Yeah, and that is why I noted that countries like China and Iran are going to be reluctant to share that data. The only way I see that happening is if sharing data impacts their bottom line, e.g. there are trade embargoes or other restrictions for not sharing public health data and allowing independent verification. Is that likely? Probably not unless all industrialized nations collectively agree to impose such sanctions uniformly.
Air travel has a disproportionate impact on climate change and atmospheric pollution anyway, so it is sensible to reduce it as much as possible with the imposition of carbon taxes and other pollutant fees so that travelers are forced to bear the true costs of flying rather than just the direct costs. Screening passengers through international boarders will almost certainly become routine, and I suspect many nations will require a doctor’s exam before issuing visas.
As for cruise ships, they are going to bear the specter of the Diamond Princess and other “plague ships” for a long time to come. Some people will still want to cruise because people are stupid, but cruise ships have always been petri dishes for contagion and that industry as a whole needs to be more tightly regulated for health and safety, not just for epidemic disease but all manner of unsafe practices. Regardless of whether that happens or not, I would expect a large contraction in that industry even once this pandemic is under control.
Taiwan has done damn well so far. They got hit hard by SARS and set out to be very prepared.
They set up a crisis task force organization which they could activate in an epidemic, operating 24/7 with beds there if needed. They had 124 priorities set up in advance.
They got wind of the outbreak in December last year and started screening passengers from the afflicted areas, with health officials boarding the planes on arrival, screening for those showing symptoms.
They set up to increase the number of masks being produced, with the government setting up assembly lines, gathering engineers from the industry. Taiwan has increased production of masks from 5 million per day at the beginning of the crisis to 15 million now.
The task force is headed by a respected person who gives daily fact-only briefings.
They have been one step ahead of most of the countries. They quickly shut down the schools while they were assessing the situation. They were able to open them.
They have certain advantages with a National Health System, including a database for everyone and can link all of the records from all the hospitals, clinics and doctors’ offices. The linked immigration records as well so the doctors can tell who has been overseas in the last couple of months, and which countries they visited.
Like Singapore and Hong Kong, they rely on tracking down the contacts of infected people and isolating them, using cell phone date to ensure they stay at home.
As of Friday, 298 of Taiwan’s 348 cases had been classified as imported, while the other 50 were believed to be local infections, the CECC said. Of the 50 local infections, only about 7 have been infected from unknown sources.
Yeah, that was what it was designed for. But when the party is supreme, the party interferes everywhere.
I don’t know where you got that I was saying this had something to do with them being Chinese. I said that American companies do the same kind of thing - like one I worked for. If the Russians were competent enough to build such a system, I bet they’d get the same result.
And in this case not only didn’t the people get informed (which was the intention) but the central government also didn’t get informed. With a free press they would have heard about it and maybe done something sooner.
People of all types don’t want to admit there is a problem, often until it is too late.
People don’t want to see a problem. Taiwan is doing very well, but the danger isn’t zero. Despite all the bad news from all over the world, people were out in force today in tourist places in Taiwan. It’s insane.
Japan has the same problem. People aren’t exercising sufficient caution. All the best planning (as in Taiwan) or good luck (Japan) don’t help if people won’t be careful.
One critical point, that perhaps underlies a few points made by others earlier.
In any epidemic growth is exponential. That has a very specific effect on things.
A day saved at the start of the outbreak is a day saved during the peak. Get a week ahead of the outbreak when it is only a few cases, and hardly on anyone’s radar, and you are saving that same week when the outbreak is at its most destructive. This could be the difference of a order of magnitude of the size of the peak.
Conversely, dither for a week, and you are still a week behind the game at the most destructive time. You give the peak a week or more to grow exponentially. The lives lost at the peak of the emergency are the ones you are saving by being on top of the game right at the start.
This seems to be a very big part of how South Korea got on top of Corvid-19. They were tackling it when it was hardly present in their country. Dithering and letting the outbreak progress for a week or two doesn’t seem like it has much effect, but in an exponential function, it doesn’t matter where you let time slip, the effect is always felt at the peak, and determines the peak’s height.
Taiwan and Singapore had a successful response, in spite of being respectively closely linked to China and a travel hub, because they were mentally and institutionally prepared for the next epidemic outbreak from China. It wasn’t mostly because they had been stockpiling equipment: it was because they went to quarantine faster.
In my own country, Australia, the stuff-ups involved people who just hadn’t got their head around what was required, because they really hadn’t thought about it in advance. In my wife’s hospital, outpatient clinics were canceled – but the doctors and patients weren’t told: they found out when they turned up. 10% of our national cases came from one cruise ship – which should, in retrospect, never have been allowed to load. The passengers were released without testing or quarantine – because the health department hadn’t really got their head around the idea that symptoms lag infection. Several states were late to setup quarantine facilities – because they hadn’t got their head around the idea that the “somebody” who provided quarantine facilities was the state.
Nurses and orderlies train to handle infection control. They actually practice the physical activities like taking off a mask. Hospitals train for mass disasters like a bomb explosion by doing crowd exercises where the put medical staff out in crowd situations like marathons or other sporting events.
Yes, the CDC stuffed up testing in the USA – but the fact that they had trouble with their test development and production was just symptomatic of their management failure.
You don’t need to stockpile stuff. You need a flexible and practiced organizational response.
Well, you do need to stockpile stuff a bit. There are going to be people taking another look at their national supply chains. But that’s not where the main lessons are.
Yeah, the claims that we should have had big stockpiles of respirators sitting in warehouses misses the point; if this were a different pandemic, we would need different equipment. But we need the ability to produce and procure the equipment that is needed, and we need to be able to do that without such reliance upon global supply chains when it comes to critical items, and particularly items like basic pharmaceuticals and protective equipment that are going to be universally needed. And we need to have enough supplies on hand to bridge the time between the onset of an epidemic and the time at which production could ramp up. I know that is money sitting idle in fiscal terms but it’s like having insurance or keeping a spare tire in your car; it’s not valuable until you need it but when you do it is irreplaceable.
But what we need the most is awareness and surveillance, as well as political leaders who take heed to warnings, so that we can put these preparations into action before the shit his the fan. Right now we are being sprayed with feces when a public education campaign could have had people just stepping out of the way.
:smack:
A small island and a city state. Both densely populated. You do realise that it might not be feasible for larger countries with spread out populations.
I would guess the problems are different. Taiwan isn’t really anything special. It isn’t really all that small. Big cities separated by significant distances of countryside. Even Taipei isn’t a pressure cooker of a city, and has quite an extended sprawl. I would say it isn’t a great deal different to many US states in terms of internal control of spread. But it is isolated by sea, and that makes a huge difference. Singapore is screwed on many fronts. A major shipping and travel hub, bridge to Malaysia with huge daily traffic, tourist destination, massive downtown shopping area that attracts travellers into close confines. But they can and do control the travel in and out. Airport and bridge. They are the links out, and they can control them.
In a previous life I used to teach in Singapore, and I remember during the SARS outbreak, there was a small squad of immigration police on the big set of stairs you go down from the arrivals hall to immigration. They were scanning every passenger with a FLIR camera. If you registered a temperature you were escorted into a room for a more serious check. They were pretty serious even then, and they had a very good idea what the drill was this time around.
As I wrote above, it was that preparedness knowing the drill and what to do that got them ahead of the exponential part of the curve. They didn’t dither about.
Reminds me for some reason about the difference in speed between a lie and truth. A lie can be half way around the world before truth has got its trousers on. Human response to the epidemic is linear, whilst the infection runs exponentially. The trick is to be ahead of the game enough that the intersection point occurs on your terms, and not its.