The WHO was pressured into saying not to ban flights from China. Made worse by the fact that China itself was nailing domestic flight from Wuhan to the pillars of shame for eternity.
> The WHO is supposed to urge member countries to keep their borders open as much as possible
The WHO is supposed to care about health, not be the World Trade Organization. This had nothing to do with science. Saying: Ah, yes, banning flights will have little effect, because there are already Chinese tourists there, is defeatist, not effective pandemic control.
> The US banned travel from China, but continued to allow travel from Europe.
So you are effectively saying the US did not ban travel hard enough for it to be effective? Or that Italy should have also banned Chinese tourists, for the US ban to be effective?
> The first major outbreak in the US, in NY, was brought in from Europe. Because the US had almost no testing at that time, the outbreak in NY spread undetected for weeks.
From my information, it was spreading around the world in December of 2019. Expats in Wuhan who got hospitalized in November 2019 were told in December that they had contracted viral pneumonia SARS.
From CDC leaks, it appears to have been spreading with local community spread, and their warnings to prepare were either blocked by Trump, or were not send to avoid panic (of course it will start in New York and LA, so wait until it spreads everywhere, so people don't start to flee like headless chickens)
> If you look at the actual advice that the WHO was giving in late January / early February 2020,[4] it was probably a much better strategy than what the US ended up doing.
Do not ban flights from China! Or if you do, ban all flights from everywhere! But that won't be effective anyway! What is effective is testing! China shows us the way how to contain this. They are the role model of virus control.
The advice from the WHO was an absolute joke. Listening to it in the early stages of the pandemic would make you a poor master of the house, unprepared to deal with a family during a pandemic.
> What was the US' biggest problem early on in the pandemic?
Not a lack of testing. Testing only makes the problem formally worse. The real problem was a lack of information coming from WHO, as they were the mouthpiece of China, and China was hush about the real origins, the real CFR, the real R+, the real human-to-human transmission.
China had the guts to pressure the WHO into saying that packages from China were 100% safe, corona would never survive the trip. And now they push it as disinformation as the origin: it was imported into China or Wuhan from a package or frozen meat.
If you want to say travel restrictions are not effective against containment of a H2H virus, be my guest. The situation we knew we were dealing with from SARS-1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_China_Flight_112
> The WHO was pressured into saying not to ban flights from China
As I just explained, the WHO's recommendations on travel restrictions are based on the International Health Regulations (2005). The US was intimately involved in the drafting of that document. The WHO was following the mandate it had been given.
> The WHO is supposed to care about health, not be the World Trade Organization.
If you look at the WHO's history and read through the International Health Regulations, you'll find that the WHO is supposed to be concerned with the economy. It's not supposed to overreact and tank the world economy. Whatever measures it recommends are supposed to be in line with the IHR, and backed by the best available scientific evidence. The WHO is also not supposed to punish countries that suffer outbreaks, because everyone recognizes that if you start doing that, countries will simply lie and hide outbreaks. This is one of the reasons why the IHR discourage travel restrictions.
> Ah, yes, banning flights will have little effect, because there are already Chinese tourists there, is defeatist, not effective pandemic control.
It's not defeatist. It's rational. Closing the barn door after the horse has bolted is useless. If there are already sick people inside your country, your first priority has to be finding them, isolating them, and quarantining their contacts. By the time the US stopped inbound travel from China, there was already community spread inside the US.
> So you are effectively saying the US did not ban travel hard enough for it to be effective?
Neither hard enough nor early enough. By the time anyone (including the Chinese government) realized that the new coronavirus was a big deal, there were probably already people with the virus inside the US. The US' travel ban in late January was a political stunt, but it had little practical effect on the development of the pandemic in the US.
> Expats in Wuhan who got hospitalized in November 2019 were told in December that they had contracted viral pneumonia SARS.
This is false. The first detection of a SARS-related coronavirus in a patient was on 27 December 2019. The virus may have already been spreading around the world by then, but it had not yet been identified as a novel virus.
> Not a lack of testing. Testing only makes the problem formally worse.
What? Testing lets you know what's actually happening. If you start testing early enough in an outbreak and if you put enough resources into contact tracing, you can significantly slow - or even reverse - the spread of the virus. If you're not quick enough, you can at least figure out that you have to start implementing lockdowns. But only finding out that you have an outbreak when hospitals start filling up is the absolute worst thing that can happen.
