The West has failed – US and Europe have made a mess of handling the crisis
irishtimes.com
irishtimes.com
Sure, the environment will be slightly different and local travel changes things. But most Londoners and most Melbournians don't move that much. (Try to invite someone to zone 5) They'll have mostly-local interactions and similar social activity circles.
The structure of the schengen area and the differing population densities is an entirely different beast, I agree.
You must not have spent much time here. Most Australians live in a narrow band stretched along the south east coast. Victoria, which has just come out of a 4 month lockdown, has nearly 7m residents in about 240 thousand sq km. Slightly smaller, but on par with Sweden. Like Sweden, two thirds of the state is virtually empty. Though in Victoria, we have a much more dense urban centre. The rest of Australia is similar, very small, dense urban centre with vast tracks of unoccupied land.
Yes, we can compare these if we are careful about the similarities and differences. Our populated areas have similar densities as various population centres across Europe. Our cities have been cut off from regional areas, and our states closed off from each other, which seems like maybe a bigger deal than if European states closed off from each other.
Maybe nuance is hard when you have a point to make.
My point is that the author isn't careful about the similarities and differences, the author just puts everything down to policy decisions and points of discourse that simply aren't the case in most of the places the author is describing.
Well, that's the problem with nuance isn't it? If you argue the bigger picture, the facts get in the way. If you argue the minutiae if facts, there is always another scope which renders those facts questionable. As I read it, the article made no comparison of anything with respect to AU/NZ, except that these are other western countries with very different policy decisions. Which is quite careful, and benign, in terms of a comparison to make.
If you take the example of Sweden from before, Sweden's border with Norway is about the same length as the border between NSW and VIC, about the same number of people either side, communicable languages, (prob also about the same level of derision from those on either side), a few major airports, a couple of difficult roads out, and the rest is by sea. Though they are closer to more populous areas, we also have a couple of billion people to our north, almost a third of the state are originally from overseas, more than half of them from Asia. There was definitely pressure here to stay open. The majority of Sweden's immigration by comparison is from Middle East. So if you look at policy decisions, in comparison, there is not much reason they were not capable of locking off their borders if they chose, both operationally, and in terms of pressure. In the case of the virus, though failure modes are indeed exponential, success modes seem they might be closer to linear.
You raised the 'does not scale' argument, but also tried to say the article lacked nuance. I was just pointing out (though I may not disagree in aggregate), I very much reject the premise of 'does not scale' when trying to deny comparisons. I argue that the article did not lack a nuance which it needed, but point out that your response did, in fact, lack nuance where nuance was needed. 'Does not scale' is a tired argument, and rarely stands to scrutiny. Comparisons are never perfect, but they are all about nuance, where do they work and where do they fail?
There are some things they do that should have some effect, like treating everyone from Wuhan like a plague carrier very early on in the outbreak (bit late to replicate that now, and China and the WHO loudly campaigned to make sure other countries didn't anyway) and quarantine for people returning to the country. We know from New Zealand though that even dedicated quarantine hotels are too leaky to really work at China scale - and there's also the problem of their extremely long land borders.
They probably lower things but it's not high enough to make people want to leak pictures of dead bodies or weird trucks carrying boxes.
Or maybe they're really good at hiding their operations..
All China did was aggressively pursue WHO and basic epidemiology strategy of find, test, trace and isolate, and doing so early enough to contain the virus. There's absurd cognitive dissonance many people that somehow this shouldn't/wouldn't work.
The controversy shouldn't be that Chinese system could implement basic epidemiologic responses, but currently, many western systems are culturally and politically unable to, even during a (hopefully) once in a generation crisis. Systems needs to be flexible enough suspend liberties and adopt certain authoritarian principles periods of exception, see South Korea and Taiwan whose response was much closer to Chinese authoritarianism than not. This isn't to suggest the west is brittle, but there are qualities of a pandemic that asymmetrically exploits vulnerabilities in liberal societies.
If people believe that the temperature checks work, then they'll stay at home if they have symptoms and/or feel like they are getting sick.
