For years experts have warned that another SARS-like virus is going to come out of China, due to their animal husbandry practices and culture of eating certain animals.
Then this disease appears, and China initially tries to suppress news of it. They deny it's an issue. Wasting valuable time and allowing it spread unchecked to the rest of the world.
Then, about three months ago they lock down Wuhan to contain it (an area with millions of people I think?) This means, based on this Twitter thread, that residents can't even walk outside. So, like being incarcerated?
And, people's wages are getting paid still, but as loans they'll owe when this is all over. So, like debt?
What boggles my mind is all the positive news coverage of this. Why are people fawning over this?
China, as with other countries, hss made errors and seen successes in addressing COVID-19. Systemic strengths and weaknesses have been exposed. A reasonable commentary expresses both sides.
Truth is nonideological.
As much as China squandered weeks, possibly months of advanced warning, we've seen precisely that script repeated around the world, across a wide range of cultures, governmental systems, economic systems, and ideologies.
With a few notable exceptions: Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan RoC, and South Korea most notably.
This epidemic is unprecedented since WWII, and everyone is making up their response (including numerous ineffective ones) as it develops. Most often there are no good options, only least bad ones.
Nobody but the Chinese were throwing their justice system at people for merely indicating there might be a problem. That's very different than incompetence.
meta: Over these past four years I've seen a growing number of people interpreting the most nuanced, neutral statements as 'apologist', 'biased', 'lobbying', 'spam', 'politically motivated'. I don't think this has always been the case, especially on HN.
It's not just skepticism, that's for sure. How do I put it? It's like assuming there are sides when there are no sides. I'm curious, is there a word for this?
I like this. Polarization is a pretty good characterization. People are just not treating neutral views as neutral anymore.
Food for thought: perhaps people treating everything as fake news is an unfortunate adverse effect of all the messaging about the dangers of not recognizing fake news.
As far as I understand, outrage culture is about shunning popular folks for their imperfect human morality. Could you (or someone else) elaborate on how this is related to this, well, let's call it erosion of neutrality?
Thanks for the link, I was wondering if Scott touched on this. Seems to be an adjacent topic but it's relevant nonetheless.
my tldr of that post: in the context of ideological/political theory, mistake theorists are engineers who want results, conflict theorists are warmongers who want to win.
Perhaps seeing bias in everything is just one of those warmongering traits -- because trust me, it's really hard to win against a neutral point of view.
Because there is value in making good decisions after a series of bad ones. Wuhan has stopped more infections, which is to be applauded.
Moving forward, we can criticize the reasons in the post mortem. However, if we are looking to find the truth, we cannot start with blame. We all know how blame causes people to cover their ass and inhibits learning.
The news I’ve seen has been calling it “draconian.”
e.g.
“China has used draconian measures to contain the spread of the virus, including locking down Hubei province and more recently stepping up measures to screen and quarantine overseas arrivals.” Reuters (NYTimes?) https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2020/03/21/world/asia/21reut...
It's awful, but I feel it's not fair to single out China for this. I don't see the rest of the world doing much better of a job, especially in Brazil where Bolsonaro is still going on television to downplay the situation and actively making it harder for state governors to do the right thing (make people stay the fuck home, if you pardon my French).
It is absolutely fair to single them out. This would not be happening if not for circumstances specific to their culture and industry. They had warning 20 years ago with SARS1, and they did nothing to prevent this, even though the solutions would basically be "don't store live animals next to each other in wet markets". Now we all pay the price.
Our world would be better with more accountability. And in this case there is one specific party who fucked up worse than all the rest, particularly given their 20 year notice.
And not to pile on, but, what can you even criticize China over? They are very much a real super power now, they get away with stuff in the same fashion as America. Jail their civilians in camps, threaten Hong Kong, steal foreign intellectual property, and now possibly mishandle the onset of a pandemic.
All very difficult stuff to get international accountability on, they’ve really joined the super power ‘I-do-whatever-I-want’ club nicely.
Don't get me wrong, I'm definitely not saying China is not to be criticized. I just feel like everyone is being quick to jump on them and forgetting about the more tangible and immediate issues, which is their own governments doing the exact same thing.
That's fair, but we have our share of blame for letting this get out of control. We knew what this virus could do as well, and instead of acting accordingly we're just not.