By the way, the blog you linked to is full of false claims. Right off the bat, it claims that in late January 2020,
> China, intentionally or otherwise, was able to lockdown its cities unknown to the world.
Probably every newspaper, news radio station and TV news show around the world covered the lockdown of Chinese cities in late January 2020. It was the #1 story worldwide.
> As I just explained, the WHO's recommendations on travel restrictions are based on the International Health Regulations (2005).
General recommendations! Not a playbook from 2005 you pull out for dealing with an upcoming pandemic!
> the WHO is supposed to be concerned with the economy. It's not supposed to overreact and tank the world economy.
It is also not supposed to underreact and tank the world economy. What would the world economy look like if China had reported their real numbers, and these real numbers had triggered a safety threshold and banned/heavily restricted travel from China for the 2 months December and January?
Probably a lot different from the world economy now: All Western countries show decline, and just China showed economic growth in 2020.
> The WHO is also not supposed to punish countries that suffer outbreaks, because everyone recognizes that if you start doing that, countries will simply lie and hide outbreaks.
Instead, China simply lied and hid their outbreak. And they got a compliment for it. Weird tactic if everyone recognizes this.
> Closing the barn door after the horse has bolted is useless.
This is a barn with over a billion horses, not a single horse. Close that damn door!
> By the time the US stopped inbound travel from China, there was already community spread inside the US.
Yes, it is not waterproof, but shields against the rain. And if you say economic concerns play a major role in deciding travel restrictions, then this measure should also be judged accordingly. China was pushing for travel from a political/economical interest. US pushed back from a political/economical interest.
> By the time anyone (including the Chinese government) realized that the new coronavirus was a big deal
The WHO had to learn about this pandemic from open source information gathering! The Chinese government tried to save face, and lost control. By the time the rest of the world was notified, it was already months too late to act.
Some scientists have actually put a human life number on this delay. By the time people in power knew, efforts were started to cover it up.
> The US' travel ban in late January was a political stunt, but it had little practical effect on the development of the pandemic in the US.
It can be both. Political pushback against China playing politics. It had some practical effect, and it is completely in line with common sense and science that travel bans help curb outbreaks.
> This is false. The first detection of a SARS-related coronavirus in a patient was on 27 December 2019.
According to you this is false. You seem to be following the official timelines. According to my timeline, the first doctors fell ill early December. Wuhan expats were told by Chinese doctors in the middle of December, that their hospitalizations in November were due to viral pneumonia SARS. But officially, many of those doctors, patients, and expats, dissapeared.
> What? Testing lets you know what's actually happening.
CDC and intelligence agencies know what's happening without the need for tests. You throw tests at the problem and find 10k people in New York, instead of "projections of multiple community spreads". How your tactics change with this news? How does the public reacts to those numbers?
We know the barn is on fire! Testing only shows where. What would have helped would have been neighbor China warning about a starting fire.
> put enough resources into contact tracing
By then it was already way too late for contact tracing efforts. Like you said it was already community spreading. Contact tracing would only have been an option if China had shared early information.
> But only finding out that you have an outbreak when hospitals start filling up is the absolute worst thing that can happen.
The CDC was well aware of the outbreaks. The hospitals were already planning for 450k deaths with 5 cases. They don't need tests for that. They have OSINT solutions for that, and can hook into US government data collection too. Like said, it is how the WHO was notified about COVID. They had to find out by mining social networks in China, and polling hospital admittance.
> What would the world economy look like if China had reported their real numbers, and these real numbers had triggered a safety threshold and banned/heavily restricted travel from China for the 2 months December and January?
In late January 2020, China:
* Announced there was human-to-human transmission.
* Completely sealed off Hubei province (population: 60 million).
* Implemented lockdowns in cities throughout China.
Yet most countries did next to nothing for a month or more. It wasn't until hospitals in Lombardy, Italy started filling up that people in Europe and the US started to take the virus seriously. So my prediction: better information from China (which the Chinese government itself did not necessarily have anyways) and more dire warnings from the WHO would have had no effect. Following WHO recommendations would already have been a massive improvement over what European countries and the US did.
> Throughout January, the World Health Organization publicly praised China for what it called a speedy response to the new coronavirus. It repeatedly thanked the Chinese government for sharing the genetic map of the virus “immediately,” and said its work and commitment to transparency were “very impressive, and beyond words.”