But in western countries, I presume some people will have symptoms and then shrug it off as "nothing serious" and continue their life as normal, thereby infecting others.
So the main purpose of those temperature checks might be their psychological effect: The enhance compliance with the other rules.
https://www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/1...
Fundamentally, that's how you eliminate this without requiring a vaccine. Test the entire population or as much of it as humanly possible, enforce heavy quarantine on positive cases until they are no longer contagious, and the virus will therefore have no vectors to spread. It really is that simple.
Not only was there a high degree of voluntary compliance with mask wearing and social distancing but the power of the state was engaged in ways unthinkable in Western countries. To take one example, the government mandated that entire neighborhoods in Beijing be completely closed with movement outside only allowed during certain hours of the day. You can disagree with the policy on other grounds but there is no reason to think that extreme steps like that wouldn't be effective.
As for 'quarantine hotels' the point isn't that they are entirely fullproof but they are significantly more effective than the alternative of asking positive cases to self-quarantine. The same point applies to temperature checks.
China's record may be exaggerated for propoganda purposes but other nations with similar policies like South Korea and Japan have had simliar outcomes.
Just off the top of my head, South Korea, Vietnam and Uruguay are "continental" countries that held back COVID really, really well.
Since South Korea's only border is the DMZ I could see them effectively operating like an island.
Both Vietnam and Uruguay or to at least some degree peninsulas so perhaps that helped.
An (admittedly cursory) look at Vietnam suggests that their major cities are on the coast. Perhaps the jungle separating them from other nations was enough to make them act more like an island?
Perhaps we could revise the parent's statement to replace "continental country" with "country with diffuse trade and transportation routes".
Won't stop a plane. Hanoi is very close to a major Chinese city. And the border near Sa Pa is infamous for having movement over the border.
The much more simple explanation is that the initial cases were dealt with before it could spiral out of control.
One hell of a claim. The US certainly isn't importing most of its cases.
What is left for us is buying the antigen tests on black market and building our 'safe bubbles': https://zby.medium.com/safe-bubbles-5bf43b09f7c5
But in the meantime - black or grey market. It used to be possible to buy the tests from online pharmacies - but now I hear from my friends that they start checking if you really are a medical professional.
We really don't know what this sort of crisis will precipitate. It isn't unthinkable that the shockwaves from COVID, in the form of wars and political action driven by economic instability, take down entire government systems.
It is still far to early to work out who has failed and who hasn't. The fog of uncertainty isn't going to lift before 2023. It takes time to catalogue and report back on what is actually happening.
In the UK we have Universal Credit - a means tested benefit system that is halfway-house towards UBI in some ways.
It paints an unfortunately one-sided picture in the US at least - there is just no arguing that the economic suffering and inflaming regular people to become wrongly anti-lockdown is the fault of Congressional Republicans and the president for not urgently passing additional very large stimulus and relief packages.
Melbourne(and Australia) had Jobkeeper and JobSeeker payments.
Opponents of lockdowns usually claim that the economic damage will outweigh the humanity gained.
But for me personally, I'm pretty sure that attending 1 funeral per month will damage my productivity much more strongly than work from home, wearing masks while shopping, and ordering delivery instead of going to the restaurant in person.
What am I missing?
Are people in New York so used to seeing dead bodies by now that it doesn't bother them anymore?
And with these closing, less money all around, other businesses end up following suit, even if they aren't directly affected, they will be down the line.
Why is that not an option?
I'm not defending government's actions here. I'm just showing what the 'angry people against lockdown' are feeling.
In Portugal the societal help was full of limitations (if you were self employed but made even 50 euros that month, you would get no help, but if you made nothing, you would get around 500, smart no? - it was later changed) and cuts but somehow we found 1.7 billion to save an already unprofitable and bankrupted airline which seems that will still need 100 million per month from government not to close.
Who is going to lobby on behalf for the general public, banks have well paid lobbyists who will make sure that most banks will get a bail out when they are in trouble.
More realistically would be a minimum of nine months of strict lockdown if you want it to actually be worth doing.
Now you're talking $2 trillion or more, because that level of economic damage would prove far worse than the 2008 crisis. $8 trillion in the US, at a minimum. For one pandemic, for part of one year. To do that would be insane.
