Something I’ve been wondering about. Suppose China, instead of trying to bury the news, took the reports of a novel coronavirus seriously, and immediately started lockdowns and testing and whatever they actually should have been doing. Would the virus have been contained? Or is Covid so transmissible that it probably would have leaked out to the rest of the world eventually? Because the whole “you could be spreading it for two weeks before your symptoms show up, if symptoms ever show up” is… kinda crazy. I’m getting the impression that this is unprecedented, at least in a serious disease.
I think that if China had been up front and open, and not tried to cover things up, then the outcome would have been more like the SAR outbreak in the early 2000’s instead of the total cluster fuck we got. The issue wasn’t that China didn’t lock down early or brutally…they did…but they did it AFTER covering things up, obscuring the magnitude of the outbreak, getting the WHO to down play the severity, and allowing Chinese citizens potentially (and as it turned out definitely) infected with the virus to basically travel across the globe, and generally did everything you could, by the numbers, to make this worse than it could have been otherwise had they played it straight, asked for assistance and investigation immediately (say, sometime in early December) and brought the world up to speed on what they knew, what data they had, and brought in experts from around the world to help.
I doubt this sort of thing will get much traction here, though, so mainly I expect people to say it wasn’t China’s fault and no…nothing they did could or would have made a difference. Then point to the fuckups of all the other countries. While I would tend to agree, the US in particular fucked up, I think that we as everyone else were operating under the assumption that the CCP was being straight with us to some degree at least. Which was really stupid of us, of course.
I don’t think there’s any realistic way it could have been contained. The big problem is the very high asymptomatic rate: Over half of the people who get the disease show no symptoms at all, and many others show sufficiently mild symptoms that they wouldn’t ordinarily seek medical attention.
You can’t start any response at all until you know that the disease exists. For that, you need someone seeking medical attention, and probably multiple someones, because there’s no way to draw any conclusions from a single case. And by the time you have those multiple someones being treated by doctors, you’ve got dozens of asymptomatic carriers.
Now, even if at this point you somehow know that this disease has a high asymptomatic rate (which they didn’t), you don’t know who those asymptomatic people are. So to contain it, you’d have to know everyone who was at the Wuhan wet market in the appropriate date range, and find out everywhere they’ve gone. And then you’d need to lock down every one of those cities, some of which probably aren’t even in China. And to ensure no leakage, you’d need to lock down hard: We’re not talking like what anywhere in America did, where the goal was to flatten the curve; you need no opportunities for the virus to spread out of those cities.
The earliest known international case is now Dec 27th in France but that patient had no travel history or interaction with China which means there’s an even earlier case than that in France. Even if China had been 100% transparent about everything, there’s no realistic timeline for the response to have moved up more than a week or two which means there would have been international cases undetected no matter what.
Given the rest of the world’s lax response in letting in spread undetected within their borders, it would have simply cropped up in some other hotspot in the world and and then spread internationally and we’d be in much the same situation we are now.
The countries that have succeeded in dealing with the virus have never relied on keeping it outside of their country as a major strategy. Instead, they’ve all assumed that there would be community spread and focused on identifying and eliminating the chains of transmission as efficiently as possible.
Not an expert but I don’t think so. The reason SARS was contained is that it doesn’t become contagious until you develop symptoms. That makes it easier to isolate sick people.
COVID-19 has asymptomatic and presymptomatic carriers. Which means unless you do a total and complete lockdown of everyone who may possibly be infected for 3 weeks, its going to get out. And thats going to be hard to do.
Even the lockdown they did in China with soldiers and thermometers wouldn’t stop the pre and asymtompatic people from spreading it.
To be fair, at best, with the benefit of 20-20 hindsight, China could have gone to defcon 5 a few weeks earlier at the beginning in January.
WHO depends on access by the government, and they made the diplomatic choice of “great job guys, how can we help” vs “you fucking idiots, whaddya doing?”. Which approach is better, you tell me?
China had open borders. Same as the US. There have been no checks on people coming into the US beyond filling out a form. Certainly, the US has absolutely zero checks on US citizens health or lack thereof leaving this country. Complete double standard. BTW, there was the case of a woman from Wuhan that left China with a fever, bragged about it on her vacation to France, and was quickly taken in by the French authorities after the Chinese government requested it. You got a cite for how the Chinese government knowingly allowed infected individuals to travel globally?
Fair point that the Chinese government could have asked for global help earlier. They didn’t. It’s an understandable tendency for a big sovereign nation to not ask for help. Especially in early December without 20-20 hindsight
Can you fucking stop with the CCP propaganda please? It is the Chinese government. CCP brings in the loaded “communist” word. You might as well say “Chicom”. And it’s incorrect since China is far from being a textbook communist State.
Bwahahahaha, the CCP are being straight with us. Who is the bigger idiot? The CCP, who are the biggest lying liars that ever existed, or those like you so gullible to being the blatant big lying lies they spout? Mao on a pogo stick…if you believe the CT, then why do you accept the Chinese governments word hook, line and sinker? It’s like the idjiots that believe in an all powerful deep state, 'cause by definition if the deep state was that powerful, the election would have been a slam dunk for other than the Republican Party.