> But behind the scenes, it was a much different story, one of significant delays by China and considerable frustration among WHO officials over not getting the information they needed to fight the spread of the deadly virus, The Associated Press has found.
To actually praise China for announcing human-to-human in late Januray 2020, while blaming most countries for doing next to nothing, is extremely ugly to me. I won't attack that (common) viewpoint, as it riles me up too much.
After China announced there was human-to-human transmission, European countries did almost nothing for another month. The US took even longer to take any serious actions. Do you really think things would have been different if China had announced human-to-human transmission 5-10 days earlier?
> After China announced there was human-to-human transmission, European countries did almost nothing for another month.
No, they started procuring masks and other PPE, but found that China had already conquered that market, before their announcement.
They could have told the US and European countries that the possibility of a modified virus lab-leak cannot be ruled out. Instead they started destroying samples, muzzle scientists, and had all their embassies push that WIV was a conspiracy theory, before any scientific investigation had even looked at it.
> The US took even longer to take any serious actions.
Yes. Was terrible to see. Can't even muster the mood to defend that.
> Do you really think things would have been different if China had announced human-to-human transmission 5-10 days earlier?
Yes. And a major moral difference. 5-50 days of valuable time. 5-50 more WHO meetings where Tedros says the window to act is getting smaller before Achilles will overtake the Tortoise.
> The WHO was pressured into saying not to ban flights from China. Made worse by the fact that China itself was nailing domestic flight from Wuhan to the pillars of shame for eternity.
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/blogs/Whathappensif/how...
Maybe research a bit more into WHO guideline on banning air travel from a particular country?
The following link is from WHO statement on H1N1 back in 2009, stating:
"The Director-General recommended not to close borders and not to restrict international travel. It was considered prudent for people who are ill to delay international travel and for people developing symptoms following international travel to seek medical attention."
They have not changed their position on this, not for H1N1, not for COVID-19. And banning travel from China ONLY is just not effective, and a political posture at best. It doesn't stop people re-routing flight, nor did it stop the further spread of COVID-19 into the US, which has been found a majority to be cases from Europe.
> The WHO is supposed to care about health, not be the World Trade Organization. This had nothing to do with science. Saying: Ah, yes, banning flights will have little effect, because there are already Chinese tourists there, is defeatist, not effective pandemic control.
No, "already Chinese tourists there" is never the reason behind their recommendation.
It 1) Doesn't stop people from re-routing flight;
2) Postures as an effort taken to curb spread, while in actuality does little;
and most importantly, 3) The majority of cases that came to US was from Europe, not China.
> So you are effectively saying the US did not ban travel hard enough for it to be effective?
Not sure hard enough is the right word, but an international ban could work better. Still, the best method of restricting travel with forced manual quarantine period for ALL incoming travelers was never prevalent in the US.
> From my information, it was spreading around the world in December of 2019. Expats in Wuhan who got hospitalized in November 2019 were told in December that they had contracted viral pneumonia SARS.
> From CDC leaks, it appears to have been spreading with local community spread, and their warnings to prepare were either blocked by Trump, or were not send to avoid panic (of course it will start in New York and LA, so wait until it spreads everywhere, so people don't start to flee like headless chickens)
No comment.
> Do not ban flights from China! Or if you do, ban all flights from everywhere! But that won't be effective anyway! What is effective is testing!
> The advice from the WHO was an absolute joke. Listening to it in the early stages of the pandemic would make you a poor master of the house, unprepared to deal with a family during a pandemic.
Interesting, why describe the situation like "a poor master of the house, unprepared to deal with a family"?
> Not a lack of testing. Testing only makes the problem formally worse. The real problem was a lack of information coming from WHO, as they were the mouthpiece of China, and China was hush about the real origins, the real CFR, the real R+, the real human-to-human transmission.
You must be jesting, no? Testing makes the problem formally worse?
So, a country should not make raising testing and laboratory capability to accurately gauge the situation and how transmissible the disease, but should instead wait for WHO to spoon-feed information. But the problem is, WHO provide statements and guidelines from statistics and reports of individual countries.
For the other "accusations", I hope you do realize that the lack of (method-wise and quantity-wise) relevant and specific testing at the beginning of the pandemic was the biggest reason why data were hard to collect, why evidence of H2H transmission were delayed in confirmation, and why CFR, R+, and other stats were not correctly estimated.