Germany could afford it in theory, and it'd be a helluva price to pay for a slightly above average pandemic (1918-1920 laughs at this pandemic so far). Planning to do the same thing in another 10 or 20 years when the next global pandemic hits? How do you plan to pay for the next great recession? Shall we pretend that nothing else bad will happen in the next decade or two and spend our brains out on this one pandemic? There is a reckoning coming from the shortsighted economic choices that have been made in Europe and the US over the past 20 years.
But apparently the economy is arranged in such a way that even though it's absolutely in the realm of physical possibility to keep those people working and supplying the rest of the population that have to sit down and not work with all the stuff needed for survival, it can't be done for economical reasons. Because apparently the economy that we have can't be made work this way? For some reason?
This is just not true, at least not in the timeframe of months/years that we're talking about. Or at least, not true while continuing to enjoy a fairly modern lifestyle.
I mean, we can definitely get rid of anyone working in education, for example. And get rid of anyone working in anything that helps with education (e.g. software for education, etc). We can also get rid of anyone working in entertainment. Or tech. That is definitely doable. It just means a huge portion of the population can't do 90% of the things they do all day (i.e. jobs aside, how much time do people spend watching TV, on the internet, etc?).
I mean, do you think that most people are not really productive most of the time? As in not doing anything that will be missed? Can you point out those things? Again, we still need teachers, we still need fairly large amounts of people to continue producing forms of entertainment, we still need fairly large numbers of people to keep the internet working, etc. Where are there huge swathes of jobs that you are OK with just not having anymore?
lawyers, bankers, patent trolls, most government employees, middle management, motivational coaches, ...
Hmm. Yes?
But to get back to the original topic, I'd agree with Joker_vD that we have lots of services around where the economic damage of pausing them for a few months seems rather low. I mean closing schools for 3 months now is something you could easily catch up for in the upcoming year(s).
I mean, I get where you're coming from, and I am sure there are at least some percentage of people that are not very productive. But I think that most of the time, what looks from the outside like a waste of resources, is born from not knowing many of the details.
That's why every time some post on HN mentions that $RANDOM_STARTUP has $SUCH_AND_SUCH employees, there are always both comments stating that having so many employees don't make sense, and other people with experience explaining exactly why it makes sense.
And no offense, but if you think that lawyers and bankers as a class are not necessary, then I think you simply don't know much about what they do or why they are doing productive work.
And even if you think that the amount of lawyers/bankers/government is too high, and that we could make those jobs more productive (meaning fewer hours worked to achieve the same result), I'm pretty sure the way to get there isn't to just say "ok, let's just turn off these professions completely with almost no preparation. Good luck!". This is usually a process that happens over many years.
> I mean closing schools for 3 months now is something you could easily catch up for in the upcoming year(s).
I completely agree, and if we are only talking about 3 months I agree that it's relatively simple. But we're already what, 8 months into this? And it looks like we're going to be in this situation for another half a year, at the very least?
To get back to your parent post, whether we can or can't organize our economy to have more people not working in general (and I argued that we can't!), the economy right now isn't organized that way, so for now at least people do need those jobs. And I think your parent post exaggerates just how many people are dying (e.g. seeing dead bodies on the street is an exaggeration, for the most part).
Given our current economic system (which I'm in favor of, to be clear), the situation really is hard for many people. It's really true that people are losing their life's savings, and much worse, given the current situation. It isn't an easy thing to do, even if you agree that these drastic measures are necessary to prevent a worse outcome (which I agree with!) It's the very definition of a lose-lose situation.
It's but a pipe dream, of course, but a nice one.
Again, the size of the modern military forces is another indicator of how much of population can be removed from doing any sort of productive work without crushing the economy. Throw in the military industrial complex which diverts lots of resources while producing mostly the tools of destruction that, again, are mostly either used up during the training or left unused and scrapped 50 years later.
