Coronavirus Sars-CoV-2/Covid-19 Megathread

[Sheilbh]

Well it's also because they didn't notify the WHO of this disease until it was too late. As I say this was circulating in France in mid-December before China reported it's first case and well before they acknowledged it could transmit between humans. By the time this disease was already in Europe, China was arresting doctors who were raising concerns about a new disease they kept seeing. My suspicion at the time, and still, is that this wasn't a choice by China - it was sort of structural. Local officials thought they could contain it and keep it local and not bother Beijing about it, by the time they realised this was more serious and they'd lost control it was already spreading in the rest of China and the world. I could be wrong, that's just my suspicion.

And I'm not entirely convinced by Chinese statistics on a lot of points and they have had to lock down areas fairly regularly. I've mentioned before that there have been a few regional lockdowns despite not reporting any new cases or clusters. I work with Chinese colleagues and generally they're still working from home like the rest of us.

I don't know how well we're able to assess the Chinese response based on the information we have at the moment.

[Valmy]

The way I look at it, Chinese actually did a brilliant job in Wuhan, all things considered.  Yes, the horse did leave the barn, but at least in China all the horses in the wild were eventually caught. 

The reason that Chinese response ultimately failed for the world at large is that China wasn't in charge of the response in Lombardy or NYC.  On the territory they did control, they extinguished their own one hotspot rather effectively and prevented any more from flaring up. 

To the extent that this Wired article did turn out to be prescient, it was prescient only because the non-Chinese dropped the ball, which wasn't where they were going.  It wasn't prescient because of any "what in the world are they doing" commentary presented there.

Look I am all for chastising ourselves for our arrogance and mistakes but let's not start sucking off the Chinese just yet. They fucked up plenty.

[Zoupa]

This is obviously anecdotal and refers only to my little corner of healthcare, but back in March it was pretty much understood that the gvt advice not to wear masks for the general public was 100% because of supply problems. They wanted to keep the stocks for hospitals, which stockpiled like crazy when the catastrophe actually hit long-term care homes instead.

[viper37]

Edit: I look back at this thread and lots of posts about people wearing masks but nothing saying that we are advised not to wear them. Dorsey even posted a joke about wearing a mask to keep safe from Corona Beer back on Feb 4th so where is this "we were told not to wear masks" stuff coming from?

In the US, I believe Fauci, and/or the CDC publicly advised against masks to protect yourself.

Same in Quebec, with our director of public health, he expressely told people in march to not wear a mask to protect themselves, that they should wash their hands and keep their distance.

That was back in January, but nice Fox news talking point. Look at the rest of what he said during that same interview.

Get your mask on when required Karen.


Correction March


https://www.factcheck.org/2020/05/outdated-fauci-video-on-face-masks-shared-out-of-context/

Get your mask on when required Karen.

https://www.factcheck.org/2020/05/video-trump-twists-faucis-words/

As I was responding to Valmy's question, I believe I was correct, that public health services in occidental countries advised against using masks for your own protection early on in the pandemic.  They changed later.  At least as of early to mid-April in Quebec, not sure elsewhere.

I did not mean to imply anything else, despite my opposition to the widespread use of the mask.

[viper37]

100% agree again - this is the point I've made before that lockdown isn't a long-term policy, it's what happens when your policy fails. It's a last resort, it's a failure and it just buys you time to control the disesase in another way.

as this disease spread asymptomatically, it was very hard to use anything else than a lockdown to slow the spread.  Even if we close our borders to tourists, we still have a lot of people travelling all around the world, and it's difficult to keep trace of everyone if you don't implement correct procedures at the border to order them to a quarantine and trace them to make sure they don't potentially spread the disease.

[viper37]

This is obviously anecdotal and refers only to my little corner of healthcare, but back in March it was pretty much understood that the gvt advice not to wear masks for the general public was 100% because of supply problems. They wanted to keep the stocks for hospitals, which stockpiled like crazy when the catastrophe actually hit long-term care homes instead.

That last part, I still fail to understand.  Why did they require to actually have the army come in to tell the nurses and general staff to wear their PPE, wash their hands and change clothes in between patients??  Are they all that stupid over there?

[11B4V]

The way I look at it, Chinese actually did a brilliant job in Wuhan, all things considered.  Yes, the horse did leave the barn, but at least in China all the horses in the wild were eventually caught. 

The reason that Chinese response ultimately failed for the world at large is that China wasn't in charge of the response in Lombardy or NYC.  On the territory they did control, they extinguished their own one hotspot rather effectively and prevented any more from flaring up. 

To the extent that this Wired article did turn out to be prescient, it was prescient only because the non-Chinese dropped the ball, which wasn't where they were going.  It wasn't prescient because of any "what in the world are they doing" commentary presented there.

Look I am all for chastising ourselves for our arrogance and mistakes but let's not start sucking off the Chinese just yet. They fucked up plenty.

I don't believe their numbers for a second.

[DGuller]

Fair enough, China has every incentive in the world to make people think about their response the way I'm thinking of it.  That said, I kind of doubt that Brazil is unfolding quietly within its borders either, and that all information about it is perfectly suppressed.  After all, other countries in China's region have likewise managed to substantially limit the death toll from the virus, if not the economic toll, and some of them appear to be more transparent than China. 

I would guess that the reason they're all getting off easy is because they don't bitch and moan about the masks, and how they're useless pieces of cloth that are only good for suffocating you.  They just wear the damn masks and get on with their lives.

[11B4V]

Fair enough, China has every incentive in the world to make people think about their response the way I'm thinking of it.  That said, I kind of doubt that Brazil is unfolding quietly within its borders either, and that all information about it is perfectly suppressed.  After all, other countries in China's region have likewise managed to substantially limit the death toll from the virus, if not the economic toll, and some of them appear to be more transparent than China. 

I would guess that the reason they're all getting off easy is because they don't bitch and moan about the masks, and how they're useless pieces of cloth that are only good for suffocating you.  They just wear the damn masks and get on with their lives.

Yea that is true. American Karen's FTW.

[Sheilbh]

Nate Silver expressing something tried to say here a lot better than I can

It's a subtle shift, but at some point in the US discourse, closing/locking things down transformed from something you implement for want of better alternatives—and to be clear, in the US, we probably still lack those alternatives—into the default way to fighting the coronavirus.

I think there's something similar going on with masks incidentally. I think part of it is probably because there's such strong resistance it becomes a really important issue.

[Tamas]

The shrilling over masks is a bit of a societal let down for me. I know there must be a tiny minority of people with health conditions that don't allow it but otherwise as it's been pointed out, the Far East has shown us that you can perfectly function with a bloody mask on.

[Sheilbh]

The shrilling over masks is a bit of a societal let down for me. I know there must be a tiny minority of people with health conditions that don't allow it but otherwise as it's been pointed out, the Far East has shown us that you can perfectly function with a bloody mask on.

Yeah I mean I've not actually seen any in the UK. The usual suspects are mouthing off in the papers. But I swear every day in the US there's another video of some grown adult person throwing a tantrum over masks - yesterday was the lady dressed as the statue of liberty who was trying to "charge" judges being sworn in.

And as with the social distance shaming, I don't know how much all those videos help. But it is crazy.

[Admiral Yi]

The (Republican) governor of Ohio has tested positive.

[Sheilbh]

The (Republican) governor of Ohio has tested positive.

It was a false positive. The second test was apparently more sensitive/accurate and him and his wife tested negative.

[Admiral Yi]

asoka