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Comment by gfodor | Hacker News Reader

Delta’s rapid evolution and plausible defeat of the vaccine which was rolled out incredibly fast, on the back of unprecedented economic lockdowns implies to me we didn’t stand a chance absent a global totalitarian regime just imprisoning everyone in their homes for a year by force.

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We probably would have been able to contain the wider spread of this virus had politicians shut down all non necessary air travel immediately after WHO/China officially declared a potential pandemic incoming in January 2020.

They are all culpable.

All but Jacinda Ardern, very smart government that one.

The need for speed:

“Three days after WHO declared the coronavirus outbreak a public health emergency of international concern on 30 January 2020, New Zealand began introducing disease prevention measures and continued strengthening them in the weeks that followed.”

https://www.who.int/westernpacific/news/feature-stories/deta...

Why do you say "air travel" and not "international travel"? Before COVID got here, domestic air travel was perfectly safe, and a boat from China is just as capable of carrying COVID as a plane from China is.

I agree especially in dense places like Europe (thinking of Italy outbreak) early border shutdown for non essential travelling would have helped in addition down the line. I’m not sure boat travel is comparable to air travel in both mass and interconnection around the globe. It would probably have also been warranted but main driver here was globalization / air travel.

No that wouldn't have allowed for containing the spread. All it takes is one carrier getting through from "necessary" air travel or illegal immigration or whatever and then the exponential spread starts in a new area. Thus uncontrolled spread was inevitable in most countries. The only exceptions are a few isolated places like New Zealand which can actually control all arrivals.

Fewer cases means tracking them is still feasible. Exponential growth can only happen after officials are overwhelmed with cases. Shutting down air travel probably would have relieved pressure enough to follow up on cases - doubling rate tells us beginning of February would still have bought us the necessary time. Beginning of March to mid of March it was game over already I agree.

Case tracking hasn't really been effective even in areas with limited spread. It's a failed strategy. Exponential growth starts immediately as soon as there's one contagious carrier, although it takes a couple weeks for absolute numbers to grow really large.

What about South Korea? Mask mandates? In addition to lockdowns. I mean it’s multiple things that politicians and officials had to get right of course. Unfortunately >90% really failed us on that practically everywhere.

South Korea has a growing number of cases.

https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/south-kore...

Mask mandates can be marginally useful in slowing down the spread on a temporary, limited basis. But they're obviously unsustainable. The virus is here to stay and asymptomatic people aren't going to wear masks forever. Much of the spread takes place inside private homes where no one wears masks.

I thought we were still talking about the beginning of the pandemic? South Korea did fend off the virus through contact tracing, mask mandates and lockdowns early on. Unfortunately most other countries did too little too late which was my original point.

The result being that by now we have a full blown ever-pandemic at hand - which includes South Korea by definition.

... or using N95-equivalent masks and mild social distancing ...

What's scary is gamma through omega.

That’s assuming the characteristics of the virus were known upfront but they weren’t. The conflicting, even suppressed, information early on didn’t help.

which comes back to "politicians made it worse" - the CDC knew damn well that masks worked, that's why they wanted to reserve them for medical practitioners, and put out knowingly-false statements that the science indicated that masks didn't work.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/healthcare/2020/03/02/se...

https://www.businessinsider.com/fauci-mask-advice-was-becaus...

it's not any one thing but - if Trump had told people to be patriotic and wear their masks for america, and the CDC had just told people that yes masks work but we need the medical one for the doctors so make your own (which is what they ended up doing anyway), and Trump hadn't seized PPE supplies from doctors so that JKush could auction them off for a personal profit, etc etc - the outcome would have been significantly different.

but for Trump all that really mattered was "his numbers". He didn't even want to bring in a cruise ship full of dying people because that would make "his numbers" go up, even though it was already all over the west coast by that point. He knew damn well it was deadly, and that it was spreading everywhere, he told it a Pulitzer-winning journalist in as many words.

Like, shame on Fauci for playing into Trump's game, let that be a lesson on what happens if you let a politician compromise your medical ethics, but... Trump had a huge part in kneecapping the response. Literally everything he did was exactly identical to the actions you'd take if you were trying to increase the spread. Lie about the spread, lie about the severity of the symptoms ("just the flu"), lie about masks and make up fake treatments like Chloroquine and Ivermectin, literally stealing supplies out of the hands of first responders...

it's not hard to see that the response could have been a lot more effective without someone actively malicious at the helm. But it was hitting blue areas harder, and "those areas didn't vote for him" so he actively did everything he could to encourage the spread.

it's the "stealing the PPE out of the hands of first responders to let your son-in-law auction it" that gets me, personally. Like what kind of person let alone president would even think of that.

I remember listening to the virologists at TWiV in February 2020 talking about reports coming out of China (superspreading events, etc) and all of them pretty much were betting on the virus being airborne and aerosol transmissible back then already. All of them are US based scientists, lack of knowledge wasn’t the issue here indeed. It was really a total lack of preparation by officials so they had to keep those masks ready for at least some of the medical professionals.

I'd still like to see some solid evidence on exactly when the virus started spreading outside of China. Some estimates say it was in the US as early December 2019. I say that to mean timelines are very important if we're going to look back and do post-hoc analysis.

While I certainly don't mind the blame-all-the-US-politicians game, there are several points of failure. The CCP is most to blame because of the lack of disseminated information (that we now know they had) and attempts to suppress people communicating about it. The media largely ignored it for many of the same reasons that politicians did. Then the internet mobs, conspiracy theorists, and social media sites acting on behalf of political organizations didn't help either. It's death by 1000 paper cuts.

There is evidence of the virus in Italy as early as September 2019.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0300891620974755

Yes I very much agree, it would be important to know more about the origins. Still the fact is that March was the time it really went “viral” with all the excess mortality and widespread health impacts. So we lost all of February - January even if you account early warnings from WHO. Cases probably doubled into critical exponential increments only in late February / early March meaning there was enough time for fast action (see New Zealand, beginning of February).

https://www.who.int/emergencies/disease-outbreak-news/item/2...

Definitely tons of mistakes were made from the get go but FWIW CCP regime went all in with their dictatorial measures after they couldn’t hide it anymore (January/February).

Though I mostly care about my personal perspective / “realm of action” being European / Canadian so EU and NA I hold up to way higher standards basically.

Pretty much all of the governments in these regions waved away the risks even though they had all the high-caliber scientists and some press warnings early on in addition to WHO’s warnings.

It goes without saying that the “leader of the free world” wasn’t paying attention didn’t help either.

It would still spread in wildlife though, so it would have to be a forever prison.

SARS1 and MERS also lived in animals, but we were able to defeat those.

SARS2 is definitely a much more difficult foe, and counterfactuals are always hard to establish, but I think we came pretty close to fighting it back. And we might still!

I honestly have some hope for eventual elimination of the common cold (actually many different diseases, not one) to a large degree. Vaccine technology is advancing at a ridiculous pace these days. There is so much we don't know about immunology, but we are also learning so fast and biotech is accelerating too.

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