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Comment by duxup | Hacker News Reader

>In Dark Winter, some members advised the imposition of geographic quarantines around affected areas, but the implications of these measures (e.g., interruption of the normal flow of medicines, food and energy supplies, and other critical needs) were not clearly understood at first.[5] In the end, it is not clear whether such draconian measures would have led to a more effective interruption of disease spread.

That's one of the more interesting questions. Is it possible to have an effective quarantine in this day and age?

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It's more possible now than it has been previously, if only because you can reduce the effect on the population by leaning heavily on the better grocery delivery infrastructure which you could beef up with government resources as needed. It's still horrid, and wouldn't be fun for anyone, but yeah, I suspect you could.

The answer to your question is: Wuhan.

These days it is difficult to know what people are saying on the internet.

Do you mean it is or isn't possible, or something else?

I presume they mean it isn't possible, as there was an attempted quarantine around Wuhan, and yet coronavirus still spread.

It’s like with 42. You see what you want to see. Who knows if Wuhan is a success or not. There is no benchmark. If Seattle, Mediolan etc have 1M cases but Wuhan stays around 100K then their containment will be hailed a monumental success. But if everyone else contains this below 10K and Wuhan stays like today, it will be a failure. But it’s still the answer to OPs question, as Wuhan is the baseline.

Wuhan!!

That no other province in China had uncontrolled spread while multiple countries outside of China have indicates that with a high degree of confidence that China's tactics work. Similarly, Taiwan and Singapore both managed to contain the spread with somewhat less harsh measures which provides evidence that China might have somewhat overreacted but that overreaction is better than underreaction.

As Iran showed, you can try and fudge the numbers around the margins but once it becomes a pandemic, it becomes impossible to hide so we can say to a high degree of confidence that China is 33 for 33 in managing to contain the virus in all non-Hubei provinces.

Taiwan and Singapore both managed to contain the spread with somewhat less harsh measures which provides evidence that China underreacted.

Containment in Taiwan and Singapore was possible because extensive measures such as strict quarantine, testing and tracing all contacts were implemented pretty much immediately since the first few cases. China delayed reaction for many weeks, so much harsher containment measures were necessary since the outbreak was already widespread; starting the same measures a week or two earlier would have meant much smaller scale of disruption.

On the other hand, if countries refuse to take highly visible measures until there are hundreds of known cases - well, by that time it's far, far too late for a Singapore-like approach to be usful.

Personally I suspect any under reaction in China has its roots in the difficulty between local government not wanting to be honest or transparent with the central government...and the dynamics that come with that (including less than ideal responses from the central government).

But the opaque nature of China makes it all hard to know.

Yeah, with the benefit of hindsight, it's undoubtably true that the Hubei provincial government fucked up, nobody is denying that. But every other provincial government in China was facing the same situation other national governments were facing, they had a stream of Hubei residents filtering through their communities, causing community spread and lighting a ticking time bomb.

But every one of the provincial governments got their situation under control with the political backing of the central government while nations outside of China clearly failed to get it under control because they didn't have the will to react so harshly.

This is strong evidence that any nation that chooses to clamp down as hard as the Chinese can get it under control with something approaching a 100% probability. Whether it's possible lighter weight mechanisms can still get it under control is an open question but we at least have the upper limit of how much you need to shut down your country to kill COVID 19.

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