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Just for clarity: Do you believe China would have reached the inflection point for this epidemic without their extreme social distancing measures?

And at a similar death toll, and with the epidemic continuing to flatten towards an asymptote if they were lifted today?

>> Unless Chinese officials are still lying about their cases

Is/was there a whole lot of evidence of this? Was it a local problem in some parts of China? Or was it unfounded? It seems to me there's been just as much of this going on in the west + we're doing a much worse job of handling the epidemic than China has done. I don't have any personal opinion on China generally but the amount of China bashing + hypocrisy in the last few weeks has been astonishing. Supposedly they are even at the point where they are shipping supplies they no longer need to Italy (masks + other equipment) and considering sending people to help too.

I in no way intended my comment to be seen as China bashing for its own sake, but in the early days of the epidemic in Wuhan, there were noted incidents of at least local officials claiming false information about how contagious COVID was and how far it had spread. It's difficult to generally trust any authoritarian regime that has a vested interest in downplaying things which in part worsened because of its own bad initial response but no, nothing right now gives a solid reason to doubt the current numbers on cases, fatalities, recoveries from China and if indeed they are true as they likely are, the reduction in new cases is visible, and even if that's being achieved through strict measures, it's heartening to see, because it shows that COVID spread can indeed be mitigated to some extent through social measures while medical resources brace themselves

Can you define sooner than some are predicting?

There's almost zero chance you see peak virus before end of March in the US. From what I hear, most people are predicting peaks in Europe in late April / early May and peaks in the US a week or two after.

I'm not sure how much faster you think we'll see peak than that.

Maybe you mean the tail will be shorter? Most people I see are predicting Coronavirus will impact consumer behavior until end of year. I don't have the first clue how likely that is.

I agree with you on what you say about zero chance for those dates, but there have been predictions (many repeated right here on HN) about a level of spread that in months infects dozens to hundreds of millions and results in several million fatalities worldwide. So far, none of these extreme prediction figures have a genuinely concrete footing (and a number of similar figures were predicted for how much it would have spread even by now, which obviously haven't come to pass)

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"someone leaping to cataclysmic conclusions based on early figures is no more substantive than another person dismissing the whole thing as nothing major"

The potential downsides for "dismissing the whole thing as nothing major" are a lot higher than "leaping to cataclysmic conclusions". Better safe than sorry. Better to be prepared than unprepared.

While that may be true, it is in no case at all a reason for panic and panicked behavior such as rampant hoarding of things one won't even conceivably need for the length of time this is reasonably expected to last. I have seen a large number of rather hysterical comments on this site that have openly proposed that yes, people should outright panic. It's absurd.

It inflected early in China because of the lockdown. People are hardly allowed to leave their house. Not even for work unless you're essential personnel.

The US is not prepared for those methods. Not culturally or legally. For better or for worse, it's the sort of thing that can only happen in an authoritarian dictatorship.

I fully expect the US to inflect much, much later than China did.

> it seems ... that China is already reaching an inflection point. The number of new cases has dropped heavily

After draconian measures. Unless there are huge lockdowns, that same point won't be reached so soon elsewhere.