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.
I don't really agree with your stance but I see you've been downvoted and so I have upvoted you. I don't think your viewpoint should be censored by being downvoted into deletion as I am seeing your opinion mirrored by friends who are intelligent and well-read on the subject.
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.
I agree with your sentiment. Simply censoring out arguments that aren't stated offsensively is not how healthy discourse works.
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.
OP’s view is indeed rather unusual and insular, and depends on ignoring the Asian and African experience.
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.
With everyone who can staying at home, people not dying in car accidents, or getting the flu, you would expect there to be a vastly reduced rate of mortality.
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.
To add another data point: From Mar-Aug,the number of deaths in New York exceeded the expectation by 65%. The US total from Mar-Jul was 20% higher than expected.
Global mortality associated with seasonal influenza epidemics: [1]
World Health Organization (WHO) estimated the annual mortality burden of influenza to be 250 000 to 500 000
To date, 1.2 million people have died from covid [2]. The year isn't finished, and for the first 3 months the spread of covid was only starting.
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.
Can you clarify the point you are trying to make, because
at the moment I can only interpret your post as: "It's all overblown, these measures are not necessary".
Stop spreading this drivel. Covid is well on the way to causing as many deaths in 1 year worldwide as TB; it's already killed three times as many people as malaria; comparing it to the flu is laughable.
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).
The article is about how the west didn’t take it seriously enough, early enough — not that they overreacted.
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.
… and, yes, China has used measures which are much easier in an authoritarian police state as part of that response. That puts the onus on those of us who disagree with that on working to have our countries be more like South Korea, Taiwan, NZ, etc. since the Chinese government has not hesitated to point to the differences as proof that their system is superior.
>probably spurred on by Chinese propaganda and their fake reporting.
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 has an extensive diaspora of people who stay in regular touch with relatives back home. You'd know this, if you actually spoke to any Chinese immigrants.
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.
> 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.
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.
Its both relatives and the Chinese regime who sucked PPE from Australia and Australian hospitals could not get masks because of that. Its the same Chinese Govt who tried to cover up the pandemic in the first place.
Christ on crutches, this has an odd air of supporting evil dictatorial regime about it
> 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.
dang, why are you allowing this kind of shit on here? Please step up and sort this out.
> Saying China did a good job is like saying the USA should suspend the Constitution and do the same thing
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.
China simply stopped reporting on corona once Xi realized the Chinese economy was tanking, which would threaten the stability of the CCP. Now he just has a famine to manage, but hey, if 50% population losses are fine (Mao quote), no biggie.
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.)
I don't agree with your conclusion but Neil Ferguson has indeed been wrong. His model predicted 85,000 deaths in Sweden by now. I don't understand why the Imperial models are still taken seriously.
This is a popular right-wing trope but I’ve never seen a source despite the reports being available and the full model being on GitHub. Can you provide a citation for that exact claim?
In Sweden it's a left-wing trope (the right wants lockdown and masks while the left supports the lax approach so the model has mostly received criticism from the left) and I believed it but you're completely right, so I apologize:
> 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.
Ah, I should have been more specific that I only follow this in the English-language media so I’ve seen it newspapers in the UK or Australia (the US discourse doesn’t mention this much).
It is exponentially harder to contain the virus on continent with hundreds of millions of people with dozens of countries than to contain it on islands with one centralized government. It is not only Europe and USA, but also India, South America, Middle East, Russia, etc that fail at it for the same reason. The only continental country that managed to control the virus is China, but they can do it mainly because they have no problem banning immigration (which is not feasible for EU countries for example) and because they can use the centralized government to make decisions that would not fly elsewhere. Effectively, China can function as a really big island.
The article does a terrible job at addressing nuance. Take Australia - a country the size of Europe with a population of 25m, and Europe - a continent the size of Australia with a population of 750m. Clearly we can compare these like for like and whine about "culture".
And yet more nuance - the density of major cities in both Europe and Australia are reasonably comparable, so concentrating on those rather than towns / rural / empty areas does provide some information.
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.
Australia was setup for this kind of incident either way with strict quarantine rules for decades on natural goods & animals brought into the country. The local wildlife had suffered from invasive species. It was not a hard act to shut it all down.
The structure of the schengen area and the differing population densities is an entirely different beast, I agree.
>a country the size of Europe with a population of 25m
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.
Yes, most of the 25m in Australia live in areas with similar densities as some parts of Europe, that still doesn't mean they're surrounded by several hundred million other people. The problem doesn't scale linearly, policing 750m people isn't like policing 25m people, especially when the 750m have a propensity to all shuffle around a bit, and live in 50 different jurisdictions.
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?
