At some point they vapidly ask "Where is the science behind this?". The science behind this is the discovery of viruses and the impossibility of teleportation.
I wonder if they don't want to piss off China and make it say, "Fine, we're not going to cooperate with you. We'll handle it ourselves."
From what I've read, China, and especially the Chinese government, doesn't seem to respond well to the sort of light criticism that people and governments in the west would blow off.
Source: Live in China.
Watching the group in Imperial College closely as they've been giving closest analysis so far.
>At some point they vapidly ask "Where is the science behind this?". The science behind this is the discovery of viruses and the impossibility of teleportation.
but it's true though. there's limited evidence that travel bans will stop the spread of the infection. the evidence ranges between "no effect at all" to "delayed infection by a few days".
https://www.vox.com/2020/1/23/21078325/wuhan-china-coronavir...
You don't need science to grok this.
> But the trouble is, they don’t appear to be helpful. At best, travel restrictions, and even airport screenings, delay the spread of disease but don’t impact the number of people who eventually get sick. Instead, they make it harder for international aid and experts to reach communities affected by disease. They are also expensive, resource-intensive, and potentially harmful to the economies of cities and countries involved.
On the H1N1 travel bans:
> Again, reduced travel delayed (by three days!) but didn’t stop disease spread. The authors wrote, “No containment was achieved by such restrictions and the virus was able to reach pandemic proportions in a short time.”
So, why?
> It’s expensive and nearly impossible to seal off the borders of a country, the authors of the paper wrote. People will inevitably move — even indirectly from the countries that are quarantined.
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The article gives a number of examples as well.
That's why staying home from work when sick actually helps.
The article doesn't deny that. One study found exactly what you've claimed.
>A study looking at [the arrival of H1N1 swine flu in 2009] found [travel restrictions] “only led to an average delay in the arrival of the infection in other countries (i.e. the first imported case) of less than three days.”
The problem with quarantines seems to be that their effects are minimal unless you lock everything down AND somehow find and quarantine the already infected who got in, which no country has ever done.
This can mean The difference between multiple cities being ravaged by a disease instead of smaller groups of infected individuals.
That sounds nice in theory, but there's no literature backing this up.
This took me less than a minute to find: https://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/92/12/14-135590/en/
That WHO post argues against travel restrictions, yet:
“In one simulation, border controls preventing 99.9% of cases entering any given country delayed epidemic spread by up to 35 days.”
35 days is a lot of time, assuming a vaccine rollout is inevitable and successful
There are other papers which are proponents for controlling and restricting travel.
> Internal travel restrictions in England, Scotland and Wales in the United Kingdom were predicted to have minimal impact on the magnitude of the peak and in delaying the spread of the epidemic – possibly because there are some densely populated urban areas and relatively high levels of population movement. However, in a recent review, it was estimated that a combination of internal and international travel restrictions could help to stagger the impact of a pandemic within a country such as the United Kingdom, by desynchronizing localized outbreaks.
This is exactly the kind of unforeseen interaction effects I had in mind a few comments above when I said I'm not convinced we are able to conclude that "travel restrictions do not work" from the present studies. This particular effect will quite obviously also depend on epidemiological factors such as the length of incubation period, whether the disease is transmissible during the incubation period and so on.
There are far too many variables to account for and far too little experimentation has been done so far to conclude anything firmly.
"Notably, the new coronavirus provides a new lineage for almost half of its genome, with no close genetic relationships to other viruses within the subgenus of sarbecovirus. This genomic part comprises also half of the spike region encoding a multifunctional protein responsible also for virus entry into host cells[30, 31]. The unique genetic features of 2019-nCoV and their potential association with virus characteristics and virulence in humans remain to be elucidated."
Hmmm... interesting.
Edit, full title of article. "Full-genome evolutionary analysis of the novel corona virus (2019-nCoV) rejects the hypothesis of emergence as a result of a recent recombination event"
This was my favorite:
> "The main reason for this declaration is not what is happening in China but what is happening in other countries," said WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus.
Obvious cautious tip-toe is obvious.
Yes and no. The guidelines for declaring a (Phase 5) outbreak is to have person to person transmission in 2+ regions of the world. https://www.who.int/influenza/resources/documents/pandemic_p... So, yes, it is about what's happening outside China.
"Our greatest concern is the potential for this virus to spread to countries with weaker health systems which are ill-prepared to deal with it."
I'd call it simply stating their reasoning rather than 'tip-toeing' or 'artificial praise'.