmacy drive through drawer, you test yourself and then drop the provided package in the mail. They don't even want your sample to enter the building, let alone you...

We're starting to see just how misguided the US was by not taking lockdown seriously early on and pushing to keep the economy going despite the long-term risks to mortality and commerce.

Here we are months later, and ground zero for the epidemic seems to largely be operating business-as-usual while the US is still seeing ~1k deaths per day as we approach flu season. I was watching an Aussie rules football game the other day and they're allowing fans back in the stands. I couldn't dream of going to a sports event in many areas of the US right now.

It is entirely feasible to keep things going on, as long as you have a high enough level of testing (not just people with symptoms) and strong contact tracing. We have neither.

And we don't seem to be making very rapid progress towards having significantly higher levels of testing in most of the US.

On top of that, I got tested last month and it took 6 days to get the results, 7 from day of scheduling the appointment. Doesn't matter how many tests we perform if they're rendered nearly-useless by being out-of-date by the time they come back. In fact, I worry about "security theater" use of these that falsely give a sense of confidence.

You have higher levels of testing than pretty much any other major country on the planet, from all the figures I've seen. The easiest demonstration is just going to https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ and sorting by tests per capita. (The UK is similar and Russia is better on paper but their figures have been extremely fishy even by global standards. China's testing seems to be heavily concentrated on high-profile stuff like testing all of Wuhan and Beijing; they've tested less overall, and there's been weird incidents like patients hospitalized with symptoms in a region already known to be a hotspot not getting tested promptly and entirely missing an outbreak elsewhere until it spilled over into Beijing.)

The reason you don't seem to be making progress is that no matter how much progress there is, your press has worked very hard to convince you that the necessary level of testing is always much higher than you currently have and you're uniquely failing to achieve it because of Trump. They use techniques like carefully only comparing the amount of testing to countries you're worse than, not comparing overall testing levels at all and instead falsely claiming test positivity levels were a measure of overall testing (by that point it mostly measured infection levels - the number of tests required to test, say, everyone with symptoms is almost entirely unaffected by the number of Covid infections unless you have so many of them your healthcare system is collapsing), and most recently literally using the fact that you've tested more to make it look like you're doing worse: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/06/us/coronavirus-us.html

For context, the big reason the US has "five times as many cases as in all of Europe, Canada, Japan, South Korea and Australia, combined" is because you've been testing massively more than Europe, Japan and South Korea did during their outbreaks, and people are only counted if they're tested. European testing was particularly bad - from what I could tell, the countries with big outbreaks basically only tested people who were hospitalized, and the much higher test positivity rates and hospitalization and death rates amongst confirmed cases seemed to confirm this. That won't show up so well on more recent overall stats because everyone did plenty of testing after the outbreaks had died down, though still not at US levels. Though with the way European and South Korean cases are picking up that might change. (For bonus points, the other thing that article uses to prove that the US is a unique failure is the length of its outbreak... after everyone had been pushing for "flatten the curve" which literally extends the length of the outbreak.)

This isn't correct. Europe has lower test positivity rates than the US. We'd need to conduct 3-5x more tests to have the same number of tests per positive case as Europe.

And these fans have gladly taken to the stands haven’t they?

You cannot have a nanny state and a free country at the same time. This is the sort of thing you have to accept and live with.

At this point anyone still complaining about “covidiots” is severely misguided at the general level of proaction/intelligence/mentality of people, and how it translates into having a stable, productive society. Learning to live with it should be groundwork for anyone who actually wants to do bigger things in life than just a 9-5.

As much as I love the panic and the incessant doom posting from every which way, the stark reality is that everyone’s time is running out anyway. The panic, when not driven to sell clicks, is driven by people who haven’t had an awakening with what it means to be mortal.

Upside: I do hope more people pick up general life philosophy and stop shopping and drinking as a means of ignoring their purpose in life, but I doubt that will happen.

How does someone find "their purpose in life"?

