Minor correction, China REPORTS making rather good progress.
While I am neither a tinfoil hat wearer nor have anything against China, the fact that they were silencing a Wuhan doctor who was trying to alert people and authorities to the virus all the way back in December makes me skeptical of their reported status.
China isn't an information blackhole nor do they have perfect censorship. If the outbreak were still accelerating in an exponential fashion it'd be impossible to hide it from the world. They have successfully hit the inflection point on their logistics curve of viral spread (for now, anyway).
The Wuhan authorities tried to silence her. There's no real reason to disbelieve their numbers now, beyond the problems of getting good numbers in a large country.
Read the WHO/China report. Or look at South Korea.
Many people here are conflating "stop" with "make it non-exponential". "Stop" just ain't going to happen, and hasn't happened anywhere (Vietnam reports they have, but come on). China reports bending the curve away from exponential. That is the goal. It is a very important one.
It's not just no longer exponential. The number of active cases is China is in decline. How long they can keep that going is debatable. But as of right now they are effectively stopping it.
What I would encourage people to consider is whether this virus is at the level that we would all be happy to allow military enforced city-wide quarantines or travel restrictions...
I understand that this is NOT the flu, but it seems like the best data we have puts the most pessimistic CFR at about 0.6% if you look at the South Korean data (who have done, by far, the best job testing en masse).
I agree that slowing the spread of the virus to help our health care workers avoid being inundated with admissions to the ICU is worth while, but I'm extremely skeptical of embracing what China has done.
> but it seems like the best data we have puts the most pessimistic CFR at about 0.6% if you look at the South Korean data
Check your stats. 0.77% of South Koreans who tested positive for the virus have died already, and more of them will die in the future. The CFR is likely to be above 1%.
~0.5% is a very reasonable estimate of the initial CFR when an epidemic starts. It's bad, around 5x as much as the flu, but probably not worth a national China-style quarantine.
But it has a key context: that's the CFR for when all patients are treated. In most of China, there were never enough infections to trigger a healthcare system collapse: that's why in all but one province, the CFR was indeed ~0.4%.
In one province, Hubei, the medical system did collapse.
Its CFR jumped to 3-4%. That is worth going to extreme measures to prevent. In the USA, that would amount to ~10M dead.
That is not a seasonal flu.
I think a superior approach for most of the world is one along the lines of Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea: extensive testing and contact tracing and limited but real quarantine measures. But, yes, everything should be on the table to prevent the nightmare healthcare system collapse scenario.
CFR of 0.6% is a very optimistic figure. It is a naive calculation based on current # deaths / # infections.
1) But # infections were growing exponentially, we need to use numbers from the same cohort, which implies much lower # infections & higher CFR. Naive CFR will go up once infections grow more slowly. (It already is higher than 0.6%).
2) South Korean confirmed cases are much younger than their median age, mainly between 20-29 years old (perhaps because of where superspreading events happen—that church). This age group has a much lower fatality rate from Covid-19.
3) # hospital beds per capita in South Korea is second highest among OECD countries (1st is Japan) and ~4 times that of the US. They already have patients waiting for beds. Most countries will do much worse if they reach the same # infections per capita.
We can embrace what China has done, or what S. Korea has done, or what Singapore has done, or what Italy has finally started doing. Any of those would have a dramatically positive effect. Right now, we (U.S.) haven't done any of that. That is the problem.
China is now seeing a wave of secondary infections as they relax travel restrictions and as people enter the country from elsewhere. They have not stopped the spread, they simply slowed it down.
That's the whole point. If you slow it down you can avoid the rapid spike in severe cases that overwhelm the system. It's like traffic -- once you surpass a certain volume, the system locks up and throughput drops.
I think the point was to do a controlled restart while making sure the rate of secondary infections remains low enough that the impact of the coronavirus remains less than the flu.
How do we know that the numbers are trustworthy? They weren't for the first two months and China has clamped down on any information leakage. Meanwhile as of last week their factories were still at around 50% capacity or less (check pollution maps online) and now I'm hearing rumors that they're forcing uighurs to work the factories that migrants are refusing to go back to.
I'm not convinced yet. This would not be the first time a communist authoritarian regime lied about a bad situation - far from it, it's standard if you look at history in the Soviet Union for example. Authoritarian regimes cannot work without being respected and/or feared by the people, so they are incentivesed to lie to save face and simultaneously punish anyone who questions the lies.
Especially considering that the longer this drags on, the more likely nations and corporations alike are to pull production from China permanently.
filoleg|6 years ago
While I am neither a tinfoil hat wearer nor have anything against China, the fact that they were silencing a Wuhan doctor who was trying to alert people and authorities to the virus all the way back in December makes me skeptical of their reported status.
CydeWeys|6 years ago
nl|6 years ago
Read the WHO/China report. Or look at South Korea.
elif|6 years ago
hcknwscommenter|6 years ago
learc83|6 years ago
rm_-rf_|6 years ago
I understand that this is NOT the flu, but it seems like the best data we have puts the most pessimistic CFR at about 0.6% if you look at the South Korean data (who have done, by far, the best job testing en masse).
I agree that slowing the spread of the virus to help our health care workers avoid being inundated with admissions to the ICU is worth while, but I'm extremely skeptical of embracing what China has done.
ummonk|6 years ago
Check your stats. 0.77% of South Koreans who tested positive for the virus have died already, and more of them will die in the future. The CFR is likely to be above 1%.
scarmig|6 years ago
But it has a key context: that's the CFR for when all patients are treated. In most of China, there were never enough infections to trigger a healthcare system collapse: that's why in all but one province, the CFR was indeed ~0.4%.
In one province, Hubei, the medical system did collapse.
Its CFR jumped to 3-4%. That is worth going to extreme measures to prevent. In the USA, that would amount to ~10M dead.
That is not a seasonal flu.
I think a superior approach for most of the world is one along the lines of Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea: extensive testing and contact tracing and limited but real quarantine measures. But, yes, everything should be on the table to prevent the nightmare healthcare system collapse scenario.
nopinsight|6 years ago
1) But # infections were growing exponentially, we need to use numbers from the same cohort, which implies much lower # infections & higher CFR. Naive CFR will go up once infections grow more slowly. (It already is higher than 0.6%).
2) South Korean confirmed cases are much younger than their median age, mainly between 20-29 years old (perhaps because of where superspreading events happen—that church). This age group has a much lower fatality rate from Covid-19.
3) # hospital beds per capita in South Korea is second highest among OECD countries (1st is Japan) and ~4 times that of the US. They already have patients waiting for beds. Most countries will do much worse if they reach the same # infections per capita.
jacobolus|6 years ago
hcknwscommenter|6 years ago
sulam|6 years ago
Spooky23|6 years ago
CydeWeys|6 years ago
ummonk|6 years ago
jessriedel|6 years ago
wholien|6 years ago
will_pseudonym|6 years ago
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/08/china-...
swader999|6 years ago
samsolomon|6 years ago
Like guns or not, that's the 2nd Amendment at work.
earthtourist|6 years ago
allovernow|6 years ago
I'm not convinced yet. This would not be the first time a communist authoritarian regime lied about a bad situation - far from it, it's standard if you look at history in the Soviet Union for example. Authoritarian regimes cannot work without being respected and/or feared by the people, so they are incentivesed to lie to save face and simultaneously punish anyone who questions the lies.
Especially considering that the longer this drags on, the more likely nations and corporations alike are to pull production from China permanently.
smohare|6 years ago