Seen on a wall in Prague earlier today. Powerful, because most of us do indeed know who Dr. Li Wenliang is, or rather… was.
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Who is Dr. Li Wenliang?March 14th, 2020 |
 40 comments to Who is Dr. Li Wenliang? |
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Indeed.
I think that Commmuist China is about to face a propaganda tsunami. Before CoronaVirus, any criticisms of how China was governed could be met with: “Mind you own damn business.” But now, how China is governed IS the business of everyone. Because how China mishandled the early stages of CoronoaVirus is now messing with the entire world. Whether or not they cooked up this thing in one of their laboratories is a detail. Either way, the government of China is in the dock, of “world opinion”.
The big claim now is that CoronaVirus will harm “globalisation”, by shutting down supply chains and unleashing economic nationalism. But another logical reaction to CoronaVirus is now to say: How each nation is governed is a matter of legitimate concern to all of us.
The basic problem with tyrannies, like China now, is that they are bad at dealing with information that is true, but which they don’t like. Instead of acting upon it, they prioritise suppressing it.
It’s ironic, isn’t it? The government of China is, on the face of it, hoovering up information about its citizens on an industrial scale. But, in this matter, it turned the hoover to blow. It didn’t want to know. And that has now affected everyone on earth. So, how they govern themselves is the business of everyone on earth.
“But another logical reaction to CoronaVirus is now to say: How each nation is governed is a matter of legitimate concern to all of us.”
And don’t you think they would say the same about us? Trump starts a trade war, China suffers. Does China not therefore have a legitimate interest in how America is ruled? That one nation’s actions affect another is not, on the face of it, sufficient.
Autocratic governments often have a bunker mentality. They believed the world is their enemy, that the world wants to overthrow them, and so they respond both defensively, building walls and barriers to keep out the world, and offensively, figuring that if they make interference with them painful enough, their enemies will leave them alone. It’s an instinctive, animal reaction. They fear us, they fear our influence, our interference, so they attack. They fear their own population. The more reason they have to fear, the more aggressive and isolationist they become. The more desperately they seek to maintain absolute control.
Aggression and the urge to punish are born out of fear, and the belief that controlling others by the threat of pain keeps you safe. That if the enemy knows that any action will be punished severely enough, they’ll leave you alone. But human psychology doesn’t work like that. Punishment breeds hatred and emnity. It traps you by building a wall of ever more implacable enemies around you, that you can never escape. Loosen your grip and they’ll kill you – tighten your grip and you make the walls thicker. People ought to know this – they know perfectly well that when other people threaten them, it doesn’t make them want to submit/surrender. It makes them angry and aggressive, and inclined to punish them back. So why do we think the other side should behave any differently?
The problem is not one of whether the rest of the world had somehow missed the fact that China’s behaviour is of concern to us all. Of course it is! We all know that. Not even the politicians are that stupid. The problem is how the hell do we dig the Chinese out of the psychological trap they’ve dug themselves into? How do we defuse the bomb they’ve built?
From ‘Yes Minister’ – the ‘Four Stage Strategy’:
“Stage one, we say nothing is going to happen.”
“Stage two, we say something may be about to happen, but we should do nothing about it.”
“Stage three, we say that maybe we should do something about it, but there’s nothing we can do.”
“Stage four, we say maybe there was something we could have done, but it’s too late now.”
I am reminded of The Battle of Imjin River, 1951, the Chinese assault on UN forces in the Korean War, the British Glocestershire Regiment defended Hill 235 against wave after wave of Chinese PVA for three days, eventually having to retreat due to sheer numbers of enemies and running low on supplies, it could be said they just did not have enough bullets to stop the Chinese advance.
The battle resulted in Chinese forces experiencing well over ten times the casualties of the UN forces, although they won that battle the PVA were severely disrupted on their advance to Seoul. This is then, the Chinese way, regardless of the numbers of casualties they inflict, it is possible to overcome obstacles by sheer number, the tactic is not forgotten.
Again, in 1979, the Sino-Vietnamese War, where the Chinese lost more troops in 3 weeks than the Americans did in the first 10 years of the Vietnam War.
One could easily think that the incompetency of the Chinese government has worked in their favour, although suffering a multitude more deaths from this virus, the impact on the western nations may be, in their eyes, an unintended victory. Perhaps not in the long-run, but the communists never think beyond five year plans.
The reaction of the Chinese government was entirely predictable. No surprises there.
What angers me is the reaction of the US media to sow panic and fear in order to attack President Trump. The resulting shut down of sports events, empty restaurants, avoidance of shopping, etc. is doing serious damage to the economy. Wall Street ended its bull market in crisis mode. Small and marginal businesses will go bankrupt. Thousands of hourly employees will have their income cut or be fired. All over a current US death toll of 41 nationwide. The sainted Obama didn’t even declare a national emergency until over 1,000 people died from the H1N1 virus, and the media just noted it in passing.
The Media is even screaming that calling it the “Wuhan Virus” is both racist and xenophobic, after calling it exactly that for months. They’re also repeating the Chinese claim that the US Army created the virus and smuggled it into China to embarrass their magnificent and benevolent Chairman Xi.