So, back to the original topic. Suspending all those services doesn't directly impact the ability of the "production of basic commodities" part of economy to keep providing those necessities, they impact it because of the way the flows of money set up. If all the restaurants in Seattle close, it's not like the farmers in Washington suddenly physically can't grow as much as potatoes and raise as much cattle as before. They can, so there is no reason for the restaurant workers to starve or go unsheltered, the production capacity hasn't decreased, it's just the way the distribution of goods is arranged that such deterioration in quality of life may happen.
So, the moment you shut down something "nonessential" you're actually hurting also other, apparently unrelated economic activities.
IOW, it might end up hurting also those providing "essential" services.
If the economy is arranged in such a way that when the demand for restaurant food sharply drops down, it suddenly means random people, not even in the restaurant business, can't afford to eat (?!), well, that's not a good way to arrange things, is it now?
You think you as a person that can work fully productively from home are representaive of the economic damage? What about all the industries that have had to completely shutdown?
You remind of the people that say there is no need for Americans to be given rights to paid holidays, maternity leave like every other country in the world, because they personally have all that already and then it turns out they work for Google.
Not only that, when a relative of mine died recently, multiple factors including social distancing and travel restriction forced me to attend the funeral by video link.
I also noticed that western people relies only on the governments rather that the collective and individual actions they can do.
It is clear to me even by reading this page. Everything is about what the governments did or did not, failed or succeeded.
The virus does not care about politics, it is transmitted from one person to another, so the individual persons have the responsibility to do something. The governments does not have the power to stop a pandemic.
So I agree 100% with the article. It's completely unacceptable that we are not able to control or enforce such basic things...
It’s weird, because I have seen exactly one person who didn’t wear one in a store since you had to in March. A few more since the outdoor inner city mask mandate started last week, but still a tiny, tiny minority. I have heard it’s worse in public transport, but at least in the inner city of Lübeck, compliance is absolutely amazing.
I live in Berlin and there it works because every store has a security and you will not be able to enter without mask.
Right now I am in Baden-Württemberg and there the customers all wear masks but the employees of stores themself violate the rules. Very strange...
What will Aus/NZ do then? Pandemic-fatigue is a real thing, both will always be at risk from a nutter not self-isolating properly when they return from abroad.
Everyone's strategy is to wait for a vaccine.
That will be the case, unsure there will be a vaccine that will give you a lifetime immunity (hopeful but I have serious doubts upon that myself the more I learn about this area). More likely to be like the flu vaccine, changes each year or requires a yearly booster perhaps.
More case of managing the sick numbers that need treatment in hospitals and capacity planning, over time - natural immunity, vaccines will provide that level of throttling as we get with the flu.
Though supply/demand does play out in many forms and gradually gets to a balance that is manageable, we are just at the stage of the initial rush and year or two on, things will start to become more settled. Though that pattern plays out in many forms in life and is a supply/demand with the supply being hospital/care capacity and demand being the virus nobody wants.
Hopefully more focus upon health armies over the conventional armies will arise. Certainly I'd not rule out countries doing health work conscription of some form in years to come - even just to educate people about basics and more so - better prepared for such events/disasters - which happen more than war.
1. The traveller must be infected (sub 5% odds)
2. They must decide to break isolation (most people are honest)
3. They must actively be infectious at the time they do (most people infect zero people. The household attack rate is 17%!)
4. They have to go someplace where they can infect many (e.g. a bar rather than breaking isolation for a park or groceries or family)
5. The govt must be slow to react once cases are detected
NZ has had outbreaks but reverted to normal. As you say, everyone is waiting for a vaccine. Seems infinitely preferable to wait in NZ rather than in France or UK which just locked down again. You’re functionally quite free in australia and NZ.
I'm in the UK and it's shit at the moment. Personally, I believe the financial, and mental health cost of the lockdowns has probably exceeded the cost to human lives. It's an awful thing to have written. I think this lockdown will be the last. Vaccine or not, things will have to get back to 'normal' at some point.
I think it’s crazy that the UK let themselves get to this position again: this predicament was utterly predictable in spring. But having got into this predicament, what option is there?
