Ah yes, “10 Days to Stop the Spread.” The memories of the common sense foisted on me…
However, that would have required very decisive/heavy-handed and coordinated action across the world. This did not happen, and so there was no stopping the thing.
To oversimplify things: you can't spread a virus if there's no one to spread it to.
(we also learned a lot though, like how viruses spread through central ventilation systems in apartment complexes)
Sources:
https://ourworldindata.org/coronavirus/country/united-states
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/coronavirus-data-explor...
Btw, I've looked through your earlier replies to others under this comment and I have to remark that you took a very patronising tone, which I found unfortunate.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/how-so-ma...
That (along with the k-factor) was a curve ball, but it doesn't change what I wrote at all, and it is totally false that we did not have the capacity to stop the spread. You don't necessarily need to identify every individual case, although being able to do so definitely helps.
Since that was about the time we had vaccines available, that suggests that none of our isolation strategies were capable of stopping the outbreak. It could only have slowed it down.
Literally the only indicator you need to look at is R_t, and R_t was less than 1.0 at various times in various places throughout all of 2020. All you need to do to make an infectious disease go away is keep R_t below 1.0 for long enough (this depends on the lifecycle of the pathogen, but in this case we're talking weeks).
It's the same reason a carbon tax type system will never work, because there will be some subset of our world that would want to take advantage of a situation for their own financial gain, even if it hurts everyone else in the long run.
The only countries that somewhat managed do achieve that, are Australia and New Zealand, which are islands with long-term restrictive border control (completely a no-go in the US). And even they needed months of lockdowns. And ultimately failed.
If one country is doing all the right things but not enough other countries are, then that country doing all the right things won't be able to stop the spread on its own, even within its geography. That's normal and to be expected.
This is why I said coordinated action was required: I didn't say that for no reason.
Nobody wants more clueless WHO driving things
It all comes down to epidemiology, actuarial science and medical economics.
And it still spread. No, 10 days with democratic governments don’t allow one to truthfully say ‘10 days to stop the spread’. It’s either ignorance or willful misinformation/lying.
In China's case, it means that simultaneously a bunch of people would be welded into their apartments, but that the government would also cover up and ignore high-enough level officials who disregarded orders, or criticism that they were ignoring important vectors. China is very corrupt: whatever they announced they were doing publicly wasn't done remotely effectively - it was PR for how tough and untouchable the government is.
It doesn't need to be perfect. Depending on the specific intervention in question, you only need to exceed some critical threshold of compliance to get R_t below 1.0.
i'm not sure which example makes you think things could have been different.
With BA.5 the unmitigated R is probably north of 10 and China had to throw in the towel, because reducing transmission 90+% is much harder.
We have absolutely no idea what happened in china. We know they hid things in the beginning, and in the end ( when they stopped counting infections after opening the fates to omicron). What makes you think they told the truth in the middle ?
We got the footage and reports of hospitals and mortuaries overwhelmed when it ran rampant at the end, but in the middle we just got complaints about how much the isolation policies sucked.
Why did the propaganda masters hide all the death in the middle but not at the end? Why did it look like a disease spreading through a mostly-naive population in the end, rather than a wave-N population like everywhere else?
Doubt was a reasonable position in the middle, from the outside, but after how it ended it looks pretty clear there was very little in the way of COVID in China for two years.
That’s rude and arrogant. “Copy and paste my previous reply”, “the timeline is not going to fill itself”. mc32 is trying to present his argument and you reply with these short quips.
If you’re trying to present a counter-argument, this strategy works against you, as it makes mc32 appear more reasonable and knowledgeable.
The hope was that the vaccine would make COVID like Measles, i.e. a few cases here and there, but you get your shot and basically never worry about it again. Unfortunately the vaccines aren’t good enough/COVID evolves too fast, so we are just living with massive death and disability.
If literally everybody stays home you can stop a disease like covid19. Otherwise, even with draconian countermeasures it will take way too long to snuff the thing out.
> However, that would have required very decisive/heavy-handed and coordinated action across the world.
This is infeasible. If we had a system for global heavy-handed coordinated action we'd be much worse off than what COVID did; the political ramifications of that sort of measure would be disastrous. We went in to COVID with economic concerns and a bit of turmoil in the world and came out the other side with a rolling economic crisis and a potentially brewing WWIII. Having a reliable mechanism for triggering that sort of thing would end poorly. Also the US already spies on everyone, having mechanisms to be able to enforce its whims would only make the situation worse.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_COVID-19_pande...
