The result has been that we’ve had this 7 month period of semi-lockdown (can eat outside, but not indoors; we’re going to send a support check, but only 1, etc.) while China was able to have a full lockdown for a few weeks and mostly eradicate it.
Meanwhile people are still dying here because people don’t want to wear masks because freedom, or something.
That is, a lot of stuff didn't make sense, was contradictory, done at the wrong time, later turned out to be wrong, etc. This is part and parcel of putting together an immediate emergency response.
I live in Dublin, Ireland. There was a preemptive anti-vaxer protest here yesterday declaring the virus a hoax.
The key point of difference between places, IMO, is public and political tolerance for these things. Can you live with some policy being dumb, because you're inevitably going to think a lot of them are dumb.
I'm saying they were all somewhat chaotic, haphazard and wrong in places. That's what happens when rulesets with multiple, sometimes competing goals have to be put in place quickly.
As for Vietnam, if I remember rightly their run of no Covid cases was ended by a hospital outbreak that somehow went unnoticed until an elderly visitor to the hospital with no other plausible sources of infection happened to get infected, develop bad symptoms, and tested positive - and then so did several other people who'd been there. This does not suggest good things about their in-hospital testing. The amount of time it took for the existence of a new case to become public knowledge should also call into question just how forthright and honest the government was being.
I see this view a lot from people--the US just needed a real lockdown. Spain also had a real lockdown, and their case count is surging right now. The difference in how China seemingly (you can't spell Xinhua without Xi) handled it is in aggressive contact tracing and tracking where everyone goes regardless of their covid status.
Who, exactly, is responsible for setting up contact tracing systems, and under what authority? If it’s devolved to the state level, how are we going to deal with people crossing state borders, or large population centers that are near or straddle borders (Kansas City will be a nightmare for that)? If it’s federal then we might as well give up hope, given how lackluster the federal governments response to the pandemic has been so far.
The US tried to do a hammer and failed. The numbers didn't really go down for the city as a whole. We never had a coordinated decision to transition to the dance either and don't have anything in place to be successful at that step. Tests taking over a week and high case numbers to begin with make contact tracing and targeted quarantine in outbreak areas impossible
This is, of course, not the impression you'd get from news coverage in the UK or US, which is still generally spinning South Korea as a test and trace success story that demonstrates how badly our governments have failed. Hilariously, the Guardian even turned the fact that they were doing less Covid-19 testing than the UK into a positive the other day, describing them as a demonstration of how important targeted testing was.
The Dance is still a distant hope.
There have been four positive cases of Covid-19 outside of managed isolation or quarantine, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern says.
After 102 days without community transmission they are the first cases acquired from an unknown source. New Zealand is now activating a resurgence plan.
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/423305/covid-19-new-case...
NZ resumed level 3 on August 12, where level 4 is the most restrictive:
people are to work from home unless they are essential workers, and stay in their bubbles. Bars and restaurants will have to close, and restrictions come in place for funerals and weddings.
Conditions are regularly monitored, assessed, and adjusted. From September 4:
Cabinet has decided to keep the current alert levels and will review them again on Monday, September 14, when they will decide whether to adjust them at 11.59pm on Wednesday, September 16.
It comes as director general of health Ashley Bloomfield reveals five new cases of Covid-19. Three are in the community.
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&object...
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/16/us/coronavirus-fatality-r...
Even with lack of leadership, we have had ~ 200k, a 90% reduction. Not too bad?
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/media/imperial-college/medicine/s...
The 2.2 million figure came from the worst case scenario. The assumptions for that scenario are:
"In the (unlikely) absence of any control measures or spontaneous changes in individual behaviour, we would expect a peak in mortality (daily deaths) to occur after approximately 3 months."
You don't get to claim a reduction from a baseline that assumes 0 intervention and 0 personal behavior change. That figure was used in the report as a baseline to compare various mitigation and suppression strategies.
Of course the US still delayed at the federal level for another 2 weeks to do really anything of substance. The governments responsible for reducing the death toll from 2M To 200K are the state governments of NY and California. The US federal government largely delayed advocating a shutdown until 2 weeks later. Even on April 4th the President was still saying Covid-19 was “going away” [1].
I encourage everyone to go look at the new cases curve on the days proceeding and following April 4th to see what utter complete bullshit such a statement was. Worse, he knew it was bullshit even as he said it, as the conversations with Bob Woodward have revealed.
To give the US federal government a grade of “not too bad” is disingenuous. Their discordant and adversarial response is why we have 200K deaths.
1- https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2020/09/politics/coronavirus...
...New York has almost the worst death rate in the country (only New Jersey is higher).
Comparing across US states, it really does look like doing nothing would've resulted in less death.
The question is always how much freedom are we willing to exchange for increased effectiveness and in the US the answer was very little.
And we’re currently paying for that decision but as long as we understand and accept the consequences I don’t think it is an invalid choice. I might personally disagree but that’s the nature of collective decision making.
If I'm reading sources correctly, the country is currently at Level 2 (excepting Aukland at 2.5), and had bumped from Level 2 to 3 in August after community spread was detected.
This is what effective and appropriate response looks like.
https://medium.com/@georgetoparis/the-book-rage-on-china-f5d...
A second reason is all gov were bad to solve novel problems 0 to 1, but good at solving 1 to 2, 2 to 3 problems. HK, Singapore, Korea Japan had experience to protect itself, swine flu, bird flu, SARS, etc. Western world had not.
But the truth of the matter, we're victims of geopolitics, media, and social media blaming thy neighbor. Go look at U.S. fatalities due to COVID which NYT posts at 200k as the time of this writing. Then go look at CDC U.S. registered deaths annually, which was last reported at 2.8M. While I am sympathetic for those who loved lost ones for whatever cause of death, quick maths show that in 0.8% of the population dies in a normal year, and COVID-19 blimp would increase it to 0.9 to 1.0%. We've grossly overreacted.