For a non-trivial amount of people, it seems like a serious confrontation with death does it. For others, tuning out the distractions might offer some space for new things to come into their day-to-day lives that make them question as to why they haven't done it sooner.

> You cannot have a nanny state and a free country at the same time. This is the sort of thing you have to accept and live with.

You have to live with hemorrhaging 1000 lives daily to be free?

A number like that in a vacuum is absolutely meaningless. The death rate in 2020 vs. historical averages is much lower in the US compared to the UK, Belgium, France, Spain, Italy, etc., but if you believe the media uncritically you'd think that America is a hellhole with people dying on the streets from Covid-19, when in fact that's just not the case. Our response was better than Europe's. We wear masks at a higher rate than other countries.

https://www.ft.com/content/a2901ce8-5eb7-4633-b89c-cbdf5b386...

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/17/upshot/corona...

>> Our response was better than Europe's.

US's response to covid-19 was better than all countries in the whole of Europe?

Or, did you mean to say the US's response was better than Europe's, on average?

In what way was it better?

How high does the death rate have to be until you'd be willing to enforce stay-at-home?

Let’s start at higher than 3x the flu. And a lower average age than 78-years-old.

If we're going to pass legislation based on death rate, why don't we start with heart disease?

Heart disease kills 647k people per year, for consistency shouldn't we also mandate exercise and outlaw junk food?

> but if you believe the media uncritically you'd think that America is a hellhole with people dying on the streets from Covid-19

But, in reality, they're dying in their homes because Americans are too afraid of surprise hospital fees ruining their entire life.

> Our response was better than Europe's

Americans had the brunt of the European and Chinese outbreaks to observe, learn, and listen, but none of these things come easy to us, so we instead decided to sacrifice our non-remote workers.

Also, according to the ECDC, there have so far been 179,793 total deaths in the EU [1] vs 169,870 in the US [2]. In terms of cases 1 946 748 for the EU, 5,422,242 for the US. Keep in mind the population of the EU is roughly 40% larger than the US.

We could also probably start looking into food insecurity rates increasing, eviction rates increasing, widespread civil unrest, but, hey, why throw more tinder onto the fire? The response has been exceptional, but in a brutally American way.

[1] https://www.ecdc.europa.eu/en/cases-2019-ncov-eueea [2] https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/cases-updates/case...

"Hey Internet Stranger, here's a bunch of non-sequiturs that get to the crux of my real belief that AMERICA BAD!!! Try to prove me wrong, haha"

Could you please stop posting flamewar or political battle-style comments to HN? This is unsubstantive, baity stuff, and not what HN is for.

The idea here is: if you have a substantive point to make, make it thoughtfully; if you don't, please don't comment until you do. That goes regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The epidemic is not just about mortality, the disease could severely impact your quality of life without killing you.

That’s true for the flu, as well. Can you name all of the long-term complications of the flu without looking them up?

>I was watching an Aussie rules football game the other day and they're allowing fans back in the stands

What other day? Victoria is totally locked down. Melburnians can't leave 5k from their homes, and they may only go outside for 1 hour per day for solo exercise or collecting essentials, or be subject to arrest.

They're all being played outside of the state of Victoria, as was organised.

I'm in Melbourne and while I 'may be subject to arrest' if I violate the rules, I am not in fear when I move about outside. Like I could go walk about the streets for the next 8 hours before curfew and I highly doubt I would attract any police attention unless I did something stupid.

On top of that the police here aren't really like the US police.

Welding folks into their homes was a bit extreme... but at least they can get back to their normal lives now! /s

No need for /s, judging by some comments made above Australians are as happy to house-arrest thousands of their fellow citizens with no trial, no anything, just because said citizens happened to live in the same building as some other people who got the virus. And all this is presented as healthy competition with neighboring New Zealand.

If someone would have told me one year ago that this discourse would have been seen as normal in a non-dictatorship country like Australia I would have branded said person as a lunatic.

