The hidden downside to dictatorship.
Heebietake: Yes. By end December PRC authorities had good reason to think the novel virus was contagious. Taiwan authorities reached that conclusion based on what they could see, at exactly that time (Dec 31) and started screening travel histories and tracing contacts accordingly. Everyone else drifted along on bad information from the PRC amplified by the WHO. Results: Taiwan ~500 cases, 7 deaths; everyone else: 37,000 deaths just since I wrote this post.
Contagious, yes. But airborne, and particularly contagious from pre-symptomatic people? Fever checks would not have prevented the horse from leaving the barn.
SARS like, means airborne. Pneumonia, means airborne. Did I say anything about fever checks? No.
The Chinese government deserves some serious criticism, but lets not kid ourselves, this was very likely to get out of China one way or the other. The difference between COVID, SARS, and Ebola is that COVID is much less deadly and often has milder symptoms, so it is much much harder to contain. Chinese secrecy wasn't the thing that stopped other countries from responding the way Taiwan or South Korea did.
Agree with 5, and think there is a very real danger that discussion about Chinese government's incompetence & inaction in this is being mostly utilized or produced as a smoke screen to avoid focus on other government's incompetence & inaction.
I've seen narrative roughly that "We would all be fine if China had done X,Y,Z" from multiple sources on the last few weeks, but it seems pretty weak.
5: I repeat myself:
Between the day the full genome was first decoded by a government lab on Jan. 2 and the day WHO declared a global emergency on Jan. 30, the outbreak spread by A FACTOR OF 100 TO 200 TIMESChinese secrecy dramatically increased the odds of transmission while reducing the odds of countermeasures being taken. Of course some cases would have gotten out of China, but there would have been fewer of them and more countries would have caught them.
On the other hand, I think we can know with certainty that better information out of China earlier wouldn't have done the US any good -- we ignored the information we had when it became available.
It's not inevitable that Italy couldn't have had stronger measures sooner. Nor, in a sane timeline, is it inevitable that our leading intellectual (S. Miller) would have been confused about the fact that white people coming from Italy could bring the disease to the US. Even rich white people!
In this timeline, though, it's clear that we should have built that wall with Mexico sooner, and should have had more tax cuts.
COVID was already spreading in the community in Italy by the second half of January, and most of the world's spread has been via Italy and not directly from China. China would have had to acted really really fast to stop those early cases in Italy.
Fortunately, it's not too late for more tax cuts!
Anybody in the US who trusted China to accurately report the extent of the outbreak could have listened to intelligence reports if they had access, or they could have just read the news. China's coverup is not some big shocking development. (Maybe there's some news in the linked article, which I haven't read, but in the broad sense, it was well understood very early that you couldn't trust anything coming out of China.)
It might have been a good idea for the US to have someone in China to keep an eye on that sort of thing.
10 I should probably do some reading, but it's not completely clear to me what the transmission to Italy looked like. A few super-spreaders? Tourists? Garment workers returning from holidays? A bunch of friends of mine were skiing in Northern Italy in the first week of February (I could have gone too) flying in and out of Venice. Which was empty of Chinese tourists, but not yet closed down.
(None of the group seems to have picked up the coronavirus. Madonna di Campiglio is no Ischgl.)
12 Yeah, I regularly read James Palmer's twitter feed, he's a long time China watcher who's lived there for many years and is now an editor at Foreign Policy and he was all over this very early. He was criticizing WHO for buying their dog and pony show in real time.
If Italy hadn't been as bad as it was, would the US have been hurt less. My sense is that most of the infections in the Northeast or at least Boston, came from Italy and Europe.
Step 1: The Chinese government sounds the alarm around Jan 10 instead of late January.
Step 2: ???
Step 3: UEFA cancels the Atalanta-Valencia Champions League match on Feb 19, despite Italy having literally zero confirmed COVID cases.
Have all of you lost the ability to read? They knew they had a SARS-like virus on December 27.
It is not only Americans who have agency in the world. If 400,000 dead bodies can't tell you that I don't know what can. Wake the fuck up.
(Sorry step 3 should have said "two days before the first COVID death in Italy" not cases.)
I'm too angry to meet my own standards. Out.
19: I think Moby was kidding in 1. It's actually pretty well-known that there are serious problems with dictatorships.
The Chinese delayed release of genomic data for a week in early January? Please. What exactly did we do upon the release of that data, and how many lives would it have saved had it been done a week earlier?
"Fifteen down to zero" was February 26th, and two days after that the Commerce Department was distributing flyers on how to better exploit the pandemic by exporting PPE to China. I'm sorry to say that Europe wasn't much better. I'm not trying to say that China was justified in doing what they did, but we didn't have a gun to our head making us act like morons, and China acting with complete transparency wouldn't have helped us.