> China had the guts to pressure the WHO into saying that packages from China were 100% safe, corona would never survive the trip. And now they push it as disinformation as the origin: it was imported into China or Wuhan from a package or frozen meat.
Not sure where the evidence is for that, but it's easily explained: more time enabled further study on the virus, and it's found to survive supply chains of frozen products. You do realize that we are dealing with a new virus and scientist can make discovery about the new virus that could cause related policy to shift a 180.
> If you want to say travel restrictions are not effective against containment of a H2H virus, be my guest. The situation we knew we were dealing with from SARS-1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_China_Flight_112
Not sure what's your point? Again, travel restriction against a single country were not helping, nor going to help. What's more, COVID-19 is different from previous epidemics in that the majority of cases are asymptomatic or presymptomatic, that it spreads before symptoms if there will be symptoms.
The WHO was put under tremendous pressure and suffered information-blackout by China. As a result of this blackout, not long-standing policy, the WHO suggested there was no proof of human to human transmission. As a result of this pressure the WHO re-iterated time and time again that banning flights from China would do nothing to curb the outbreak.
> a political posture at best
Even if it was encoded in policy (I will simply acede), it remains a policy based on politics and economic concerns, not a recommendation a scientist would ever give: an aerosolized h2h virus is out there, but it is has no effect to restrict travel from there.
It is weird to me that the opposition seems to be: banning flights is just playing politics. However, saying to not ban flights is science and based on sane protocol.
COVID was once in a 100 years. Not really apt to combat with political policies written in "peace time".
> No, "already Chinese tourists there" is never the reason behind their recommendation.
If the WHO is correct: China did extremely well with virus containment, and set a standard for the rest of the world. And Xi is correct: People fleeing from Wuhan are to be nailed on the pillars of shame for all of eternity. And you are correct: restricting travel is just political and does not nothing to help curb spread.
Then what is this inconsistent reality?
> No comment.
Then no links to ease your search for a truth.
> Interesting, why describe the situation like "a poor master of the house, unprepared to deal with a family"?
This pandemic showed that for maximum security for you and your loved ones, you have to rely on yourself and your own fact-finding. Health generals were telling you not to buy masks as these were not protective. Senators were saying that banning flights would be useless to help curb SARS (in response to Trump, not in response to fact-finding).
You listened, then you took your family to China Town without masks in early March 2020. You listened to the CDC, you were without toilet paper or medical supplies. You listened to China, and you would not prepare.
The officials first botched the response, heavily politicized it, then attacked the "misinformation pandemic" so your aunts facebook post on turmeric would be blocked for promoting false cures, and your uncles facebook post on the WIV would be blocked for racist conspiracy.
Or maybe you had an oxymeter, supplies of vitamins, masks, gloves, glasses, rubbing alcohol, vaporizer, routes to hospitals with occupancy, and 2 weeks of canned food. Maybe you informed your nearest ones, when doctors and virologists on TV were comparing COVID to heart attacks.
> You must be jesting, no?
A bit. I knew it would be perceived as a Trumpian: Just don't test, then we won't know, and what we won't know can't be a problem. But maybe you can re-read in the most favorable manner you can muster and take more from it than a joke: By the time we were bickering about tests, their availability, and effectiveness, there was already wide local community spread in the major cities. This stage demanded a different approach. Contact tracing resulting from a positive test would be a drop in a bucket. Test, say, 95%, and now you have exact numbers of something you already know in general to be true. Now what? Personalized quarantine efforts costing billions, while 5% goes on their merry way?
Italy dumped all their tests in a week to get an overview of their situation. Result: Formally, the problem got worse (they know the extend exactly), and a shortage of tests followed where doctors had to sail blind and just assume it was COVID for everyone with pneumonia.
> relevant and specific testing at the beginning of the pandemic was the biggest reason why data were hard to collect, why evidence of H2H transmission were delayed in confirmation, and why CFR, R+, and other stats were not correctly estimated.
It was a reason, I'll give you that. The biggest reason was China not being clear with information sharing. The WHO supporting that, because "now is not the time to point fingers", and countries either underestimating, or forced to overestimate (like the UK was forced to treat this very severely).
> more time enabled further study on the virus, and it's found to survive supply chains of frozen products.