Just grrrr … 😡😡😡
Brian
A quote I saw attributed to a certain N Mandela ‘Your freedom and mine cannot be separated.‘.
Was the Battle of Imjin River the one where the Gloucester’s ran out of ammo and hurled tinned cheese instead?
Which reminds me. I’ve just re-installed “MiG Alley” which, whilst old, is an ace game. So I shall be taking my Sabre over the (virtual) Yalu quite soon!
“Small and marginal businesses will go bankrupt. Thousands of hourly employees will have their income cut or be fired. All over a current US death toll of 41 nationwide.”
41 so far. But plagues increase exponentially, so if you don’t actually stop it right now, and keep it stopped, everyone will get it. Globally, about 3.4% of the cases reported have died. Data from Italy – who haven’t tried to fudge the numbers – suggests 3-4%. The actual fatality rate will be significantly lower, because of all the people who catch it but don’t get symptoms, or only minor ones they don’t report to the authorities, but even at 0.1% that’s about 300,000 American deaths. What if it is 3%?
But that’s not the entire problem. A lot of patients get into breathing difficulties and need to be in intensive care on breathing support. The US has about 100,000 ICU beds, a lot of them already in use. If even 1% of the population need them (and about 5 times more people need them than actually die), that’s 3,000,000 people who could show up at a hospital expecting to be saved. What happens when the hospitals run out of beds, and trained staff? How many have you actually got?
The numbers seem to ramp up about 10-fold per week. This week you might have 100, next week 1,000, the week after 10,000, and so on. This means that the bulk of infections can happen very fast, all at the same time. You could have 90% of the cases all showing up in the same week. What’s that going to look like when it hits your health system?
And then you’ve got panicking people with guns, and millions of undocumented illegals and homeless druggies wandering round the streets extremely unwilling to present themselves to the authorities, a lot of lawyers who live off sueing the pants off people for medical negligence, and a virtual civil war going on politically between the Republicans, the Democrats, and the Trump supporters added into the mix… it could all turn into an unholy mess.
Plagues are like that. If you cut it off right at the start, stop it spreading, then yes, you can keep the death toll down in the thousands and be able to say “What was all the fuss about?” It’s entirely possible. So never mind what Obama did. Never mind what the Democrats and the media are doing. Stop playing games. The only thing you want to be talking about is what you’re doing. Unless you’re going to say there’s no point in even trying, you accept that a few million mainly older folk are maybe gonna slowly suffocate to death, but the economy is more important.
Italy has just had to quarantine 60 million people, at an absolutely enormous cost to their economy – they’re not doing *that* just to attack Donald Trump! It’s not about Trump.
Yeah, there’s a few people here in serious denial. It sucks that the media lit their credibility on fire over the last several years(or decades), but this isn’t about the media. It’s not about Trump, or Johnson, or Xi, or any other random person. It’s about a virus that will likely kill millions before it’s through. Unless we get very, very lucky, most of us will know one or two people who die of this. In poorer parts of the world, it’ll be worse. The medical system is going to be utterly overwhelmed for months, schools won’t re-open until the fall(or even later), office towers will be ghost towns for months, working from home will get more common everywhere, and so on.
It’s not the apocalypse. But you might do well to look up 1919 in your history books. It’s not literally the same, but it’ll look more like that than anything else. The modern medical system has done well at keeping pestilence away, but biology still exists, and it can still be pretty terrible. We’re going to be reminded of that pretty soon.
‘everyone will get it.’
That’s not how colds work.
It’s about a virus that will likely kill millions before it’s through.
It seems the Chinese have the virus under control as in the last days there were very few new cases in Wuhan. Likewise it seems that the virus is under control in Hong Kong, Singapore and Korea. That is – there were very few new cases in these places in the last days.
So far about 5000 have died worldwide.
I don’t think “it will kill millions”.
The world today is different from 1918, then they didn’t even know what a virus was.
We are all guessing, so here you have my guess: no millions….
This article about China’s all out and resolute war against the Wuhan virus, once they woke up to it’s dangers, is worth reading.
IIUC, that is indeed the policy of the UK government – everyone (or rather, a sizeable majority) will eventually get it and they feel there is less than no point in imagining that outcome can be prevented now (unless a vaccine is found faster than seems likely). Of course we’ll (probably) all (almost all) get it sooner or later just as we almost all get flue sooner or later. The Chinese authorities had their chance to stop it but preferred to treat Dr Wenliang as a criminal. After that it was unlikely that any other country ever had a real chance to stop the “most people get it” outcome. Now the UK’s hope is to slow the rate at which we approach that outcome, to help that elderly group who will require hospitals, oxygen and etc. to have a good chance of surviving.
Some (most? almost all?) EU governments disagree with the UK’s assessment. Austria, for example, has explicitly advised its citizens in the UK to return to Austria because it does not agree with the UK’s approach, despite Austria having more cases (per capita) than the UK at this moment.