It's additionally ridiculous that New Zealand is being hailed as a paragon of responsibility when all they have to do (as a comparatively small population island) is the courageous, genius act of stopping the planes /s

I beg to differ. We still have no idea which policy will prove correct in the long run because the Covid-19 timeline (6–8 months) is still too short. It's not outside the realm of possibility that letting the virus burn through the population is more beneficial; it's possible that in 2-3 years the United States will have herd immunity and Covid-19 is in the back-mirror, while countries that followed China's model still has to shut down cities relatively frequently as outbreaks inevitable occur.

And note that this isn't a "oh maybe in the future" thing - coronavirus lockdowns in China never stopped, they just fell out of the news cycle. The city of Urumqi has been under full lockdown for the past month or so.

Have we reached herd immunity against other coronaviruses?

Influenza type ZZ-plural-Zα?

Yes. Herd immunity doesn't mean that the disease is eradicated, just that outbreaks are self-containing. We don't see cases where the existing coronaviruses spread suddenly across an entire city, and they're deadly enough to at-risk populations that we'd notice if it happened.

It's a bit of reductionist false dichotomy. I think it's fair to say that China is putting a decent amount of weight on vaccine development as well.

I'm honestly pretty disappointed in the BBC for covering this like it is fact and not calling into question the data integrity issues China is infamous for. Nevertheless, I do think China, at least before re-opening, had less community spread than most other countries due to the severity of their lock-down. Authoritarian countries are able to impose measures like this much more quickly than democracies, for better or for worse.

so where are the mountains of dead bodies? where are the macro indicators?

what I'm disappointed in is even in the face of evidence that much of the nonsense about fake data and coverups was exaggerated, Westerners will continue to believe it

I think we can call this authoritarian silver lining. I wonder what is actually happening in North Korea.

How many people do you think have died from covid in China? America has 200x deaths per capita according to official numbers.

Last time I checked about a month ago, China reported ~6,700 total deaths, I would guess ~8,000 now.

I'm still surprised this isn't a more publicized, aggravating, and/or disputed figure, even given China's questionable reporting.

I've been treating the covid death count like GDP out of China. It's probably padded (e.g. you can count a death as "pneumonia" instead of covid), but it's probably not an order of magnitude off.

The reality is that surveillance states and collectivist societies like South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, etc will have an advantage when it comes to coordination. China is very much one of these types of societies.

Is there any way to independently confirm China's claims? AFAIK they have kicked out all non-Chinese journalists so that they have sole control over the truth.

Is there any way to independently confirm Florida or Texas' claims?

Not while the "president" bans independent journalists from asking questions.

Thankfully you don't need to go through the president to get this information. Troves of independent, even international, journalists have written stories on COVID responses within US states, including TX and FL. It is wholly misleading to compare the claims of these two countries.

> Thankfully you don't need to go through the president to get this information.

Hospitals are sending their data directly to the white house bypassing the CDC. [1]

https://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/white-house-hospitals-...

Pretty sure journalists from around the world have free reign to examine any of Florida or Texas’s claims. Can you say the same about Wuhan?

Why is this downvoted? This has been happening a lot recently on seemingly normal messages.

This is a topic people are very emotional about, so it's unsurprising to see a lot of hair triggers on the downvote button. I've definitely felt myself fighting the urge to flick to a downvote whenever I see a comment that frustrates me.

Covid has created an atmosphere where certain questions are not allowed to be asked. Certain discussions are not allowed. Welcome to the coronavirus discussion on the Internet.

Bring up how people are dying and it's terrible? Automatic upvotes. Attempt discussion about the tradeoffs of the lockdown (economy vs lives)? That person is stupid and uneducated and a Trump supporter - automatic downvotes.

It's pointless to even attempt a discussion that isn't simply lamenting deaths. Don't waste your time like I have.

> Covid has created an atmosphere where certain questions are not allowed to be asked

I find that unacceptable so let's talk.

Long story short I think that the economy will pick up again once this all blows over and that whatever negative consequences there are from a lockdown are still better than hundreds of thousands of people dying.