Strip away media narrative on both sides, an impartial timeline would be:
Wuhan medical community recognized a new pneumonia of unclear cause in late December during winter and the height of influenza season. The novel Corona Virus was identified, WHO was notified, the genome was sequenced. This took roughly 1 week. Then it took 3 more weeks of "stability management" before central government quarantined WuHan and essentially shutdown the entire country right before the most important holiday of the year and the largest annual human migration.
4 weeks for identification to evaluation to 3 months of aggressive techno-authoritarian quarantine, and assuming 2nd wave and import cases can be managed until the vaccine - China just demonstrated the first civilization model in human history to be able to suppress a virus of this magnitude in large countries. Other countries are only recently adopting the war analogy, China executed it on a dime. How they'll fair in rebooting society is unknown.
Was there missteps? Yes. Could they have done better? Not by much IMO. Every misstep with Chinese characteristics is being repeated just as worst in other countries with their cultural characteristics. The overall response as been not as agile (if there a response at all), despite having ample notice and more information.
The retrospect of this global health crisis is going to be interesting, China and a handful of islands managed to successful crush the curve, complacent developed countries may or may not successful spread the curve, and all the developing countries get rapid herd immunity because like the Spanish flu, they have no other choice. 1.4 billion people without herd immunity among a globalized world with immunity is going to be a conundrum though.
Lots of people left Wuhan before the lockdown though. Also lots of people still travelled for the Chinese New Year internally. January 10th is the beginning of travel season, Wuhan was locked down on the 23rd: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_2019%E2%80%932...
Locking down Hubei after 600 cases / ~3weeks is extremely expedient for an utterly unprecedented response. NYC was at 10k+ cases before they implement a light lock down, 60 days after Hubei, they're still meandering through half-measures. That's a comparatively severe response outside of China.
Many considerations in a region of 60million, i.e Jan 17th was the regional two sessions meeting. The early migration and WuHan being regional hub no doubt precipitated the decision to lock-down that fast. China locked down most of the country after ~30 days. Outside of a few city-states or island nations, we have ample counter-examples that no other country has responded as agile as China. Many don't even have a meaning response plan in place.
Herd community for covid19
is speculation right? There is no proof that that will happen is there? It is a (dangerous) gamble at this point as I understand it.
Assuming patients can't get reinfected with the virus, then herd immunity will definitely work.
But for herd immunity to occur, a very large portion of the herd needs to get infected. And I would assume that proportion is greater, the more infectious a disease is.
The idea with the lockdowns is to keep the rate of infection slow enough that hospitals can handle the influx of cases.
The earliest known case, just as the mid-November suspected cases you cited, is a suspected case. If you read the original paper claiming the Dec 1 case, you are going to see they made the conclusion based on symptoms and epidemiology. This is something which can only happen retrospectively. It does not mean someone can magically realize there is a novel virus when the first few patients just showed up.
The health officials surely isn't (and won't be) curious about isolated flu-like cases, they can't because there are simply too many such patients, to the point it is not realistic to track them all.
The doctors who saw these cases are certainly curious, but unless one sees a number of related cases with similar symptoms, "novel infectious disease" would not be among the first few explanations one turns to. There are simply too many other possible reasons (and more probable in routines) for flu-like symptoms. Unfortunately due to the nature of this virus early cases are indeed pretty isolated.
From what I read, the virus was first detected by an mNGS run in late Dec, which as far is still a "fuck I believe this must be caused by microbe but I'm seriously out of idea what could this be"-thing to Chinese doctors.
The report Dr. Li tried to send out is one of the mNGS report I mentioned above, it happened on Dec 30, i.e. late Dec.
The mNGS run itself happened around Dec 26 if you look at the original photo Dr. Li posted.
Could you please highlight where in this news article a date earlier than late December (like, Dec 1 or Dec 8 as you said) was mentioned? It brings a valid point, that China government sat on the problem for three weeks, but the timeline does not match yours.
Even all you claimed stand, China stop its whole country in Jan and achieved 0 domestic new case in 2 months. This is already the biggest positive news.
Speaking of that:
- Hongkong and Palau has much worse eating wild animal habit than Wuhan.
