I've been telling my wife and friends I expect this to last well over a year. I've been told I "sound like an idiot" and that my negativity isn't helping. We'll see.
Back in January, my friends were trying to convince me to do a spring break type vacation in Miami in March. I said, I dunno if we should book just yet, this Coronavirus in China is certainly going to become a global pandemic. They thought I was a tinfoil hat lunatic.
Then, in early March, right when SF starts it's social distance / lockdown, and SXSW and stuff like that starts getting canceled -- the Spring break thing we wanted to do in Miami is canceled, too. No surprise.
Immediately after, my friends try to convince me that we should do this thing in Chicago in early May. Flights and hotels are stupid cheap right now, they say. We should take advantage.
I'm like, guys, there is enough data from China, SK, Japan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Italy, and Iran to know that this is going to be at its worst by early May.
They think I'm insane. This will be over in a week or two at best, they say.
Now there's yet another event in October. They're trying to convince me to do that now! I'm like, GUYS! Hopefully the world is somewhat back to normal by then, but who knows? Why don't we just wait a bit. The deals will be around for a while.
It really seems like Fusion energy. Instead of always being 40 years away, everyone seems to think Coronavirus is always 2 weeks from just going away in its own.
You can still go if you are not taking orthogonal risks. We just cancelled our rock climbing vacation because we intended to do some stuff that's hard for us and I don't want to end up in a hospital for unrelated reason and take up the capacity. Otherwise (e.g. if we were going for a beach vacation), viewing lockdown as hugely net negative I'd totally go.
As far as I'm concerned, violating lockdown right now is basically civil disobedience - I normally run about once every 2-4 weeks, but if they close the park next to my house I'll make sure to go do it as often as my legs allow.
I'm just curious. Where do you live that you are not allowed to leave your home? I know different places are implementing social distancing differently.
UK - we're only permitted to go out if it's essential[0], such as buying food or collecting medicine. You're also permitted to travel to work, only if you have a job you can't do from home, and you work at one of the designated "essential" businesses/organisations. You're also allowed out for excercise.
The police here have in some cases been acting with ludicrous heavy-handedness, such as posting drone footage of 1-2 people walking over an empty moor, claiming they shouldn't because it's "NOT ESSENTIAL!". The actual laws actually seem quite reasonable, and leave room for common sense - hopefully the police will stop this nonsense, or their behaviour may cause people to lose respect and start flaunting the rules.
I believe it's the same situation across most/all of Europe now.
Where are you seeing that? Every projection of which I'm aware has been in the range of 12-18 months. It's reasonable to hope for faster, but not to plan on that basis.
I'm just a layman, but my understanding of vaccine development is that the timeline has little to do with how long it takes to actually research, make or distribute the thing (although that's certainly part of it).
The reason you need to wait so long is to prove its efficacy. By definition, you make a vaccine to give to everyone who is healthy and does not have the virus. So the absolute worst possible outcome would be to inject 95% of the population with a vaccine and discover in 6 months that it causes some horrible side effect.
Well the other option is that everyone already catches it by then, and we move in without the immediate need for a vaccine, depending on length of natural immunity. Which I think is becoming the more likely outcome, given the increase in non symptomatic carriers.
The catch will be if we attribute a drop off in hospital admits as successful containment or as the result of natural immunization/ herd immunity.
The current nearly total shutdown of retail businesses cannot and will not last for a year. If it needs to last for a year in order to contain the virus, it still can't and won't, and people will die from the virus.
I think it should last between 18 to 24 months too, but the confinement measures will be lifted much sooner. Once the epidemic curve is going down and its well under control, people will be allowed to go back to work with face masks, slowly industry by industry before the end of the year. This should only take a couple of months.
There's no reason to expect "Once the epidemic curve is going down and its well under control"
before there's a vaccine deployed or everyone has been infected and paid the personal cost of their viral lottery ticket.
Best bet might be a modifier herd immunity plan, of infecting healthy people with a miniscule viral load and hoping the immune system can handle it better than a heavy load from getting sneezed on or spending all day at a hospital.
That's just modified variolation with a flu virus. We don't use that method anymore for many good reasons. Controlling a viral infection is nearly impossible, let alone literally billions of people, all at once.
Well the Chinese have been able to successfully contain the disease after a 60day lockdown so it shouldn't take more than that. Unless of course there's an agenda we're not aware of.
The Chinese lockdown is much more severe than anything being enforced in the US. They track everyone's movements with their phones, large areas of the cities where cases have been reported are sealed off with checkpoints at the exit points. Your temperature is checked almost everywhere you go, the temperature of anyone working in food production is checked every 30mins, to board the subway you must scan the QR code in the specific carriage. It's very hard to explain just how drastically different the measures China are taking compared to the rest of the world but here is a good video that gives some insight: https://youtu.be/YfsdJGj3-jM
Can you imagine this happening in the US? What happens if this is what it takes to avoid the 60-80% infections required before herd immunity kicks in?
