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Comment by carlmr | Hacker News Reader

>If lockdowns were taken seriously from the start, it would had prevented going wild and risking new strains.

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.

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The long distance travel which spreads a pandemic so fast now is predominantly a First World thing. We could and should have shut that down.

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.

>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.

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.

sars definitely reached other countries outside of china..

> I think this is only because it was contained in China before it reached the world

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?

SARS was more lethal and people actually took public health measures seriously.

Additionally, SARS v1 was not contagious until there were visible symptoms - a huge difference from COVID/SARS v2.

I wouldn't put too much confidence in that. SARS wasn't known to be contagious presymptomatically, but neither was COVID-19 for many months. Levels of presymptomatic transmission similar to COVID-19 are entirely consistent with the evidence we have from SARS.

That seems unlikely, if for no other reason than the way COVID has spread. Do you have any data?

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.

> I don't think a strategy that needs every country on earth to cooperate this tightly ever had a chance to work.

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.

If your goal is to stop mutations from happening, yes, you need everyone in the world to go on full lockdown for 4 weeks. And then test everybody and quarantine until the disease is gone.

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.

> 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.

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.)

Of course a country with the resources to test properly has the highest number of cases and deaths in the world, because if you can't test properly you can't detect Covid-19 cases and deaths. I know the American press has fed its citizens a load of nonsense about this for nakedly partisan reasons, just like it has with every other part of the Covid-19 crisis, and it's getting tiring...

That of course is another thing to mention.

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.

I was listing the necessary, not the sufficient criteria.

The United States could but it doesn't because the political system is too federalized for a centralized response.

> I don't think a strategy that needs every country on earth to cooperate this tightly ever had a chance to work.

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.

> Taiwanese warnings

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

> The disease originated in Wuhan, mainland China, not Taiwan.

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.

The WHO really dropped the ball in early 2020, since they were also recommending against personal mask use.

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...

I think a lot of this comes back to the mid-level Chinese bureaucrats’ instinct for damage control. That infamous WHO tweet came in the 6 day interval between Chinese officials being briefed on the likelihood of a pandemic and publicly acknowledging it, and I haven’t heard any evidence that WHO was a party to that decision rather than simply not having better data available to them because it hadn’t been approved for public release by the Chinese government prior to January 20th.

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.

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