China's success is weird. Almost none of what they're doing should work. For example, according to their totally-not-propaganda publication describing how they controlled coronavirus, the foundation is public temperature screening - it's that which feeds potential cases into testing and later contact tracing - and that just fundamentally doesn't work. The false positive and negative rates are atrocious, especially if you do it with forehead thermometers and thermal cameras like they do. They also do big, high-profile testings of entire cities which don't seem to find anything, making them useless. Meanwhile, there kept on being incidents like someone admitted to hospital with coronavirus symptoms in the main city of the region where the big outbreak was known to be at the time not getting tested for coronavirus and spreading it in the hospital. Or China completely missing an outbreak until it happened to spread to the better-tested and better-protected Beijing.
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.
I don't know - there are also things that should work - like the isolation in hotels with food delivery etc. What I see is that they throw just everything at it and maybe they misinterpret what really worked, maybe some of it was just theatre - but some of the measures did work and the whole also created enough pressure to have high compliance with the orders.
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.
The nothing serious effect is huge. I lived in an area with out of control covid, and you wouldn’t believe the number of people who say “oh it’s just a cold” “oh if’s just allergies” when they had symptoms consistent with covid.
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.
I'm not sure that is an accurate reflection of the pandemic control measures used by China and other asian nations.
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.
South Korea is a peninsula country, and an island for all intents and purposes considering no one, other than the occasional defector, crosses their only land border (with North Korea). Other examples, sure. There are more, too.
Being a peninsula country gives you an advantage (relatively fewer border towns to worry about), it doesn’t give you immunity if you fail to do anything and let the epidemic take root within. In addition, being a special kind of peninsula country where anyone who crosses your border can be shot without questions helps out big time compared to other peninsulas, hence the emphasis on “an island for all intents and purposes”.
Good point! Perhaps there are factors that allowed those countries to act more like islands than continental nations.
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".
>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?
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.
Unless a vaccine comes along there'll come a point where The West will have resigned itself to be living with the virus.
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.
Aus/NZ can continue trade with the East Asian nations I guess? Many East Asian nations have brought this under control through strict lockdown. Of course some things that are missing from the argument are the fact that many East Asian nations that have controlled the virus have extremely well organized governments which are able to deliver stimulus where needed. For myself living in Singapore, the government has been fairly generous with economic stimulus.
>Unless a vaccine comes along there'll come a point where The West will have resigned itself to be living with the virus.
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.
So for australia/nz to have trouble, as you suggested:
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.
All very good, but I used the phrase 'nutter' for a reason!
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.
It’s all very well and good to say, but without a second lockdown UK hospital capacity would have gotten overwhelmed. And then what do you do? There’s no normal while that’s happening.
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
They really need to close borders to everyone except British passport holders. That will be extremely unpopular, and given the multi-national make up of the UK population, citizens travelling to places like Ireland, India, Pakistan, European continent, etc to visit relatives, even that may not help.
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.
Frankly, this article doesn't seem to bring anything new to the table and seems to just couch the author's pre-conceptions in massively over-arching generalizations about "The West". There have been huge differences in policy, govenrment response and death rate across Europe. But instaed they all get lumped into one and then scolded for attitudes that frankly seem to only describe one particular part of America's atittudes.
Slightly OT, but I've wondered about this for a while:
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?
Because while you can work from home and have a paycheck, thousands (millions?) of small businesses are closing and the people rely on those to make their money. I could endure a lockdown for years (heck, I've worked remotely for 10), but my friends that own a restaurant? Screwed! My coach that needs the athletes to practise? Screwed! Friend's mother that sells her vegetables in farmers markets? Screwed! etc etc
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.
If I remember correctly, Germany spent 550 billion on the 2008 banking crisis. There's roughly 80 million citizens. So the government could - at the same cost - pay every citizen €2300 = $2700 per month for 3 months to cover the complete loss of income caused by a super-strict lock-down.
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.
How would three months be enough? This is a year long pandemic, at least.
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.
Reading this argument is always pretty surreal. There is some amount of population that is employed to provide the most basic commodities: food, fuel, medicine, infrastructure maintenance, logistics, healthcare, etc. Even if everyone else would go to lockdown, they still can provide the same amount of food, medicine, etc. Well, physically, at least.
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?
Well, you know how it is. This is in a socialist government with quite high taxes, but the money has to always flow to the upper echelon of society, not the poor mom or dad that want to feed their kids. But then again, you don't need a crisis, we have the money/production for everyone to have the minimum conditions to live, but hey, some billionaire wants another comma in their net worth so...
You seem to be assuming that a certain portion of the population needs to work, and the rest of the population doesn't really need to work.
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?).
But it is true, isn't it? There are lots of people who don't work and still live (relatively) well. And today, thanks to the technical progress, this number is larger than it was, say, 500 years ago.
Well yes, we're more productive, so a lot less people work. E.g. people usually retire, young people usually don't work, people usually work fewer hours, etc. That doesn't mean we can just cut most of what is left and still have everything we want.
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?
"do you think that most people are not really productive most of the time?"
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).