You might want to compare the strictness of the Chinese lockdown to what western countries are doing.
The goal of the lockdown must be getting the case numbers low enough that contact tracing works again. To do that you need to get the replication number well below 1 and hold it there for two months or so. The measures we're currently taking are totally insufficient for that. R is still closer to 3 than to 0.5.
This is a lie. China now has another outbreak, and several country's intelligence agencies have suggested that their original numbers were completely made up.
> Well the Chinese have been able to successfully contain the disease in 60days so it shouldn't take more than that.
Though they did seem to delay action, when they took it they went hard. Some of the US is past the point that China threw the brakes on, and the rest of the country continues to accelerate. We can't expect the timeline to align in any way.
Western leaders aren't even trying to contain the disease, and they readily admit that. It's all about flattening the curve, and a flat curve stays flat a long time.
The chinese are also using mass surveillance to keep the problem under control. You need to show a qr code on your phone that proves you are allowed out at many checkpoints.
The disease, obviously. When the disease was running rampant through Hubei, there were innumerable reports of it on social media.
The WHO has had a large team of disease experts, public health experts and others in China since late January, and they say China has been totally transparent.
The unfortunate truth is that authoritarian regimes are better suited to dealing with a pandemic, particularly competent, technocratic regimes like China's.
Not really a fair accounting at all. Everyone points to local efforts to control information about the disease, but that lasted a couple days, not two months.
Genetic analysis indicates a single index patient sometime around mid-November. In late December, there was a large cluster of pneumonia cases with multiple patients at the same hospital in Wuhan, which were mostly linked to the Huanan Seafood Market.
And this is exactly what you would expect. One case in mid-November, 2-3 cases a week later, 4-9 cases by early December, 16-81 cases by mid December, and maybe a couple hundred cases by late December. And among these cases, only a minority are going present to a hospital for treatment. Most will get sick, but simply stay home.
On December 31st, the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission became aware of the Huanan Seafood Market cluster and issued a notice to local hospitals. That same day, Li Wenliang made a statement to friends about the unknown pneumonia cases, which was shared by friends to social media. Local authorities arrested Li Wenliang and made him sign a statement acknowledging a misdemeanor, and ordered him not to talk about the illness publicly.
Later that same day, Chinese officials notified the World Health Organization of an outbreak of pneumonia of unknown cause.
On January 1st, local authorities closed the seafood market.
On January 7th, Chinese researchers identified SARS-CoV-2 as the causative agent in the outbreak.
On January 12th, Chinese researchers shared the viral genome with the world health community.
On January 22nd, with about 500 confirmed cases, China locked down Wuhan, and all of Hubei Province the next day.
There were clearly some local efforts at suppressing information about the virus, but at a time that very little was known about it, and apparently all at the local level.
Somehow this is seen by some in the West as state-sanctioned efforts at suppression, but the President of the United States saying it's just the flu, nothing to worry about, there are very few cases, most of them are getting better, it's totally under control - that's not suppressing information, just efforts to project calm.
The reality is that China's response to this novel virus represents a new gold standard for emergent disease response. In terms of both speed and efficacy, it was the best response the world has ever seen.
I agree this started in Nov., but dont have a source. Do you have a link?
As I've written before, "a powerful flu like corona" was circulating in SE Asia already by Dec. 10. So the Dec. 31 WHO notification was pretty slow.
I'm lukewarm on congratulating China since they were the epicenter for SARS-1 in 2002/2003, and various bird flus since. I wonder how many hospital staff Wuhan lost in Dec. 2019? Must have been dozens - did that make the press?
My take is that if my government managed to successfully lie about the number of deaths (assigning COVID-19 as the reason only in cases where the patient had no chronic illnesses) then China is more than capable of doing the same and has a major incentive to do so.
China's can more effectively control people's movements than the US, which helps with containment.
But at the same time, as in the US, reported infection rates are probably much lower than the actual rates, since both countries' administrations have an interest in minimizing the reported rates, or when that fails, minimizing the timeline for normalization of life.
Public health authorities are the only people who have no incentive to exaggerate or suppress information.
I agree that the saving grace in the US is that we have independent state and local officials. Kudos especially to Ohio's governor for bucking the party line and declaring a lockdown in a timely way.
Local officials have credibility right now from being the actual local boots on the ground. Their voices have cornered the administration into admitting, however begrudgingly, the scale of the problem.
Given the administration's incentives, it's good that the institution aggregating the numbers right now is John's Hopkins, and not the administration's VP-led task force.
There is nothing close to a lockdown currently in place anywhere in the US or Canada. Not to say that that's what's needed, just pointing out that China's policy was more extreme.
So what? The rest of the world is still a hot zone. As soon as one infected person slips through your net—tomorrow or six months in the future—you have an outbreak again.