The sensible thing would be to figure out a sustainable long run policy once the wave has been beaten. Not sure that’s elimination now: it will be much harder to eliminate covid in the Uk over winter than it would have been over spring/summer
The general population also needs to give more of a fuck. Blaming the government is a total cop-out. They cannot morally, or possibly even legally, physically stop people from mingling. Young people travelling to Ibiza and the like for their holidays didn't help. Some people have zero sense of civic duty.
Personally, I haven't seen my family in person for almost a year. I'm probably going to spend Christmas on my own. It'll be depressing but it has to be done. I can handle it. There are people out there who cannot.
- slightly less deaths than normal [0].
- Less ICU patients than normal ([1] vs [2])
- stagnant (and normal) amount of people with respiratory illnesses [3]
The only thing unusual at all is the PCR tests.
[0]: https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Querschnitt/Corona/_Grafik...
[1]: http://s9w.io/intensivregister-10-31.png
[2]: https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/880182/umfrag...
https://www.euromomo.eu/graphs-and-maps#z-scores-by-country
Deaths in Sweden tracking 2.4% higher than 2018, and even then explained by very low deaths in 2019 due to weak flu seasons:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/525353/sweden-number-of-...
Our mess is listening to frauds like Neil Ferguson from the Imperial College who have a track record of consistently over-estimating deaths from each new pathogen.
The West is aging and each flu season will have greater mortality spikes. COVID at best is a once-a-decade unusually strong flu variant which we have severely overreacted to - probably spurred on by Chinese propaganda and their fake reporting.
One friend is in fact a physician who was on the front-line saving elderly patients ill with covid, and they still believe that the socioeconomic costs to our future generation is too great and lockdowns too blunt a tool to protect hospital capacity.
So I'd rather people (re-establish) the arguments against your point for reasons of posterity rather than simply censor you as I am seeing similar polarisation of views over covid as I have over other important discussions of the recent years.
I am not an expert in this field so don't really have any primary sources to add, though I personally know people who died and nearly died untimely from this disease.
That said I happen to disagree with his conclusion. As can be seen from SARS, MERS and now again SARS-CoV-2 swift action by Asian nations has been effective multiple pandemics in a row.
On the other hand Ebola, Zika and SARS-CoV-2 in African, South American and Western nations has exemplified what can happen if you react too slowly and without enough force. (worth mentioning African nations mostly learnt their lesson here and used the systems developed to combat Ebola to shut down Covid19 fairly rapidly).
As a resident of Thailand I am probably somewhat biased but I see the lockdowns having been very effective here which allowed us to mostly return to daily life after only 4-6 weeks of extreme lockdown. This also follows for Vietnam, Japan, Taiwan and even China after they were able to get everything under control.
Arguing against something that clearly works and has allowed these nations to reignite their economic engines without fear of health system collapse seems disingenuous to say the least.
The West reacted slowly, too heavily (closing parks?), and then declared victory too quickly, and spent little time over the summer preparing any systems to actually beat the virus.
I live in one of the few western areas that did beat the virus (the atlantic bubble of canada) and life is much more pleasant than elsewhere. It just took about six weeks more restrictions, and actually aiming at winning.
Most of the west adopted a “just prevent the hospitals from collapsing” goal, which is a stupid goal if your only tool to do so is heavy handed lockdowns. You’re guaranteed to have yo-yo lockdowns.
The only coherent strategies are developing an effective test/trace/isolate system or local elimination. The west doesn’t seem institutionally capable of the former.
Instead, there's a moderate increase, despite us taking drastic preventative measures. Lift the measures, and mortality will skyrocket.
... Meanwhile, in parts of Asia, the lockdowns have lifted months ago, and life is back to normal. That's what happens when your government takes this disease seriously, instead of half-assing it's response to the epidemic.
Italy and France are seeing excess mortality.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/healthan...
World Health Organization (WHO) estimated the annual mortality burden of influenza to be 250 000 to 500 000
Currently, around 5k to 7k people die per day from covid, and that number is expected to go up since the daily new cases are increasing (from around 300k per day end of September, to around 450k per day end of October)
Comparing it to an unusually strong flu variant is drastically underplaying the severity.