I’m going to go a little bit against the grain here.
I’m no expert, either, but it’s not like we don’t know about pandemics, how to stop or at least slow them. We know how to do contact tracing, have done it for decades. And there was a perfectly good test available from Germany, offered to us by the WHO. We in the USA decided not to use it.
I guess the first question is, how do you define “contained”?
No, I don’t think it could ever have been contained within the borders of China. However…
If the Obama pandemic task force were still intact and had been allowed into China – as they already were before being disbanded – to study the virus, we would not have taken the Chinese at their word.
If we had allowed our medical professionals and the CDC to lead and direct, we would have responded in an orchestrated way.
If Republicans had not blocked funding for stores of PPE, we’d have been better prepared to deal with the virus when we understood it was in our population.
If, when the first cases were showing up, we had worked fast to quarantine those folks and done aggressive contact tracing, we could have significantly controlled the outbreaks as they appeared. No need for full lockdown if you know who is at risk of getting the disease and segregate them quickly from the larger community.
All you have to do is look at our numbers v. the numbers of many other countries to appreciate how poorly we handled things here in the USA.
Unfortunately, because COVID-19 is now widely in our general population, we are the epicenter to spread it throughout the rest of the world. Not only did it become a pandemic, it is likely going to soon become endemic. We will live with this for many decades to come.
Agree with Chronos that the highly infectious nature of COVID-19 combined with its ability to hide within an asymptomatic population makes this a particularly nasty challenge. But we could have done a whole lot better, and likely could have contained the spread in a significant way.
I know it’s just a standard fact that China sat on this epidemic for “months”, but the reality is that this has been exaggerated a lot.
In reality, the time interval between the epidemiologists being silenced and arrested (yes, which was appalling), and the WHO being notified was 10 days.
Secondly, some people seem to labor under the idea that from the first case of someone being sick to knowing for sure that it is new human-to-human transmissible virus and a possible global pandemic involves zero steps. In reality, this is very far from the truth; it can take a long time to even confirm that it’s a virus. So you get people claiming that China knew all about Covid in November, because that when when the first case happened – when in fact that’s a possible first case looking retrospectively at old patient data.
I know it’s kinda pointless trying to fight back against the tide: people are angry and upset, and a clear “bad guy” makes everything more simple. And the Chinese government works well as a bad guy here because they are always portrayed that way in western media (as an expat living in China, it’s really surreal to hear news about China on western media. Even very simple, positive stories must always include some editorializing about “suspicions” that “many people” have). Treating China as the boogeyman was central to Trump’s platform even before he was president.
But regardless, my opinion is that in the alternate universe where China told the WHO earlier, it would have made some difference, but the hard quarantines would have only started when they knew they had something serious i.e. about the same time as in our universe.
Yeah, China as bogeyman makes no sense. At best, the USA could have known about the new coronavirus a couple weeks earlier than it did.
Our government knew about it at the beginning of January. Then did nothing until mid-March. Then to the extent they did stuff then, it was mostly useless posturing.
China wasn’t the problem. We have met the enemy, and he is us.
I should add to my previous post that I am not trying to say the Chinese government is all sweetness and light.
The silencing of the doctors is evidence of a lack of freedom of speech, human rights and desire to cover up bad news (though I think it was for domestic purposes; not to hide a pandemic from the world which doesn’t make sense).
And yeah what’s happening in Xinjiang is utterly appalling too.
Nonetheless, there have been a lot of CTs about this virus, and the fact that they keep turning out to be demonstrably false doesn’t seem to give the media any pause to stop with the editorializing. And no-one is countering all the talk of “China did this to us!”, which benefits many in the current administration that might otherwise need to be accountable.
I’m going to proactively declare that it belongs here in Great Debates because it’s not really about the ongoing pandemic but rather a form of thought experiment.
Well, let’s take them one at a time then, shall we?
It doesn’t take much hindsight to understand that the CCP covered this thing early on, and that is, you know, bad. Even if you believe the narrative they have pushed, it’s still a week when they covered it up while knowing things were bad and allowed both international and in country travel. They blithely told their people that there was no human to human transmission until towards the end of January, and downplayed the threat. If you think that these things had no effect and that it would take some sort of 20/20 hindsight mystic mage to sus out why this would be a problem then that’s up to you.
The ‘you fucking idiots, whaddya doing?’, especially when you consider that when they finally did let the WHO in it was a dog an pony show with no meat. The WHO had and has a responsibility to bring this sort of thing up and let the world know that a major nation who seems to be having an outbreak of an unknown disease is not coming clean with it’s data. This leaves aside the fact that they ignored Taiwan’s data which showed that human to human transmission as happening in December (which means the folks on the ground knew a while before that). Again, if you don’t see an issue with that then there really isn’t much more to say.
I don’t need a cite. They covered this up. They allowed people from Wuhan to travel until mid-January, despite knowing at least from December (and probably before that) that it was dangerous and would cause issue. They allowed this in China and throughout the world. Sorry, this is a ‘can you give me a cite that water is wet’ thing. Even if you totally buy the narrative this is true, since they have admitted that ‘local officials’ covered things up in Wuhan in early January.