There is no need for digital mass surveillance to enforce a quarantine. It's been done before computers were invented.
How do you intend to achieve this miracle? Will the plan involve Maoist policies? How will the plan be hardened to prevent its being used for Maoist policies? Any mechanism that could possibly coordinate a worldwide lock-down of everyone is eventually going to be used to implement a "common sense" policy that starves ... these days it could be a billion people if coordinated globally. That is a much worse idea than the COVID pandemic which, apart from the lockdowns, was nowhere near as bad as a system that could allow global coordinated action to disable the world economy in coordinated fashion on demand.
The thing you're avoiding talking about seriously is the part that isn't already a certainty. Ie, the entire question.
It's a certainty because it happened. R_t fell under one as a result of NPIs, not immunity.
You don't have to keep R_t under 1 forever. Just for long enough that the virus fizzles out. It's possible and in fact it has been done repeatedly.
You must be dreaming. There was not even any way to assess who was infected in the early days. Nobody was able to contain it either so your expertise needs to face hard facts
It's an almost completely useless model to apply to countries like Bangladesh or Peru.
Oh great, another "expert". Yeah, if only we put you in charge things would've been totally different, right?
I think it's pretty clear by now that the reaction to the disease has been grossly mishandled by the so called "public health experts" which acted against evidence that was already available at the time (children not in serious danger from COVID), or which made up evidence (vaccines stop infection, etc..).
> However, that would have required very decisive/heavy-handed and coordinated action across the world. This did not happen, and so there was no stopping the thing.
Exactly. So whatever you said about stopping the spread is unfeasible in the real world.
(cue: how many minutes until commenter replies with some bad counter-argument that ignores exactly half of the words I used in that sentence? I'm even going to tell you which ones ahead of time because I don't want to bother replying to your upcoming reply: at the population scale.)
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/20...
https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/31/health/pfizer-vaccine-adolesc...
https://www.acsh.org/news/2020/12/01/modernas-covid-vaccine-...
And on, and on, and on. Oh yeah there was also this fun one:
“But it’s here now and it’s spreading and it’s gonna increase. … We are looking at a winter of severe illness and death for the unvaccinated – for themselves, their families and the hospitals they’ll soon overwhelm. But there’s good news: If you’re vaccinated and you have your booster shot, you’re protected from severe illness and death,” the President added.
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/12/16/politics/joe-biden-warnin...
(The aforementioned winter of severe illness and death didn't happen)
And today we have
"Growing share of Covid-19 deaths are among vaccinated people, but booster shots substantially lower the risk"
https://edition.cnn.com/2022/05/11/health/unvaccinated-covid...
Gaslighting, moving the goal posts, etc.
Donald Trump is the last person you should take medical advice from. He was criticized nonstop by medical professionals, scientists and even scientific journals for saying all kinds of crazy things, and this is the least of it. My 12 years of postsecondary education have not prepared me to articulate exactly how stupid this person is. It's indescribable.
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Link 2
That study has a confidence interval that is not reported in the news article. CNN is not a great authority for health advice. It's okay to watch/read it, but then it's incumbent upon you to verify the technical details. They get science stuff wrong all the time, and so do all other non-specialist news organizations.
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Link 3
Despite the super misleading name, this is a pro-industry lobbying organization. This website is not where you go to find health advice. Notwithstanding, the web page says the data shows 100% effectiveness (n = approx 30,000) against "severe covid" (which is defined in very precise terms), but again this will have a confidence interval which is not reported here.
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Link 4 / Biden quote
"you’re protected from severe illness and death" is accurate. No mention of 100%.
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Link 5 / last quote
Also seems accurate, at a glance. No mention of 100%.
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Bottom line: politicians are not who you need to listen to for medical advice (yes that sucks, and yes they should do better). Also you can't blame scientists, doctors and public health experts for your own misunderstanding, for the fact that you get your information from dubious places, and for your inability to grasp nuance. Also, public health messaging is insanely difficult even in the best of conditions: even when the message is 100% accurate there will be second-hand reports that get it wrong, and people who understand the complete opposite of what is said. You need to understand this if you want to hope to understand what's happening.
Go to nature.com or science.org if you want science news.