- Hundreds of Wuhan gov officials got punished due to inefficient response, more investigation is still continuing.
- First case reported at end of Dec, China CDC shared out coronavirus gen sequence in Jan, Wuhan locked down in Jan, but the most of the world simply did nothing in the upcoming 3 months and keep spreading unchecked globally even today.
> - Hongkong and Palau has much worse eating wild animal habit than Wuhan.
Curious how you get this impression, do you have specific examples in mind? For example, bats, wolves and civet cats are consumed in Wuhan, which is not the case in Hong Kong.
> - Hundreds of Wuhan gov officials got punished due to inefficient response, more investigation is still continuing.
On the flip side, I wonder how the cases for the eight whistleblowers reprimanded by local authorities, including Li Wenliang, are being investigated. More importantly, the real question is: does it actually solve the problem? Replacing officials (especially the local ones) is easy, solving the root cause (lack of accountability) is hard.
> Curious how you get this impression, do you have specific examples in mind? For example, bats, wolves and civet cats are consumed in Wuhan, which is not the case in Hong Kong.
The estimated IFR for this coronavirus is ~.05 to 0.1%. Even if it turns out to be something extreme, like 0.5%, it's not a big deal for the vast, vast majority of the population. But lockdowns and economic catastrophe are. They are a big deal for everyone. In this case the needs of the many are being overridden by the needs of the few.
If the shutdowns/lockdowns go for more than 4 weeks, I think we'd have been better off just letting the disease run wild. More people will die from the economic issues at that point. Might be too late already.
The numbers are higher than that. From Wikipedia today:
> "The case fatality rate (CFR) depends on the availability of healthcare, the typical age and health problems within the population, and the number of undiagnosed cases. Preliminary research has yielded case fatality rate numbers between 2% and 3%; in January 2020 the WHO suggested that the case fatality rate was approximately 3%, and 2% in February 2020 in Hubei. Other CFR numbers, which adjust for differences in time of confirmation, death or remission but are not peer reviewed, are respectively 7% and 33% for people in Wuhan 31 January. An unreviewed preprint of 55 deaths noted that early estimates of mortality may be too high as asymptomatic infections are missed. They estimated a mean infection fatality ratio (IFR, the mortality among infected) ranging from 0.8% to 0.9%. A peer-reviewed article published on 19 March estimated the overall symptomatic case fatality risk as 1.4% (IQR 0.9–2.1%). The outbreak in 2019–2020 has caused at least 335,974 confirmed infections and 14,641 deaths."
Current predictions are that letting the disease run wild would result in millions or tens of millions of deaths, and on top of that another large number of people walking around (slowly) with serious lung damage. Consider this:
> "The Hong Kong Hospital Authority found a drop of 20% to 30% in lung capacity in some people who recovered from the disease, and lung scans suggested organ damage."
There is a stream of academic papers coming out that show the original estimates are extremely high. I’ve seen CFR estimates getting into the 0.6% range. It is not at all unreasonable to see that number go down even further with more testing.
If they are estimates, it's not at all unreasonable to see the number go down or up.
But in any case, the CFR estimates are also changing as a function of learning more about how to treat, and hospital capacity relative to caseload.
I was replying about the "let it rip through the population" scenario, without slowing it down, which basically means don't treat the majority of severe cases in hospital (because the hospitals would be totally overwhelmed in that scenario). The CFR would be higher.
US had a 2 month warning. Our president and CDC kept downplaying it like it was nothing. Trump was saving face for a long time trying to not harm the stock market while blatantly lying to us.
How is this any different from what China did?
At-least China has gotten things under control, the west is on fire. Italy is being decimated and being overwhelmed.
For years experts have warned that another SARS-like virus is going to come out of China, due to their animal husbandry practices and culture of eating certain animals.
Then this disease appears, and China initially tries to suppress news of it. They deny it's an issue. Wasting valuable time and allowing it spread unchecked to the rest of the world.
Then, about three months ago they lock down Wuhan to contain it (an area with millions of people I think?) This means, based on this Twitter thread, that residents can't even walk outside. So, like being incarcerated?
And, people's wages are getting paid still, but as loans they'll owe when this is all over. So, like debt?
What boggles my mind is all the positive news coverage of this. Why are people fawning over this?