As to open borders and such, that’s true enough. It’s one of the reasons that the US and Europe got hit so hard by this. But had the CCP been open and honest, not just with the world but with their own people, then not only would countries have been better prepared but more on guard. Containment would have been more of an early priority.
It still would have gotten out, IMHO. Even I can see that some of the earliest cases in the US and Europe were before anyone could reasonably see this thing was the monster it’s become. However, if we knew in, oh, say late December or early January how bad this thing was, if the data had been shared, if the early virus samples had been shared, then we could have all worked harder at containment. We’ll never know, however, because the CCP covered things up and allowed a snowball to become an avalanche before anyone really knew it was happening.
It’s a function of a totalitarian and authoritarian government. You aren’t seriously telling me that you think if this thing popped up in most European nations they would have done similar things wrt asking for help and blocking data from the WHO?? :dubious: Again, it doesn’t take 20/20 hindsight here. Most modern nations would ask for help or at least share data and allow in observers when something like this happens.
Oh, so your issue is with my use of the CCP? Tough. And I don’t want to get into some ridiculous no true Scotsman semantic discussion about text book communism. It’s a rather stupid point, though your use of ‘fucking’ definitely brings the right mix of emotion, so good on you.
No idea where this screed is even coming from to be honest. It’s so disconnected from anything I’ve written or think that I don’t know how to respond except to roll my eyes a bit.
I agree that this is the reality. No attempt to blow sunshine up our collective shorts will make this not true. Long-term, a vaccine is the only solution for those who choose to take it. And many won’t, thus remaining a societal threat. Oh well.
Definitely the crux of the matter and what makes this virus so complicated to control.
Some people refuse to believe they are in danger from something that’s imminent but they can’t see the threat right now. Look at all the people who refuse to evacuate areas that are threatened by approaching natural disasters-- even when there’s plenty of warning. Hell, in my city, at least once a year during heavy rain, someone drives around a barrier, is swept away, and drowns in their car. :smack: My name for that is STOOPIDITY. And it [del]can be[/del] often is fatal.
Count me amongst those who think the nature of COVID-19 infections having asymptomatic and presymptomatic carriers this would have been inordinately difficult to nip in the bud.
Another factor would be the assumption that the initial bat-human transmission occurred in the Wuhan wet market. I think it’s feasible that the initial infection was a vendor(s) who became infected catching/handling the bats, went to the market as a carrier, symptomatic or otherwise and it was community transmission in Wuhan. Which starts the clock earlier.
This is not true. At a certain point early in the crisis they said there was no evidence of human to human (I’m going to say H2H from now on) transmission. This is a very different thing from making the claim that H2H transmission was not possible. The data in general was still patchy.
Again, no.
The Taiwanese government made the claim that they had informed the WHO about H2H, but when the WHO subsequently made their correspondence public, there is no such unequivocal claim.
Huh? WHO was informed in late December, and it became global news by the first week of January.
I would agree that if the Chinese government had acted early and not silenced the early reports, things would be better than now, though I agree with you that it would still have gotten out.
I disagree with the caricaturing of this as “allowing a snowball to become an avalanche”, for the reasons already given.
It could not have been avoided, but the US need not have been the world leader in casualties. Had the administration simply followed traditional procedures the United States would have met the emergency with effective measures that would have minimized the impact of the virus.
Yes - the disease could have been contained.
(Traditional procedures - CDC funding, pandemic team in place, all cabinet positions filled and confirmed, ACA maintained, response to intelligence briefings)
China could have undoubtedly contained the virus if it had acted quickly and been more transparent. However the rest of the world also had ample warning right through February and they could have contained it too with the right policies. How do we know this? Because there are countries like Vietnam which have succeeded in containing it with a fraction of the resources of richer countries. And there are countries like South Korea which have contained it after an initial flare-up of cases. There is no reason to believe that most countries, certainly the more developed ones couldn’t had also done this with the right policies at the right time. The basics are pretty simple: move fast and test, trace and isolate on a big scale wherever there in outbreak. This can be combined with social distancing norms and mask-wearing and partial lockdowns in areas which see a spike.
The reason most places didn’t do this are psychological and political. Our brains are fundamentally bad at dealing with threats that grow exponentially. It’s hard to intuitively grasp that dozens of cases a day will become thousands in a matter of weeks. Secondly and relatedly containing the problem means imposing a fair amount of economic pain before the problem appears severe and that is also difficult for any politician. This is basically the “Jaws mayor” problem.
Oh, sure, we (by which I mean, the world as a whole) could have responded a lot better than we did, and significantly reduced the impact. But we still couldn’t have contained it entirely.
Would you say the virus has been contained in Taiwan which hasn’t had a new case in almost two weeks? With the right policies implemented early, there is no reason why every rich country couldn’t be like Taiwan. There would still be some travel and event restrictions but certainly those countries would be in a vastly better situation than they are now.