All of these numbers are despite international lockdowns and efforts to stop the spread. The numbers would be far, far higher if no measures had been taken.
And all of these deaths and infection numbers are low because we have reacted - not strongly enough - much more than we do to a flu. If we had taken the usual flu measures, the deaths would skyrocket from overwhelmed hospitals, as has been seen in early unprepared regions (such as the Bergamo region in Italy).
Sweden (and most of the EU and US) has done terribly compared with China, Thailand, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan measured in deaths per million. These countries took a proactive, serious approach and have successfully prevented widespread local transmission.
China has done an amazing job at preventing the spread of coronavirus, considering its huge population, long borders, and volume of international trade.
What the hell are you talking about? What propaganda or fake reporting?
China initially denied there even was a virus or that it was dangerous. Just like Europe. Just like the US.
What kind of weird conspiracy websites are you getting this information from and how did you end on this site? Don't those places have comment sections too where you can discuss with like minded people that are also shopping for confirmation basis data points for their xenophobia.
China has a very scary government but that's no reason to for us here to just make shit up. It actually dilutes from the real risks and criticisms.
China can open their firewall and let their citizens speak freely if they have nothing to hide.
This diaspora knew about how serious COVID was back in January.
If they had millions of people secretly falling sick today, this diaspora would have heard about it. It hasn't, and they don't.
For all intents and purposes, South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam, and yes, China have brought the virus under control, while we are faffing about with millions sick.
> This diaspora knew about how serious COVID was back in January.
I know because lot of them were buying masks and other PPE from Australia and sending it to China. Too bad they did not care about their host country.
Not sure why you are talking about South Korea, Taiwan, Vietnam they are much more open than China.
Do you have the same expectation of self-sacrificing patriotism from, say, a non-immigrant millionaire (there's a lot of those around, especially in booming real estate markets), who sits on a mountain of wealth instead of 'helping their host country'? Or is it just constrained to middle-class immigrants, who are trying to help their relatives survive a pandemic?
Christ on crutches, this has an odd air of xenophobia about it.
Christ on crutches, this has an odd air of supporting evil dictatorial regime about it
dang, why are you allowing this kind of shit on here? Please step up and sort this out.
You're the one who's wrong:
SARS-1 2003
MERS 2012
COVID-19 2019
Mortality for under 30: 0.05%
Mortality for 30-50: 0.1%
And nobody believes any reports from China or the WHO.
Wuhan death fog https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/latest-news/fears-thick-dea...
Wuhan protests: Incinerator plan sparks mass unrest https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-china-blog-48904350
Chinese woman describes Wuhan virus patients being burned alive https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3881683
Video shows interior of new Wuhan 'hospital' resembles prison https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3870468
You Can Now Go to Jail in China for Criticizing Beijing’s Coronavirus Response https://nypost.com/2020/01/30/chinese-residents-face-jail-if...
Video appears to show people in China forcibly taken for quarantine over coronavirus https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/video-appears-show-people...
"They treat us like we're the virus": Africans evicted from housing in Chinese city https://observers.france24.com/en/20200413-coronavirus-niger...
This is a ridiculous statement.
China has done a good job on dealing with Covid and so have South Korea and Taiwan. Restrictions are all mostly lifted within these countries and life is mostly back to normal.
They key to their responses is not that they are awful dictatorships. They were prepared, they have taken strong and necessary measures and their population voluntarily made efforts for the benefit of all even if that meant some personal sacrifices.
The relative failures of many Western countries is due to, I think, lack of preparation, lack of leadership, and misguided refusal by many to make the necessary and quite limited personal sacrifices on the false pretext that they are a threat to personal liberties.
However, their door-welding quarantine would work if you did it on a large enough scale for 2 weeks. But then do you weld-in the welders? lol. (Apparently the CCP delivered daily takeout to the weldees. We're not setup for that in the US.)
Thanks.
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/mrc-global-infectious-disease-ana...
https://twitter.com/imperialcollege/status/13077606155456061...
> Thanks for confirming: Neil Ferguson’s Imperial model did not point to 85,000 Covid deaths for Sweden; another researcher did. A mean time-varying reproduction number Rt estimate in March is not a prediction of deaths nor is it a model for predicting them.