One person dying is objectively worse than one person going bankrupt, this is ethics 101.

I realise now that I'm doing exactly what you were criticizing (lamenting deaths) but I'd really like to hear your counter argument.

Define “blows over”. If covid appeared, today, with its current death rate (about 3x of the flu), there’s no way we would be taken the extraordinary measures that are being taken: shutting down schools, businesses, churches, and in general grossly violating constitutional rights with questionable efficacy.

I see people saying “let’s wait for a vaccine” but what if a vaccine doesn’t appear for years?

How many deaths of despair are worth it?

How many domestic violence cases counterbalance one 70-year-old person dying (the average age of a covid death)?

How many people going bankrupt is worth saving the life of a single person? What if I told you that going bankrupt is associated with increased likelihood of death?

And so on... single-variate analysis of such a complex issue is doomed to fail, but that’s basically all I see.

>>>One person dying is objectively worse than one person going bankrupt, this is ethics 101.

The argument of the anti-lockdown crowd (at least as I understand it) is that the second- and third-order effects are just rich people going bankrupt, but middle- and lower-class people being forced into dire economic straights up to and including starvation, or a drastically reduced ability to afford esssential life-saving healthcare for other non-COVID conditions.

> a drastically reduced ability to afford esssential life-saving healthcare for other non-COVID conditions

Isn't that more of a symptom of a broken healthcare system?

In my opinion GP's post was silly in the context in which it occurred, as a comment to an article by journalists from the BBC about how people currently live in Wuhan, which also includes links to earlier reports from Wuhan and videos from Wuhan. The comment was rightly downvoted.

> Why is this downvoted? This has been happening a lot recently on seemingly normal messages.

It's actually fairly normal for HN, posts very often attract a few stray downvotes when they don't really deserve it (the set of people who can vote is broad enough that that is blind to happen) and if that happens early on you'll often end up with a undeserved negative net score.

And it'll usually go away fairly soon, which is one of the reasons for the guideline about not discussing the votes a post receives. It is almost always a waste of time that will provoke one or more people to get up on a soapbox about the way they perceive a viewpoint to be systematically suppressed on HN, often about the same time the score recovers to net positive, never to return to net down voted status, so all that's left in the subthread is a bunch of conspiracy theories explaining why HN is biased against a message with a positive net score.

What makes you think that is true? FL fired their data analytics because they were too accurate. [1] Hospitals are sending their data directly to the white house bypassing the CDC. [2] The excess deaths far exceed the official covid deaths numbers we're being told. [3]

[1] https://www.npr.org/2020/06/14/876584284/fired-florida-data-...

[2] https://www.healthcareitnews.com/news/white-house-hospitals-...

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/08/12/us/covid-deat...

Maybe ask a friend who lives in China or a friend who has friends that live in China? They're also subject to fake news, but at least they can give you their experience of what daily life is like where they live. It's not like China is so locked down that it's impossible to communicate with their citizens.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24201310

"If Chinese citizens are told by their government that covid is no longer a risk to the general population and that western media outlets are fear mongering to damage China, they will believe it regardless of the truth. The CCP is the truth in China."

Chinese people are incapable of thinking for themselves and anything you personally hear from one should be disregarded as brainwashing.

With an attitude like this, I see no hope for meaningful future cooperation. Everybody on board the cold war train.

But it may be unwise for them to say anything overly critical via electronic means. We'd almost need pen and paper (which might be eccentric enough to attract attention too).

I asked an American friend over Signal about it, he confirmed that the lockdown was less severe in Beijing months ago while US cities were in peak shelter in place. But he also said that every single day somebody would call to check in. That level of surveillance wouldn't fly here (our contact tracers are far less effective than say South Korea's).

China isn't North Korea. You can use VPN to access the broader internet. And if you have an American SIM card, all your traffic gets routed through the US so you can access the full internet (it's just painfully slow).

That they've eradicated coronavirus in Wuhan? The photos are pretty self-evident. If there was a government cover-up and people were still getting sick then we wouldn't see people putting themselves at risk to go to a music festival.