No we already knew by then that coronavirus could survive on plastics for days. That active SARS was known to survive in sewage system for weeks, and demanded extra chlorination.
But there was more time to allow for a cover-up and produce an alternative story.
> You do realize that we are dealing with a new virus and scientist can make discovery about the new virus that could cause related policy to shift a 180.
No. It was extremely useful, and still is, to treat this virus as SARS-1. SARS-2 is unlikely to be constructively different, no matter if epistemic science takes years to validate a hypothesis.
Ask yourself why an initial policy was 180 different from a policy that would be sane for a precursor disease?
> Not sure what's your point? Again, travel restriction against a single country were not helping, nor going to help.
The point is that curbing travel from a country that is suffering an outbreak is effective against fighting that outbreak. Not 100%, but nobody is claiming that. There is water on the floor, you close the tap before you start mopping.
Banning travel from China helped, it would have helped a lot more if done earlier, and doing it the next time is going to help combat spread.
Asymptomatic spread is only a reason for travel bans (which target everyone from the epicenter, not just visibly ill people, who are "strongly advised" to not travel). Not a reason for throwing your hands in the air and going: Now it won't help at all!
> It was a reason, I'll give you that. The biggest reason was China not being clear with information sharing. The WHO supporting that, because "now is not the time to point fingers", and countries either underestimating, or forced to overestimate (like the UK was forced to treat this very severely).
I just don't buy the "China not being clear with information sharing" part that much. I mean, a week after the preliminary report China locked-down a city of 11 mil, how much serious would China have to get?
China also release guidelines on diagnoses and treatment, and update quite rapidly on their guidelines (as expected for a novel virus).
China did not stop Chinese researchers from release papers on findings about COVID-19, from research on the virus itself to various treatment results on patients and even better practices for patients.
In other words, China is responsible for China, just like US is responsible for US, and UK is responsible for UK. Each country's CDC need to do their own research, evaluate their country's resources, and make their own guidelines, and educate their populace.
> No we already knew by then that coronavirus could survive on plastics for days. That active SARS was known to survive in sewage system for weeks, and demanded extra chlorination.
> But there was more time to allow for a cover-up and produce an alternative story.
> No. It was extremely useful, and still is, to treat this virus as SARS-1. SARS-2 is unlikely to be constructively different, no matter if epistemic science takes years to validate a hypothesis.
> Ask yourself why an initial policy was 180 different from a policy that would be sane for a precursor disease?
You do realize that most of the carrier and spreader for SARS-COV-2 are pre-symptomatic (some asymptomatic), and it spreads before symptoms (if there will be symptoms)? That's vastly different from SARS-COV-1, which exhibited much lower rate of asymptomatic spread (I don't think there were research of pre-symptomatic transmission, such was not observed), only around 3-8%. But pre-symptomatic transmission for SARS-COV-2 account for multiple times that, and depending on different research papers 8-20x (3x20 -- 8x8 -- 10x8).
This makes detection and quarantine day and night vs SARS-COV-1, which spreads after symptoms. So temperature scanning etc. which were effective for SARS-COV-1 turns out to not be even closely effective for SARS-COV-2, and need PCR testing and lab works to ascertain.
> The point is that curbing travel from a country that is suffering an outbreak is effective against fighting that outbreak. Not 100%, but nobody is claiming that. There is water on the floor, you close the tap before you start mopping.
> Banning travel from China helped, it would have helped a lot more if done earlier, and doing it the next time is going to help combat spread.
> Asymptomatic spread is only a reason for travel bans (which target everyone from the epicenter, not just visibly ill people, who are "strongly advised" to not travel). Not a reason for throwing your hands in the air and going: Now it won't help at all!
I don't know. Banning a single country while allowing rerouting to other countries is more hassle, but I doubt how many will be dissuaded by that. I mean, if UK banned India and Russia did not, and rich Indian Business men have assets in UK, what's stopping them from buy tickets that stop at Russia? So basically do more than just banning a single country, you need to trace tickets and origins and whatnots to be effective enough.
> The WHO was put under tremendous pressure and suffered information-blackout by China. As a result of this blackout, not long-standing policy, the WHO suggested there was no proof of human to human transmission. As a result of this pressure the WHO re-iterated time and time again that banning flights from China would do nothing to curb the outbreak.