18: One lab knew a few people had something similar to SARS on Dec. 27. That information has to be shared and confirmed and policy decisions made. Also they had no clue then that most people have much milder symptoms than SARS does and so had no clue just how widely COVID had already spread. Getting from one lab on Dec 27 to the government declaring a serious emergency by mid January would be highly competent. But even then, they didn't know that the techniques used to contain SARS (where the response had even worse delays due to worse Chinese government failures) would be insufficient for COVID.
The Wuhan lockdown started Jan 23. That's an surprisingly timely response, and wasn't enough.
Now having read the link, I'd certainly agree that suppressing internal reporting led researchers to wrong conclusions about how infectious this is. Still, 24 is right, and it's not clear that before January 10 or so, anyone could have known that Italy was going to have to destroy its economy to save itself.
In the China-is-transparent timeline, when would policy makers have known that truly asymptomatic travelers needed to be blocked? Whether that would have saved 400,000 lives depends on whether the travelers who brought the coronavirus to Italy had already left.
I think comment 2 is the crux of the argument: what stopped the PRC from responding like Taiwan, which had access to the lab information very early and responded aggressively and effectively? Is it just that that Taiwan-sized solution couldn't possibly scale? (At some point you just start haggling over the numbers: this reasonable intervention would have caused that reduction, etc.)
Is it time for me to uncover my eyes and check the news from Mexico? It has been shockingly easy to avoid, from here in the U.S.! In California! WTF. Okay I'm gonna do it.
what stopped the PRC from responding like Taiwan
A deliberate effort to suppress information was also among the things that kept that from happening. China's government behaved very badly.
Goddamn it, this was a week ago. "Several independent studies of death certificates have indicated that fatalities in Mexico City, the epicenter, may number at least three times the official count. . . . Mexico's testing rate -- about 2,350 per 1 million residents -- is among the lowest in the Americas. Chile and Peru test at a rate of more than 14 times that of Mexico, according to the Worldometer statistics site." (Peru has a very high case count but far fewer deaths reported than adjacent countries on the list like France, fwiw.)
If Mossy is bailing on this thread maybe we can talk about testing policies/regimens. I believe that tests in my county are available to anyone who might want one, but I don't know anyone who has voluntarily gotten tested, perhaps because the antibody tests still seem pretty unreliable.
NYC is encouraging everyone to get tested, whether or not they're sick at all. I've been fine so I haven't, but I'm starting to wonder if it's my civic duty.
26: Estimates are that the early cases in Wuhan were in the first half of November. Wuhan already had 6 weeks of exponential growth by Dec 27! Taiwan didn't.
Have the racist agents of your unjust system choked the life out of 380,000 people and counting in the year to date?
Car crashes also kill a lot more people than racist cops. It's important that people put these things in perspective.
How much of all of this is just that this is a tough disease and how much of this is that governments all over the world failed badly?
29: So weird here, because in Somerville anybody can get tested. Other places the criteria for asymptomatic testing are pretty strict. I just saw a graph showing that you are most infectious 1 day after symptom onset, and then it drops pretty quickly after that, but that there's a lot of capacity to infect between -3 and 0 days of symptom onset.
I get that it's a bit unseemly how Americans are focused on watching their own particular piece of shit circle around the bowl. In our defense, it's an unusually large piece of shit and the consequences of it not being flushed are very high.
That's a metaphor, not an analogy.
The AP piece is very good. I had such low expectations for Chinese transparency and bureaucracy that the story actually raised my opinion of that country's handling of this.
WHO looks maybe a bit worse than I had realized.
I still kind of wonder if the AP's version is a bit rosy, and that a more transparent political system might have allowed China to work this out even before late December.
27: right, I should clarify "Taiwan-like internal response + corresponding transparency with dire warnings to WHO and globe." As far as anger... I think if there were a more proximate target for the rage, I might feel it more, but when the source of any anger is some version of "and those fuckers are getting away with it!", it tends to burn out faster if there's no obvious way to push back. With everything involving China and geopolitics, it's complicated to figure out what levers to pull.
Still boggling at those stats from Peru. All the demagogues are right! If you test people, your numbers do look worse!
Yeah, I've seen the pushes here in Somerville for everyone to get tested. I'm not sure I really understand. Maybe they're trying to increase the chances that people will randomly be found infected before they knew it? But that isn't accomplished by just getting tested once.
There was a local article where the person in charge was chastising locals for not getting tested, saying there was an excess of tests that is going unused, and also you still need a doctor's note. I was annoyed at that. If you want people to get tested, make it easy.
Like require a doctor's note or a small cup of urine. You just really want someone to put in the effort.
How much of all of this is just that this is a tough disease and how much of this is that governments all over the world failed badly?