>AFAIK they have kicked out all non-Chinese journalists so that they have sole control over the truth.

I'm not able to find a source to confirm that, but I do see some news articles from earlier this year abiut China revoking press credentials for journalists from 3 US news outlets. AFAICT from searching, journalists from other countries and news outlets are not affected.

If there was a government cover-up and people were still getting sick then we wouldn't see people putting themselves at risk to go to a music festival.

I disagree with the conclusion here by looking at what people are willing to do locally.

> If there was a government cover-up and people were still getting sick then we wouldn't see people putting themselves at risk to go to a music festival.

A tad misleading, if people cannot communicate publicly about people getting sick or hear this from media, why wouldn't they go to a music festival? They wouldn't know. Interested to hear your thoughts

I made a mistake and did not quote the line properly. The comment is not mine, but a quote from the poster I replied to.

Don't we have evidence from other countries that some people will, in fact, put themselves at risk when the virus is spreading? It's certainly not the Chinese government's official position that the virus is gone forever and everyone's safe now.

wouldn't see people putting themselves at risk to go to a music festival.

Aren't music festivals exactly the place you would expect high levels of risk taking around crowds?

> That they've eradicated coronavirus in Wuhan? The photos are pretty self-evident. If there was a government cover-up and people were still getting sick then we wouldn't see people putting themselves at risk to go to a music festival.

I think you underestimate the power of government propaganda.

If Chinese citizens are told by their government that covid is no longer a risk to the general population and that western media outlets are fear mongering to damage China, they will believe it regardless of the truth. The CCP is the truth in China.

It's not like covid is the black plague, bodies don't pile up in the streets no matter how bad it gets. Some elderly die here and there and life moves on (and plus it doesn't spread all that fast because mask usage is a cultural thing there anyway).

I just have a hard time believing that a country with as much corruption, pollution, and just general lack of sanitation as China does has "completely eradicated" the virus, meanwhile South Korea is taking containment measures for its latest wave.

I think more it's more likely China just put on a dog and pony show for the world, but really they haven't eradicated covid at all and the citizens are just kept in ignorance. This is, of course, gross speculation with no evidence to back it up. But in my mind it's like "the most populous country on the planet claims they've only had 4,634 deaths total due to covid, hmm..." and I start to think I'm being lied to by a country that wants to save face on the world stage.

Then again, maybe this is a scenario where having a dictator is advantageous to having an inefficient collection of bumbling democracies. When you have a god king that can force 11 million people to take a medical test within 14 days (or else?), you have an upper hand over countries where stuff like "due process" and "deliberation" slow down policy making.

>If Chinese citizens are told by their government that covid is no longer a risk to the general population and that western media outlets are fear mongering to damage China, they will believe it regardless of the truth. The CCP is the truth in China.

Nonsense. Chinese people aren't an unthinking monolith. Like anywhere else, some people believe whatever the government tells them, some people believe any old nonsense on social media and some are savvy and sceptical.

The only thing more effective than Chinese censorship of the internet is the efforts of Chinese citizens to satirise and subvert it.

https://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/12/world/asia/12beast.html

Ya their satirizing is so effective you have to go back 10 years for an article about it but their social credit system would have downgraded you for reading that article.

I think the level of naivete on your part shows someone who doesn't worry about getting called for tea.

China has been releasing padded GDP numbers for the past 15 years. Many have doubted the true economic growth. Yet now magically they're the top economic competitor to the United States and being taken seriously as a threat to global leadership?

There is clear evidence of the virus being taken care of, so I'm pretty sure if numbers are off, they're off in the same way GDP is padded, and not orders of magnitude off.

> this is a scenario where having a dictator is advantageous to having an inefficient collection of bumbling democracies

Yes, and I'd go further and say it's not just democracies and dictatorships but cultures of individualism and collectivism. It's no coincidence that east asia has done so well (South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, Japan, Singapore) compared to the US and much of Europe.