1) It's not a result of an information-blackout. Please do realize that this is a novel virus we are talking about, that got reported as such on Dec. 31st 2019, and per WHO's tweet on Jan. 14th 2020 (merely 2 weeks!),
"Preliminary investigations conducted by the Chinese authorities have found no clear evidence of human-to-human transmission of the novel"
Note the words "Preliminary", "no clear evidence", THIS IS NEW, CHINA and WHO DON'T KNOW MUCH, THEY NEED TIME
In comparison, the alpha COVID-19 variant discovered in UK was back in "Late September" back in 2020, and publicized in BMJ in Dec. 16th 2020.
That's 2.5 - 3 month. And what of this variant?
"
Does this variant spread more quickly?
Matt Hancock told the House of Commons on 14 December that initial analysis showed that the new variant “may be associated” with the recent rise in cases in southeast England. However, this is not the same as saying that it is causing the rise.
Loman explained, “This variant is strongly associated with where we are seeing increasing rates of covid-19. It’s a correlation, but we can’t say it is causation. But there is striking growth in this variant, which is why we are worried, and it needs urgent follow-up and investigation.”
"Is the new variant more dangerous?
We don’t know yet. Mutations that make viruses more infectious don’t necessarily make them more dangerous. "
"
So instead of 2 weeks, UK had 10 - 12 weeks, but they still don't know much about the alpha variant. Why? It takes time, time to collect testing results, compile and aggregate them, make hypothesis, make models, test models, etc.
Why do people expect China to be magnitudes better, and if not, it's China's fault? I mean, it's not like the US or UK didn't down play the pandemic at the beginning, and only after Italy or New York did they speed up. Why evaluate with double standards?
2) Like what my previous comment said, recommendation to not ban flights or restrict on international travel has been WHO's standing since H1N1 back in 2009,
The following link is from WHO statement on H1N1 back in 2009, stating: "The Director-General recommended not to close borders and not to restrict international travel. It was considered prudent for people who are ill to delay international travel and for people developing symptoms following international travel to seek medical attention."
> Even if it was encoded in policy (I will simply acede), it remains a policy based on politics and economic concerns, not a recommendation a scientist would ever give: an aerosolized h2h virus is out there, but it is has no effect to restrict travel from there.
> It is weird to me that the opposition seems to be: banning flights is just playing politics. However, saying to not ban flights is science and based on sane protocol.
> COVID was once in a 100 years. Not really apt to combat with political policies written in "peace time".
No, what "posturing" meant to say is it's ineffective, and has prove to be ineffective. I'm saying he did not do enough, either he banned all flights (which I don't think would be possible back then), or enforce mandatory quarantine (which hadn't happen even now, much less likely then).
And such "posturing" only hurts effort to better protect, just like hygienic theater of temperature monitoring and deep cleaning in late 2020 doesn't help too little, but take away resources from measures that can help.
> If the WHO is correct: China did extremely well with virus containment, and set a standard for the rest of the world. And Xi is correct: People fleeing from Wuhan are to be nailed on the pillars of shame for all of eternity. And you are correct: restricting travel is just political and does not nothing to help curb spread.
> Then what is this inconsistent reality?
This reality is consistent:
1) China did do quite well for its size and amount of people. You can argue that their number is not accurate (I would say that any country's number will not be inaccurate at the beginning, when testings are much rarer)
2) I wouldn't say nailed on the pillars of shame, but they did divert a lot of potential medical resources to better monitor spread outside of Wuhan, instead of putting more medical personnel and resources in Wuhan.
3) Restricting travel does not curb spread if you half-ass the restriction.
You need to do mandatory quarantine for incoming personnel, restrict contact and movement for the duration of the quarantine, and multiple tests during quarantine. And the precursory policy would be mandatory quarantine for at least 21 days, and people with symptoms are not to stay with their family, but to separate quarantine rooms.
> Then no links to ease your search for a truth.
No comment.
> This pandemic showed that for maximum security for you and your loved ones, you have to rely on yourself and your own fact-finding. Health generals were telling you not to buy masks as these were not protective. Senators were saying that banning flights would be useless to help curb SARS (in response to Trump, not in response to fact-finding).
> You listened, then you took your family to China Town without masks in early March 2020. You listened to the CDC, you were without toilet paper or medical supplies. You listened to China, and you would not prepare.