> lawyers, bankers, patent trolls, most government employees, middle management, motivational coaches, ...
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.
Also, military. Imagine if we could remove all of the military in the world? The savings would be quite large, I'd think. And the best thing, with no armies around, we would need no army for protection from other armies, so it all works out!
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.
Let's not forget second or third order effects. A restaurant isn't just a restaurant: it involves a lot of other parts of the economy (for example, maintenance, supplies....).
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.
I was talking more about the flow of goods (and services), not about the flow of money. After all, the main point of the economy is to arrange the production and the distribution of the goods, not of money.
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.
Quote 1: "... tank their economies to an extent that may affect the global balance of power for our lifetimes"
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.
What makes this especially propaganda-riffic is that it's not just the West that's "virus-riddled", it's also Africa, India, the Middle East... in fact, basically everywhere except the countries listed in the articles as having succeeded (and maybe not some of those - I wouldn't trust the reporting out of China or Vietnam one bit at this point). Those countries are basically going to have to isolate themselves from not just the West, but the entire rest of the planet indefinitely if no really effective vaccine appears.
I find it curious that people are so skeptical of China and Vietnam's numbers. A government might be able to hide some percentage points, or even an order of magnitude of the spread. But hiding more than that is pretty impossible in this modern day age. Especially a place like China with high internet penetration, proximity to Hong Kong and a population of overseas relatives in the millions. People may recall the Chinese citizens risking their lives to leak in the ground footage onto YouTube - I can't imagine that would stop if things were bad in China.
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.
Not to mention that there's now a scientific and medical consensus about how a combination of hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin (and zinc) is effective at preventing the virus from gaining foothold in the body when the first symptoms appear – but many of the governments and so-called "medical authorities" are in complete denial of this.
EDIT : and the GAFAMs (& Twitter) have been complicit of this censorship in preventing the doctors (= experimental scientists) from discussing their work on their platforms.
Please provide peer-reviewed evidence for this claim.
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.
OK, so I didn't look at every trial (as I do have a job), but I examined two of the studies for pre-exposure (for which most of the studies appear to be about).
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.
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.
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 !)
That's a laudable idea (and to be fair, doctors do make decisions like this all the time), but the trouble is twofold: 1) placebo effects and 2) expectancy effects.
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.
Look - this is a direct evidence of time travel! BlueTemplar obviously came to this day straight from March or so - before all the big trials found no evidence that HCQ and AZ (plus zinc) help.
You can't have a lock down without universal basic income. You can't force some families into poverty to protect some other families without suitable economic compensation.
This is why an exceptional situation like a pandemic lockdown warrants a massive stimulus package in Congress - so that wages can still be paid to people the government must unfortunately prevent from working.
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.
My father is currently connected to a ICU because of corona virus. It makes me sick to see how many people are not able to wear their mask over their nose. I live in Germany btw.
So I agree 100% with the article. It's completely unacceptable that we are not able to control or enforce such basic things...
> It makes me sick to see how many people are not able to wear their mask over their nose.
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.
The pandemic isn't over. It remains too early to talk about what succeeded or failed. Speaking from Australia, it is unclear that our policy of isolation is sustainable. The lack of migration is going to have slowrolling and serious economic blowback.
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.
I agree and I'd add that EU has not failed yet. It has not given up the fight as the US did. Certainly we have been far too loose during September and October. But at his moment all of the EU countries are striving to provide care for everyone in need, which implies remaining below hospitals saturation threshold.
Why not match capacity to cases rather than match cases to capacity? They have had 6 months now to increase capacity but it seems they aren't even trying.
Sure they did very little effort in that area. But you have to consider that saturation is reached eventually, so long R0 is > 1. Current trajectory for France is a doubling of cases every 3 weeks. Assuming a huge capacity increase of 50%, that would afford a 12 days delay.
It is funny how the West was not authoritarian enough for any top down effective action - but proved to be authoritarian enough to prevent us from buying antigen tests (https://zby.medium.com/it-is-9-months-now-why-we-have-no-mas...) and build our own bottom up response.
Yes - I watch it closely! I hope it will be a success - and then everybody will copy it :) The cost is really minimal.
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.
There are some caveats though - it seems that they have 1% of positive tests - but I cannot find any information if the try to confirm the positives with another test (PCR ideally). The specs on the test quotes 0.3% of false positives - this too close to that 1% of total positives.
French living in Japan here.
From what I have seen on both sides, I think the main difference is that most Asian people have a culture of group thinking and common interest, while most western people behave selfishly.
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.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 153 ms ] threadhttps://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...
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2771761
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.
[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6815659/
[2] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/#countries
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://github.com/ImperialCollegeLondon/covid19model
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
In the UK we have Universal Credit - a means tested benefit system that is halfway-house towards UBI in some ways.
https://www.gov.uk/universal-credit
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.
- 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...
[3]: https://imgur.com/qYed6rF
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...
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.
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.
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.