The problem, from a non-medical expert layman, is that the "sensible" measures only appear so in hindsight.
It would have been sensible to close our borders and halt international travel 8-12 weeks ago, and begin widespread screening of suspect individuals. But at the time everyone said that was nuts, you want to tank our economy over some virus that's barely even outside Wuhan!?
Right now we could still contain it with radical isolation measures like Italy is doing. Nobody leaves their house without a good reason, everything comes to a halt, we perform mass testing on everybody and if you're infected you get an even stronger quarantine. But you want to shut down our economy over just a few hundred "isolated cases"!?
By the time people are dying en masse and hospitals are overwhelmed, it's too late. There's nothing you can really do at that point.
The basic problem is that people don't understand quadratic or exponential curves. If you have a pond that starts with one lily pad and they double in number each day, and it takes one month to fill the pond completely, then when is the pond 50% full? The answer is the day before. And the lesson is - exponential growth requires extrapolating from "who cares, it's just a few cases" to what could happen if it's allowed to grow unchecked. Which humans are incredibly bad at doing.
> It would have been sensible to close our borders and halt international travel 8-12 weeks ago, and begin widespread screening of suspect individuals.
Types easy; is hard.
11 weeks ago was Christmas. How many Americans were overseas on holidays for Christmas? How many Americans with Chinese relatives were in China? How many Chinese students of American universities were home on break? Is flying Boston to Seattle meaningfully different than flying Boston to Toronto? If you halt international travel and close the borders, where do the stranded travelers now live? For how long? Who pays for it? Do they lose their jobs/have to quit college? On average, nearly half of international travelers are on their way home, not out. These are real people.
> But at the time everyone said that was nuts, you want to tank our economy over some virus that's barely even outside Wuhan!?
If you set the system parameters tightly enough to prevent the virus from leaving Wuhan, I think you're basically closing travel all the time. How many people get sick and die of random, novel things? How many of those have the theoretical potential to be silently but exponentially transmissible? How can you set a system tight enough to prevent all of them while having travel and commerce?
It seems quite possible that such a tight system would be a cure that's worse than the disease. I'm not suggesting that we're doing all that we can or that we shouldn't have taken some of today's steps last week, but I am saying that I think it's completely unrealistic to think we could prevent this entirely in any sane way.
No one said it was going to be easy, or convenient. But most estimates say 70% of the population could become infected and with Italy's mortality rate of 6% that's 13.7 million deaths in the U.S. alone.
We had 6 weeks to prepare for this, and we did nothing, and we're still not doing nearly enough.
With due respect, telling Americans that they can't come back home from Christmas holidays is quite a bit more than "well, it won't be easy or convenient."
I got the initial wake up call after it became clear this is much more contagious than SARS/MERS. (Reused parameters and initial data for contagion simulation.)
That was a month ago. Managed to get done most of the preparations designed for a quarantine of about a month length as predicated by Chinese data. And a few extras. Not exactly hoarding food levels.
What I didn't consider was how strict and well executed were the containment measures applied by China. Without these, we'll probably get much longer, three month run. The measures I've taken definitely will help but potentially are not enough.
It would have been sensible to close our borders and halt international travel 8-12 weeks ago, and begin widespread screening of suspect individuals. But at the time everyone said that was nuts, you want to tank our economy over some virus that's barely even outside Wuhan!?
Right now we could still contain it with radical isolation measures like Italy is doing. Nobody leaves their house without a good reason, everything comes to a halt, we perform mass testing on everybody and if you're infected you get an even stronger quarantine. But you want to shut down our economy over just a few hundred "isolated cases"!?
By the time people are dying en masse and hospitals are overwhelmed, it's too late. There's nothing you can really do at that point.
The basic problem is that people don't understand quadratic or exponential curves. If you have a pond that starts with one lily pad and they double in number each day, and it takes one month to fill the pond completely, then when is the pond 50% full? The answer is the day before. And the lesson is - exponential growth requires extrapolating from "who cares, it's just a few cases" to what could happen if it's allowed to grow unchecked. Which humans are incredibly bad at doing.
http://jonathanbecher.com/2016/01/31/lily-pads-and-exponenti...