> The officials first botched the response, heavily politicized it, then attacked the "misinformation pandemic" so your aunts facebook post on turmeric would be blocked for promoting false cures, and your uncles facebook post on the WIV would be blocked for racist conspiracy.
> Or maybe you had an oxymeter, supplies of vitamins, masks, gloves, glasses, rubbing alcohol, vaporizer, routes to hospitals with occupancy, and 2 weeks of canned food. Maybe you informed your nearest ones, when doctors and virologists on TV were comparing COVID to heart attacks.
I do agree that to best protect one and one's closed ones, reliance on others were and are not the best option.
> A bit. I knew it would be perceived as a Trumpian: Just don't test, then we won't know, and what we won't know can't be a problem. But maybe you can re-read in the most favorable manner you can muster and take more from it than a joke: By the time we were bickering about tests, their availability, and effectiveness, there was already wide local community spread in the major cities. This stage demanded a different approach. Contact tracing resulting from a positive test would be a drop in a bucket. Test, say, 95%, and now you have exact numbers of something you already know in general to be true. Now what? Personalized quarantine efforts costing billions, while 5% goes on their merry way?
> Italy dumped all their tests in a week to get an overview of their situation. Result: Formally, the problem got worse (they know the extend exactly), and a shortage of tests followed where doctors had to sail blind and just assume it was COVID for everyone with pneumonia.
Lock-down and quarantine, testing, contact tracing, these go hand-in-hand. Only do some and not all will cause back lashes.
You lock down first for at least 1 month, quarantine the incoming personnel, quarantine those that have symptoms to individual rooms, quarantine those that had close contact with people that showed symptoms, suggest self quarantine to those that came in close.
Lock down buys some time, and in that time you need to scale production for testing, and test the heck out of the population. Priority would be people who traveled outside of the country, those that came close to travelers (airport/port workers, taxi drivers, etc.), then frontline medical personnel and staff, and down the line. Testing results gives a better presentation of the severity, and what's more, where to pool resources and personnel to prevent a collapse of the hospital system.
Contact tracing is to further track weaknesses in the lock down, quarantine, and testing. It also help to better pinpoint clusters and super-spreader events, to provide evidence to implement policy prohibiting such events.
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/blogs/Whathappensif/how...
> The WHO is supposed to urge member countries to keep their borders open as much as possible
The WHO is supposed to care about health, not be the World Trade Organization. This had nothing to do with science. Saying: Ah, yes, banning flights will have little effect, because there are already Chinese tourists there, is defeatist, not effective pandemic control.
> The US banned travel from China, but continued to allow travel from Europe.
So you are effectively saying the US did not ban travel hard enough for it to be effective? Or that Italy should have also banned Chinese tourists, for the US ban to be effective?
> The first major outbreak in the US, in NY, was brought in from Europe. Because the US had almost no testing at that time, the outbreak in NY spread undetected for weeks.
From my information, it was spreading around the world in December of 2019. Expats in Wuhan who got hospitalized in November 2019 were told in December that they had contracted viral pneumonia SARS.
From CDC leaks, it appears to have been spreading with local community spread, and their warnings to prepare were either blocked by Trump, or were not send to avoid panic (of course it will start in New York and LA, so wait until it spreads everywhere, so people don't start to flee like headless chickens)
> If you look at the actual advice that the WHO was giving in late January / early February 2020,[4] it was probably a much better strategy than what the US ended up doing.
Do not ban flights from China! Or if you do, ban all flights from everywhere! But that won't be effective anyway! What is effective is testing! China shows us the way how to contain this. They are the role model of virus control.
The advice from the WHO was an absolute joke. Listening to it in the early stages of the pandemic would make you a poor master of the house, unprepared to deal with a family during a pandemic.
> What was the US' biggest problem early on in the pandemic?
Not a lack of testing. Testing only makes the problem formally worse. The real problem was a lack of information coming from WHO, as they were the mouthpiece of China, and China was hush about the real origins, the real CFR, the real R+, the real human-to-human transmission.
China had the guts to pressure the WHO into saying that packages from China were 100% safe, corona would never survive the trip. And now they push it as disinformation as the origin: it was imported into China or Wuhan from a package or frozen meat.
If you want to say travel restrictions are not effective against containment of a H2H virus, be my guest. The situation we knew we were dealing with from SARS-1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_China_Flight_112