AFAICS this isn’t talked about enough! If lockdowns were taken seriously from the start, it would had prevented going wild and risking new strains. But here we are
I don't think a strategy that needs every country on earth to cooperate this tightly ever had a chance to work.
Most countries aren't the first world, most countries don't have the resources to test and quarantine properly, most countries can't afford lockdowns.
On top of that a lot of countries have much worse disease to deal with, Malaria for example, for them this is just one of many, and not such a terrible one.
There will be mutations, this will come back a few times, maybe it becomes milder on its own, but thinking you can keep it from mutating is Quixotic.
A month after we knew we were in deep trouble it was still perfectly normal to decide hey this is boring I'll go on vacation to somewhere with nowhere near the capacity needed to handle COVID-19. Oh, I have a little cough, never mind if I feel sick I'll just fly home after I'm done infecting these people.
Remember this is SARS-CoV-2. Where's the mutations and endless new strains of SARS-CoV-1? There aren't any, it was eliminated in humans.
So yes it is now sadly likely we're stuck with this, but we ought to be clear it's our fault in countries that didn't do even one tenth of what they should to prevent it.
I think this is only because it was contained in China before it reached the world. They had an excellent pandemic response and quashed it before it reached other countries.
This time around it had spread around the world before we even heard about it. It was completely predictable containment efforts would be futile.
Is this true? According to the CDC, there were SARS cases reported in Europe and the Americas prior to containment in China. Why was it different this time around?
All the data I've seen on SARs and the mechanisms deployed to control it indicate infectivity at or only very, very shortly before clear symptoms or they would not have been able to control it.
COVID is quite clearly infectious before visible symptoms of any kind, and even when visible many times symptoms are pretty mild - where SARs was not - and this matches it's observed spread and difficulty in controlling it.
It doesn't need that though.
It needs countries to close the borders tightly except to countries that do cooperate, as many Asian countries have successfully done.
The situation right now is that you have plenty of breeding grounds for new mutations, and it only needs some minor crossing of borders for these to get through.
I would also say it's infeasible for non-island nations that need to trade with other countries to completely lock the borders.
The United States meets all these criteria, and has the highest number of cases and deaths in the world. (And near the top in per-capita measures, too.)
Kind of like the EU countries talking badly about England after they discovered a more infectious mutation. In Germany at the time they didn't even sequence enough viruses to detect mutations before they're widespread.
The United States could but it doesn't because the political system is too federalized for a centralized response.
It doesn’t need anything that drastic: imagine an alternate history where the Taiwanese warnings in December 2019 had been taken seriously and international travel was locked down with a mandatory three week quarantine (adjusted by the later availability of tests) on arrival. That would require no cooperation from any other government, and it would have kept spread down below the level where contact tracing and other measures could be effective. Making it a delay avoided the obvious failures like an outright ban packing as many people as possible into crowded transportation and customs facilities, and means that critically important travel could still happen.
The problem was that businesses like the travel industry are influential and delayed until it was too well established in most countries and once it had successfully been turned into a political shibboleth, the chances of lighter approaches working plummeted.
The disease originated in Wuhan, mainland China, not Taiwan.
The emergency was communicated in China (as well as Taiwan):
http://py.cnhubei.com/py_news/2019/1231/3290.shtml
Sure, listening to any official source would've been better than what happened... But shutting down travel to/from the whole of China (since otherwise you'd have to trust every passenger to declare if they had been in Wuhan) while there were less then 30/40 cases of pneumonia, and not a single death would've been a really difficult measure to sell
Yes, I’m aware - try more carefully reading my comment and note that I never said otherwise. What I was referring to was Taiwan being faster to acknowledge human to human spread when the Chinese government was still in damage control mode and WHO was following their official statements saying there was no confirmation of retransmission.
This happened 2 weeks later:
https://www.who.int/csr/don/14-january-2020-novel-coronaviru...
Taiwan had begun health screenings of travelers from Wuhan on December 31st, following their request to WHO and the China CDC for more information. By the time the first case was detected 3 weeks later they’d already activated a substantial public health plan — not because they were prescient but because SARS had given key officials a strong sense of the importance of not delaying.
That said, I think it's fair to say that some kind of response might've been faster in one place vs another... But any response at the beginning was taken out of caution (again: no healthcare workers infected, no deaths, no proof of human to human transmission)
Taiwan was obviously wise in applying caution, but did they actually publish any kind of statement regarding their beliefs for h2h transmission? (I'd be surprised if they did, since without cases there hadn't been any samples, and research on the genome of the virus couldn't start before Chinese researchers uploaded it online one January 10th)
"Based on the available information there is no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission" does not mean that there was no h2h transmission: just that there was no evidence, yet.
Everyone reading this stuff was obviously concerned, but again: if you remember, the 2nd death was only confirmed on January 15th...
In retrospect, it’s impressive how quickly the Taiwanese government moved based on the equivalent of a Reddit post including a screenshot from that Chinese doctor (Li Wenliang) who was jailed for spreading the news before it was officially acknowledged:
https://web.archive.org/web/20200417144920/https://focustaiw...
