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Comment by fibers | Hacker News Reader

if we only learned from china how to combat this

Scientists are investigating the possibility that deaths in Asia have been relatively low due to prior exposure to another similar coronavirus.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/scientists-investigate-whether-...

How would another presumably milder coronavirus that was widespread enough in Asia to cause observable population-level effects not also be widespread in the rest of the world?

You mean, ignore it? It beggars belief that countries like New Zealand, which have significant geographical and population advantages over China, have had to work so hard to get where they are today, yet China was able to quietly beat it.

How freely do large numbers of people move around the country in China?

Er.... There's no restriction. Whatever number you want. My father just traveled several times recently (each of them hundreds of miles). In China, fully moving to a different city takes some effort (schooling, etc), but simple travels are just matter of high speed rail tickets.

What do you mean quietly beat it? Whenever they had a small outbreak, they would test the entire city. Symptomatic, asymtomatic, everyone in the span of a week. They spent a ton of money on shutdowns, testing, and contact tracing.

Yep, I've seen one or two reports of entire cities being tested. What testing method do they use, that is accurate enough to catch all cases in a very densly populated developing city (and within a week)? Unless Covid isn't as infectious as we have been lead to believe, that doesn't pass the sniff test for me.

RT-PCR, it's pretty good but takes time.

They just do batch tests and mix samples in groups, if positive, test again. My father did one a few months ago after returning from Qingdao, where there were a small outbreak then in a hospital.

China is really good at doing things at scale and honestly US is nowhere close (too slow and too inefficient, from what I see here in Santa Clara)

It’s PCR and you can get it down to a few hours turn around time in a lab, even in the US. China does batch testing with retests for accuracy.

The main difficulty is getting everyone to give a sample but with China’s level of social cohesion and control that is a solved problem.

It's still cheaper than what the US is currently doing. Lockdown is almost a whole year and numerous restaurants I usually go closed permanently.

While in China, it's like putting sparks off here and there, but most of people are not affected. If the problem can be solved by money, it's not a real problem.

China hasn't fully beaten it and doesn't claim to have done so. They regularly have to reimpose new measures in areas where the disease flares, up to and including lockdowns - the most recent lockdown I heard about started just two weeks ago. (https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3110817/coro...)

Those lockdowns also come with massive screening tests. Usually lockdowns end in a couple of weeks after the identification of clusters of transmission.

The numbers are generally small (maximum a hundredful), so not difficult to handle.

True. I don't want to imply that they don't have control of things - just, there's no secret strategy they have other than continuous application of harsh measures wherever spread is detected.

I think restaurant, retail ( non food), and hotel owners would feel like 2 weeks of harsh lockdown followed by complete masked opennings would be better than the current situation of months of non-stop partial measures.

Most of China has not had any lockdowns since July. I wish I could travel.

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