Yes, to the extent that I've been sympathetic to China it as been based on, "almost every government, everywhere minimized the significance of the disease until after the point at which it was too late for simple counter-measures to be successful." There are counter-examples (Taiwan, New Zealand, Vietnam), but the majority of the world fits that description.
That said, just because that pattern is common doesn't mean it's beyond criticism. The linked article is helpful at laying out more information about what are the fair criticisms.
I'm not at all sympathetic to China. I'm just really focused on the one government that I have some input into and Trump is very much trying to change the story to blame everybody but him.
41: I mean, we're clearly one of the worst. I 'm too ignorant to know what's happening in lower income countries where he death toll will likely be worse. And fuck Trump. But it does feel like a lot of governments have failed. Trump and the contemporary GOP reject the idea that government should care for all of its citizens and that it has a role to play which the private sector (even non profit hospitals and charities) can not fulfill. It seems to me that belief in the importance of government and government competence (especially in public health) has shrunk, not just in the U.S. but elsewhere as well.
41: "Sympathetic " may have been the wrong word. I don't think it requires any particular pathology of the Chinese government to explain why they made bad decisions.
It's still worth criticizing them for making bad decisions
Right, but whataboutism is a legit misdirection strategy.
There are only 24 hours in the day, and decidedly fewer that each of us is going to spend on thinking about stuff not right in front of us. We're all doing triage. Complaining about people who aren't interested in my opinion (nearly everyone) and have no obligation to even listen is nearly always below the line for me.
One drug dealer shoots another in Chicago. OK, I'm not in favor, but I'm not going to spend any time expressing that, and certainly when someone acts like I must not actually care about the police killing George Floyd because I'm not wound up about that drug dealer -- well, that's straight up bad faith, and not only am I not going to jump through hoops for such a person, I'm quite possibly never going to hear from him (it's always a him) again.
China messed up, again. What do we learn? That the Chinese government isn't reliable, that we have to make our own way, and that water is wet.
I am interested, sort of, in the facts about how this virus got from one place to another. There is, however, a deep need on the part of a whole bunch of people to focus on blaming China -- and random Chinese Americans -- for our own failures wrt to coronavirus, and this too doesn't get me out of provincial bubble.
Last sentence poorly written. I totally get why Chinese failures are over the line for MC. And China should totally do better. Is there a way to get China to do better? That's what the WHO was struggling with, and I think we can all appreciate their dilemma.
I don't think the leadership of my government, or the faction that supports it, is talking about this subject to try to figure out how we/they can do better in the future. Best of luck to all engaged in trying to change China's government for the better!
Last sentence poorly written. I totally get why Chinese failures are over the line for MC. And China should totally do better. Is there a way to get China to do better? That's what the WHO was struggling with, and I think we can all appreciate their dilemma.
I don't think the leadership of my government, or the faction that supports it, is talking about this subject to try to figure out how we/they can do better in the future. Best of luck to all engaged in trying to change China's government for the better!
China didn't mess up so much as intentionally shove a bunch of people under the bus to avoid economic pain.
Yeah, if you have testing capacity the point isn't to test everyone, it's people in jobs that require interacting closely with people can get tested every day. I don't get what they're aiming for.
"Is it obvious that China's negligence pushed us from one category to the other?"
No. Is it obvious a lot of very evil people want us to hate China more?
Yes.
A more complete answer. If their sclerotic gerontocratic oligarchy had given us 3 more months of warning, our sclerotic gerontocratic oligarchy would have squandered it.
It is not an accident that they did better than us with this crisis. Their leadership values their population at least a little. Ours does not value us in the least.
Oh crap, I forgot to do a checking in thread on Tuesday!
Also, guys, guys, listen to these local case numbers:
Last week:
6, 18 18, 14, 4, 9 (new cases per day)
The week before was similar. Before that, we were almost always in single digits.
This week:
43, 24, 27, 82 cases per day.
Like, today alone is 1/9 of our previous cumulative total of the past three months!
The free market will fix this, heebie. That's a classic Laffer curve you're describing.
Most upticks are in southern states. I do wonder if the summer retreat indoors into AC is a factor.
I'm getting ready for fall. Just bought a Pennsylvania tuxedo.
54: no, it's the nightclubs. The vast majority of our new cases are 20-29 year olds.
You are fucking kidding me. Nightclubs?
Nightclubs, but not in a way that we can understand.
It's Texas. They were probably tired of line dancing with themselves.
My son called me earlier this evening.
He now wants to come up to Canada; and it now feels like a heavy burden has just been lifted from me. And I've been stupidly in tears all evening long, ever since the boyo called me. Head due north, my son.
52- Sounds like this infection thing is going viral.