So, no, Taiwan didn’t put out a big press release on December 31st when they started the discussion with WHO, the China CDC, and others but they had started circulating what they knew in public health circles and being a free country they didn’t conceal what they were concerned about when they started screening travelers.
Here’s their statement on the December 31st email:
https://www.cdc.gov.tw/En/Bulletin/Detail/PAD-lbwDHeN_bLa-vi...
If you recall the origin of this thread, I was responding to someone who said “I don't think a strategy that needs every country on earth to cooperate this tightly ever had a chance to work.”. My point, again, wasn’t that Taiwan had secret knowledge of the future but that they showed how much could be done with basic public health protocols and, importantly, without requiring widespread international cooperation. Every sovereign nation could have started health screenings and quarantined travelers, but most waited too long and simpler methods weren’t going to be adequate by that point.
A strategy that involves convincing every country, and every little province, to destroy their local economies, all at the same time. I can’t believe it didn’t work! Maybe if we just keep trying.
Some examples include:
* China bringing their initial outbreak down to near-zero
* Italy arresting their early surge that overwhelmed health systems
* New Zealand bringing their infection rate low enough to essentially return to normal life (apart from international travel)
* The UK stopping a dramatic winter uptick involving the B 1.7.1 variant from overwhelming the NHS
In what way have they not worked?
Good for Italy!
Sadly, coronaviruses definitely have the potential to deliver on that. Now that so many people have become infected because lockdowns weren't taken seriously, and because poor and working people weren't protected or provided for, we're going to have to deal with every possible mutation that could be imagined. Scary situation when MERS was a thing.
The idea that the world can't wait at a fairly comfortable sustenance level for any period of time is one that might be written on our species' tombstone.
They haven't worked, and they can't work. There are many third world countries that don't have internet access or the equivalent to the CDC. Global cooperation is just absolutely not going to happen. We can't even agree city to city in the US, much less state to state.
The way out of a global pandemic is the same it always has been. Vaccination. Attempting to control individual behavior on a global scale is a fools errand.
The average American 35 year old thinks if they catch covid they have a >10% chance of dying. This is off by almost 1000x.
If you drove that error down to 0 so people knew exactly what there risks were if they got covid (i.e. for most healthy adults and children, covid is a complete non-event)... I don't think the general public would tolerate any of these NPI's at all.
The fact that people can overestimate their covid risks by almost 1000x has destroyed our ability to have rational discussions about kids in school, who should be prioritized for vaccination, and how we should return to actual normal life.
Shoveling nonstop boatloads of absolute fear into peoples head has been one of the most morally bankrupt things the media and public health "experts" have done over the course of the pandemic. Society is going to spend years cleaning up the mental health train-wreck these people have caused.
Source for the figures. Take a look. It blows me away how wrong peoples risk perceptions are of covid. https://covid19pulse.usc.edu/
Personally, I am not afraid to admit I am scared of a virus that can be transmitted by asymptomatic people, incubates for two weeks, then can kill you, but hey, I guess that just makes me a scaredy-cat. I'm willing to live with that label.
Because risks are everywhere. Overestimating your risks from covid by 1000x results in making some really, really poor risk tradeoffs.
People joke about dudes drinking bleach and stuff but that behavior was because they vastly overestimated their covid risks... so much so they completely disregarded the very real risks of... you know... drinking bleach.
Much more serious examples of bad risk tradeoffs are how many parents are handling their kids. Some of the stuff people are doing to their poor children is downright deplorable. For example keeping them completely isolated from outside contact. All of it is because their perceptions of covid risks are incredibly wrong.
The media and these "experts" have created a huge shadow pandemic of unchecked, irrational fear. Absolutely nobody seems to acknowledge it and we have to tackle it at some point in order to move past this. Unfortunately, it will require these experts to "tell the truth" about the risks of covid instead of hyping every outlier all the time.
I thought asymptomatic transmission wasn't really a thing. Is there updated data on this?
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-19802-w
Here's the best thing I've found for incubation period:
https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/bmjopen/10/8/e039652.full.pd...
The people who complain about lockdowns are also the people who refuse to do the alternative, and then claim "nothing works".
I am really tired of the "we tried nothing and we're all out of ideas" political party. Get out of the way and let people who are capable of handling things get to work.
And then there are countries where the economy is based on resource extraction. Only a relatively tiny amount of people is necessary to work the oil and gas industry, or whatever, and thinktanks have sometimes bluntly referred to all the remaining millions of people as "superfluous population". So, whether you let COVID spread or not has little overall effect on the economy.
If there weren't lockdowns (and people were travelling again), our economy would be doing much better.
[With all that said, and while I dearly missing socializing, it isn't obvious to me that removing the lockdowns would improve things; on the other hand, it isn't obvious to me that letting the disease run rampant would be worse than the mental and emotional toll the lockdowns are taking on people and the economy. So many poorly understood trade-offs.]