Notwithstanding, my statement stands as written: it's too late in the pandemic to suddenly revert to measures that were successful in some parts of Asia where they were undertaken earlier in the spread of the virus, before so much of the population was affected and already spreading it even further and faster than had been imagined possible.... that's that 'novel' part.
Pandemics are intrinsically mathematical as well as medical phenomena, so you need to have the mathematical equations of pandemic growth in your head when thinking about it.
You are suggesting that once the pandemic reaches a certain size, it becomes impossible to control.
(By control, I mean bring down the speed and growth of the pandemic, not necessarily stopping it altogether. This pandemic control is the approach used by all countries, but each country uses a set of different techniques to control the virus.)
That idea that you cannot control pandemic speed and growth at a later stage is wrong. You can. At any point in the pandemic, a key parameter which determines its speed and growth is the basic reproduction number, called R0. This represents the number of people that a person with the virus will go on to infect, on average. Originally the R0 value in this pandemic was 2 or 3, meaning each infected person would go on to infect around 2 or 3 others. But due to the controlling measures, countries have been able to lower R0, and this is what has slowed down the pandemic.
At any stage in the pandemic, if you introduce an effective new controlling technique, it will have an
instant impact on R0, and within weeks you see a reduction in new cases. We have seen this many times when mandatory universal use of face masks has been introduced in a country. We have seen this when lockdowns were introduced. Any effective new controlling measure you bring in will help to reduce R0 further.
If you can get R0 below 1, then the pandemic will actually die out. That's just a fact that comes from the mathematics of exponential growth.
We don;t even have a accurate count, the official count here in the US (and I suspect in the UK as well) is suspected to be as much as 2, 5, 8, 10 times more (take your pick .... it changes depending on what you're reading and where you're reading it) than what's been reported. We have no idea how many asymptomatic transmitters there are, and we may never know given the snail's pace at which the most basic diagnostic tool's availability is proceeding.
The official case count is wildly underestimated. That generally accepted.
You can get a more accurate idea of the number infected in any country by a calculation using the death toll figure. The death rate in Europe it is 0.4% (but it is lower than that in the US). So that means for every one death, there will be
100 / 0.4 = 250 infected cases.
So in the UK, we have had about 17,000 deaths so far, which means there must be at least
17000 x 100 / 0.4 = 4.3 million people who have had the virus in the UK. This is a simple calculation that allows for a rough estimate of the number who have been infected with the virus.
So the richest, best equipped country in the world is staggering under a load of illness and death that's unprecedented, totaling more lives than those lost in the last 5 wars, combined.
The US like most Western countries was ill equipped to handle any pandemic. Little of the necessary pandemic control infrastructure was in place.
This is why Asian nations like Taiwan in particular have done so well, because they have dedicated pandemic response units and infrastructure already in place, operating all the time, reading to spring into action at the first sign of a pandemic.
The US pandemic response unit and infrastructure was pretty small and insignificant to begin with, and then a few years ago Trump closed the US pandemic response unit down entirely.
Taiwan, and also South Korea, Japan and Hong Kong have done far better than the West in controlling the pandemic, because they understand about controlling pandemics much better.
In the West, we have shown ourselves to be a bunch of ill-prepared and bungling fools. We need to do some soul-searching, and need to learn some very important lessons from this pandemic, because without doubt there will be other pandemics in the future.
I can't believe that any responsible gov't has suggested that this is a viable response, even in the face of the economic catastrophe that this pandemic will inevitably trail along in its wake.
Yo-yo lockdowns may happen whether you like it or not. Once lockdown is lifted, new infection cases will automatically start increasing, as R0 will increase. If they increase past the point where hospitals can cope, then the lockdown may have to be re-instituted again. That's how you get a yo-yo. And this may happen many times.
But it has also been argued that yo-yo lockdown are psychologically beneficial, as they give people a short break from lockdown conditions, before the next lockdown is implemented.
Those Asian measures might work after COVID has peaked and started down, in a meaningful, measureable way, in order to open up the economy, but done too early, and we could have a pandemic no top of a pandemic,
Those Asian measures can first be introduced on top of existing measures. Once we gauge their success and see that they are working, which usually takes a few weeks, we can then consider lifting some of the measures like lockdown which are highly problematic to the economy. We can still keep restaurants and places of public entertainment closed if necessary, because doing that has no major effect on the economy. But lockdown cripples economies.
Please, for God's sake, post some dates and figures relating to your statements re " ....the Asian pandemic control techniques appear more effective than lockdown ....". Which Asian countries? Certainly not India or Malaysia. When did those countries start enforcing the wearing of face masks? What was their COVID load at that time? What was their death count at that point? What is it now?
We are talking about Taiwan, South Korea, Japan and Hong Kong. There are plenty of articles about how well these regions have done if you Google.
The data from these countries can be seen on the Worldometers website, eg, the
Taiwan Worldometer, which shows only 6 deaths so far.
You are arguing that these Asian measures would be ineffective; but it might be an idea to read about what these measures actually are before arguing against them!
And we now have data from European countries which have more recently mandated universal mask use, and a great drop in new infection cases followed. This article provides some info about this:
Coronavirus could be 'wiped out' if 80 to 90% of Britons wear effective DIY masks, claims Oxford University health chief as government is warned making them compulsory for public risks NHS supplies
Yes. That enforced mask wearing thing could have worked back in late January or even the first week or maybe even the first two weeks of February, but we're nearing the end of April, and NY is still awash in corpses, which have long since overflowed their mortuaries and are being stored in refrigerator trucks like frozen TV dinners, hospitals are stuffed to the rafters, including the tent hospitals set up in Central Park, Drs are exhausted and dying, as are nurses and support staff.
As explained, any effective new controlling measure introduced today will have an instant reducing effect on R0 on the very same day. If we found some highly effective measures than reduced R0 below 1, the pandemic will fizzle out in a matter of weeks.
Are you saying that the lockdown should be lifted, people should be allowed to go back to their jobs, their offices, their favorite bars and restaurants, their gyms, their nail salons, their barbers and beauticians, etc., and that masks will solve everything?
No, masks are a key factor, but the Asian countries I mentioned have introduced other important measures, like comprehensive testing and contact tracing, social distancing, and lots of other little things. You need a portfolio of techniques to bring R0 down.
You can maintain the closure of restaurants, bars, etc, if necessary, because these are not crucial for the economy. But once you put people into lockdown and keep them in their homes, the economic impact becomes massive. So in our portfolio of techniques to control the pandemic, you need effective techniques, but not ones which destroy the economy.