In the case of TB, it's well known that 20-29 year olds will have the highest caseload in a given population because they have the most interactions out in the world - lots of unmarried people living away from nuclear family (dating, working, partying, traveling) means lots of chances to spread transmissible disease. I was surprised that the coronavirus case distribution was not following the same pattern, but I have been wondering whether it was lack of serious symptoms combined with test shortages.
61: Can he cries the border? I can't go, but we thought Tim could until we checked the rules.
64: it's certainly not the case in the UK - but that's for patients testing positive. https://coronavirus.data.gov.uk/ Highest number of cases looks like the 80-85 age bracket - and that's absolute number, not prevalence in the cohort. But, as you say, test shortages mean that tests have been focussed on people with actual symptoms.
Seroprevalence studies like this one in Geneva https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0140673620313040 found highest seroprevalence in 20-50 year old adults; but they point out that this was after a lockdown aimed at older people in particular:
"The lower seroprevalence estimates among older adults are a sign that targeted efforts to reduce social mixing of these people with others might have succeeded. However, it remains possible that older adults develop a lower IgG response after infection--something that needs further investigation". Children, they suspect, may be both less likely to develop severe disease and less likely to catch the disease at all.
Oh, so now you're pissed?
67: Caseloads in Germany and Singapore (small n, there) do look roughly like the pattern I was expecting, though, and I think they are testing more widely.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1105465/coronavirus-covid-19-cases-age-group-germany/
https://co.vid19.sg/singapore/
When data don't match my theory, I certainly revisit the theory, but I also like to confirm that the data were acquired in a way that would be useful to test that theory. In the case of the US (and I assume the UK), coronavirus testing has not been representative population surveillance. The current antibody testing might give more representative values if done on representative samples of the population rather than people who are already reporting moderate to serious symptoms, but it's early.
That middle bucket (20-49) is most of the population, though. UK breaks it down into 5-year cohorts and the picture looks very different.
Also the median age here is 23. (I'm slightly conflating the city with the county, though. The city is about 1/3 of the county. Covid cases were county-wide.)
The median age of patients? Or of the population?
47: I wonder. I'm not even entirely convinced that this is Trump's primary motivation. I often suspect that the authoritarian mindset just doesn't do well with bad news.
Nobody does, but we vary greatly in our ability to live in denial.
72: Population. Just that the vast majority of the town is itself 20-29
52. Is more testing being done in your area (city, county, state)? I was under the impression that blue states (NY comes to mind) were doing more testing in tandem with the slow unlocking, and red states were doing the opposite. More testing is going to find more infected people. So is great State of Heebieland doing more testing?
65: BG, I think you can now both cross the border: Tim as a Canadian, and you as the spouse of a Canadian (if I'm getting your relationship/nationalities right?). The problem is, whether Canadian or not, when you cross the border into Canada, they require that you self-isolate for 14 days. And they might actually check up on you, though I don't think they're enforcing this with the efficiency of, say, the South Korean govt.
76: Basically no increase in testing. Like, the past week has been maybe a little higher on average, but very comparable to the testing levels for since May 1.
We are going for "herd immunity" in the stupidest, most destructive, least decent way possible.
77 I heard a cute story yesterday, Service worker (waiter or bartender) in Banff asks patrons where they're from. Texas. But how'd you get here? Told the border guys we were driving to Alaska, and they let us through.
Can't be true, right?
77: Yes. Tim is the Canadian but he is a permanent resident and I'm Mrs Horton, U.S. spouse. It may have gone back. A couple of weeks ago you had to be able to prove that if you needed to care for family there was nobody else who could do it. Coming in to the US from Canada, it seems to be possible by air but not land.
14 day quarantine is tough when we would normally stay with his mother for about a week.
82: Amy Acton in Ohio also resigned as health director. It was extremely demanding job with 4 AM under the circumstances, but it could not have helped that she was threatened and needed a security detail. The Governor kept her on as a health advisor, because he did not want to lose her, but gah.
Tim is the Canadian...and I'm Mrs Horton, U.S. spouse
Ha!
I believe the Canadian authorities have loosened up on the restrictions in past week or two, so that immediate family members (spouses; parents; children; etc.) of Canadian citizens no longer have to prove that their presence in Canada is absolutely necessary for the care and feeding of a Canadian citizen.
The 14-day quarantine is really tough for most people, though (and this quarantine applies to everyone crossing the border into Canada, whether Canadian citizen or not [with the exception of some exempted classes of workers in, e.g., the health care and transport industries, of course]).
80 and 84 were a bit of what I was experiencing with the menacing phone calls from crazy angry people, though obviously those two actual big-jurisdiction health officials had it much worse that I did as a local nobody who thinks you should wear a mask. But right now the crazy angry people are distracted by antifa, so there has been a respite.