>If there was a government cover-up and people were still getting sick then we wouldn't see people putting themselves at risk to go to a music festival.

If the coverup was effective why wouldn’t they? We know the Chinese government is extremely good at propagandizing their own citizens.

The Chinese government is not "extremely good" at propagandizing their own citizen. Many Chinese know that there's censorship, and they take their media with a grain of salt. Chinese propaganda is also extremely crude, simple and straightforward. If you watch Chinese propaganda for a while, you will notice this. Especially many of those who have been overseas know that western propaganda is much, much more sophisticated and harder to detect compared to Chinese propaganda.

And for context, the 13 journalist ban that was in direct response to the US initiated banning of 60 Chinese journalists one month earlier.

My undergrad university is in Wuhan. I can personally confirm this since all my family and friends in China live almost like normal now. If I am being honest, I am disappointed and astonished to see how anti-intellectual, selfish, and conceited some Americans are. I do not like China's politics, which is one of the reasons that I do not go back. But I do not think U.S. should blame China for being in such a bad situation. More disappointedly, I do not see it getting better... I do not believe U.S. can contain it without vaccine.

>AFAIK they have kicked out all non-Chinese journalists so that they have sole control over the truth.

You'd be mistaken. Some American correspondents have had their visas revoked and Tibet and Xianjing are effectively off-limits, but there are huge numbers of foreign journalists working in China.

Here's Peter Hessler in the New Yorker on life in China over the past few months: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/08/17/how-china-cont...

Basically it seems they do have things well under control.

Lol I posted the same link 2 mins after u

A recent report from New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/08/17/how-china-cont...

> AFAIK they have kicked out all non-Chinese journalists

No, that's not correct.

It would be hard to verify, of course, and there could well be some unreported cases, but it's simply not plausible that China's seeing a US scale outbreak, or even an EU-scale one, without anyone noticing.

> there have been no domestically transmitted cases in Wuhan or Hubei province since mid-May.

I'm somewhat suspicious of this when New Zealand wasn't able to keep it to zero. China might be able/willing to impose stricter policies, but New Zealand is an island.

I have no doubt New Zealand will get back to 0 cases since they reached 0 from a far higher rate earlier in the year. It's currently ~10 cases per day they are detecting.

They haven't identified the gap in the quarantine that allowed this current outbreak but it looks like an edge case regardless since they stayed at 0 cases for almost 6 months now.

China hasn't been able to keep it to zero, new cases have been imported and there have been flare ups but they keep them from growing with mass testing and lockdowns, the same as New Zealand is doing now.

> but New Zealand is an island

Every country can effectively be an island if they want.

Not really. The US has more than 7,000 miles of land borders, not to mention sea crossings. Closing European borders to that extent is equally impractical.

If the US had taken the same approach as China, it would have been both 1) effective and 2) unconstitutional.

There is a pretty large landscape between what the US has done in response and what would have been unconstitutional.

If we had the political will, we would have had weekly mass testing by now. The US has spent trillions to try and keep people afloat when they could have used that money to try and keep people safe by stopping the virus.

A combination of ignorance (throughout society), what seems to be FDA incompetence, and of political games is what is killing the economy and thousands of lives.

>1) effective

Maybe if the virus is as deadly as anthrax or ebola, but for covid its not worth it.

> Wuhan went into a then unprecedented lockdown on 23 January - at a time where the virus had killed 17 people and affected more than 400.

It hasn't been that long ago but I almost feel like I forgot how to count this low now.

It seems as if an aggressive and extended lockdown at the start has worked?

None dare call it herd immunity.

good job

Over here in the US we're stuck in the stage where we get really mad at everyone but ourselves for how badly we've blown it. I saw the video of the party, it looked fun (though someone should really teach those kids how to dance). Meanwhile, we're just watching social media videos where people scream at each other for wearing masks, or not wearing masks.

It might well be true that Wuhan currently has no known community transmissions but this is also pretty obviously a propaganda/public relations move. Weird that the BBC covers it so uncritically.

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