Quote 2: "It is we, the virus-riddled Westerners, who will be isolated indefinitely"
Wooow there lady, let's wait for vaccine that would be rolling out in a few months, maximum a year, before spilling Apocalypse and FUD all over the place. Yeah, I agree, West fucked up, but I bet it will also rebound within maximum 5 years.
So 0 cases might be 10 or even 100. But it's hardly going to be 10000 or 10000000.
It also shows a huge ignorance towards cultural attitudes towards both authority and contagion.
I know plenty of Chinese people who sheltered long before governments told them to due to covid. They were prepared to cancel Chinese New Year rather than whine about the poor sadness of missing Christmas. And when the government issued orders plenty were willing to listen and trust the authorities.
Yes the Chinese people are not infallible: people went to hotpot and whistleblowers were wrongly imprisoned. People also protested in Wuhan.
But man seriously we like to scorn communist countries for having their propaganda but if you are comfortable preaching "their numbers are fake" you're buying into the western rhetoric that China can't have been better than us.
In any case if it is so hard to imagine China and Vietnam achieving containment of the virus maybe some friendlier examples include our friends in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and Taiwan.
EDIT : and the GAFAMs (& Twitter) have been complicit of this censorship in preventing the doctors (= experimental scientists) from discussing their work on their platforms.
It's pretty extraordinary, and you are essentially saying that the medical profession are engaged in a vast conspiracy to prevent lives being saved, which does not pass the sniff test (for me, at least).
(a) downvote and move on, the parent comment has a lot of hallmarks of not engaging in good faith discussion.
(b) steelman their argument, improve it for them and see what conclusions are or further predictions it would indicate
(c) look for evidence that confirms it first. Saying something like, “I tried to research your claim but I only found FOO, which does not include any reputable or credible sources. Meanwhile, reputable sources like BAR have said <whatever>,” is much gentler and diplomatic as well as adding new information for other participants.
Other people will see the comment and realize it has no supporting argument. Any rebutting comment that only says “citation needed, your claims are extreme” isn’t helpful no matter how obviously poor quality the original comment was.
The most likely outcome is no reply, but that suits me fine as reasonable observers will conclude that there isn't any evidence.
The first one I looked at Arleo, hasn't been published, which is pretty concerning given that any CV paper with any kind of insight is getting published right now.
The second (chosen by sample(1:31, 1) from the 31 papers) was this one: https://academic.oup.com/cid/advance-article/doi/10.1093/cid... which shows no significant effect of HCQ in a really large trial.
Note that this trial actually seems pretty well run as it's an RCT with a large sample size. I find it difficult to believe that if there's a non-significant result here then NCQ is effective in pre-exposure terms.
Additionally, there are standards for meta-analyses and systematic reviews, and the hcqmeta.com link doesn't mention them, which is very concerning (and lowers my prior that these results are correct).
Like actually, given that there's no search strategy for papers (making it impossible for anyone to check if they are actually including all papers, or just a biased sampling), I am gonna again reduce my prior on HCQ being correct.
Just as a final note, the likelihood of doctors not using the best available treatment during a global pandemic is incredibly low, and you do a disservice to medical professionals by suggesting that this is the case.
What about my second link ?
Some doctors do want to use these treatments in those countries that "banned" HCQ :
https://www.lifesitenews.com/news/doctor-group-demands-biden...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexledsom/2020/11/02/hydroxych...
https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/hcqtrial-com-astroturf-and-...
Ok, that doesn't look good… (Still, I would have preferred that doctors would be free to decide by themselves which drug to prescribe for a new disease. After all, they have skin in the game !)
Humans are really bad at remembering both successes and failures, we tend to only remember the instances where something worked and forget the times it didn't.
Additionally, doctors belief in a treatment will cause them to over-interpret the successes of said treatment, and potentially change their interactions with patients who do and don't get the treatment.
Hence we have clinical trials, where the analysis is done by people not involved in the treatment, and neither patients nor practitioners know who got what treatment.