Well, no (it’s news to me if anyone suggested that it was, or indeed that anything virus-related the Italian government is doing – as opposed to anything the US media is saying – is aimed at Trump). A point more worth discussing is that governments sometimes do a thing to show they are doing something rather than because it is the right thing to do. Or, as Sir Humphrey Appleby put it:
Of course, British people can do things (or not do things) to show they have a stiff upper lip. But, being British, I’ll bet on Boris’ approach. We’ll see.
The germ theory of disease was dominant by the 1880s, a generation before the Spanish flu. Viruses were discovered in the 1890s. They knew perfectly well what they were dealing with in 1919. And it still killed several million – by some estimates, more than WW1 had.
And yes, China has dramatically slowed it down. They did that by shutting down the country so thoroughly that it can’t spread, because people aren’t in contact with each other. That works, especially in the short term, and it’s what we’re doing now. (Though, as with most things, a brutal autocracy can be way more authoritarian than we can, so they can do more in this vein than we can). It’s possible we’ll react heavily enough to limit it to hundreds of thousands. But that will basically involve shutting down large swathes of modern society for months.
This doctor tried to warn people – the Chinese Communist Party Dictatorship silenced him with threats, and now he is dead.
By the way N in V.
“Trump started a trade war” – have you been asleep for DECADES? The People’s Republic of China Dictatorship has been waging a trade war against the United States for many years, whole industries have been destroyed in the United States, hundreds of billions of Dollars of DEBT has been run up, and the United States, and many other countries, have become dependent for vital (strategic) goods from a hostile source – the PRC, whose fist is on the throat of the West.
At least the American (and other) Establishment Elite have an excuse to come out with PRC Dictatorship propaganda such as – “Trump started” a trade war that had been going for many years before he became President, the PRC dictatorship PAYS them to sell out their country. The media, academic and financial elite in the United States (and many other Western countries) are in the pocket of the PRC dictatorship.
Please do not copy them. This is not a free market, this is NOT free trade – this is the PRC GOVERNMENT doing everything it can (for DECADES) to use “trade” as weapon to undermine the West.
At this point there is no excuse, none, for not seeing the Clear and Present Danger of the PRC Dictatorship – not “just” to the United States, but to all of the West.
The establishment elite love money (fair enough) and they hate the work of actually making products – so they have gone for the “easy money”, but that always turns out to be the hardest money of all, for you sell your Soul.
“Ha, ha, ha, we do not believe in the Soul – so we have sold nothing”.
Also fair enough – but believe in this, the idea that you can sell out everyone else and have a very comfortable life yourself is a very serious mistake. Let us say the West never wakes up and you are not punished for your treachery – what do you think happens to you if the PRC WINS? You, the establishment elite, have been very useful to them – but the second you are no longer useful, your fate will be terrible indeed. Your “friends” would do far worse things to you (and just for amusement) than I would do to you.
However, one must also make a very sharp distinction between the Communist Party Dictatorship and the ordinary people of China – indeed the ordinary Chinese people have always been the main VICTIMS of the dictatorship.
Just as the objective of the PRC dictatorship is to destroy freedom (the principles of the Bill of Rights) all over the world – in its fanatical desire for world domination, so (conversely) the objective of the West must be to destroy the PRC Dictatorship so that the Chinese people can have such fundamental rights as Freedom of Speech.
It is the dictatorship (and its lackeys in the West) who are the enemy – NOT the ordinary people of China.
“Well, no (it’s news to me if anyone suggested that it was, or indeed that anything virus-related the Italian government is doing – as opposed to anything the US media is saying – is aimed at Trump).”
I do sometimes wonder if I’m speaking the same version of English as everyone else here.
I’m seeing a lot of talk in the US currently along the lines that the whole virus scare is an overblown panic ginned up by the US media to attack Trump in the election year, and that there’s no need for all these shutdowns and quarantines are unnecessary. The comment above – “What angers me is the reaction of the US media to sow panic and fear in order to attack President Trump. The resulting shut down of sports events, empty restaurants, avoidance of shopping, etc. is doing serious damage to the economy” – is a pretty typical example of that.
I was simply pointing out that the Italians have also taken extreme precautions and shut everything down, and are *obviously* not doing that to get at Trump. Ergo, the “panic and fear” that led to the “shut down of sports events, empty restaurants, avoidance of shopping, etc.” has got nothing to do with attacking Trump.
Sure, they are no doubt unfairly criticising his response to the problem, and not being very helpful. But it’s not a good idea to assume therefore that there isn’t a serious problem.
“The People’s Republic of China Dictatorship has been waging a trade war against the United States for many years,”
[sigh] I’m well aware of it. And I’m well aware of all the many ways that the USA does the same sort of thing. But this is not the time for a debate on the merits and mechanisms of free trade versus mercantilist protectionism. Like I said, the issue is not one of whether China behaves badly or is considered a threat to the rest of the world – they’re near the top of NATO’s list of big humongous dangerous threats. The issue is, given the psychological nature of the trap they have dug themselves into, how do we best go about digging them out, and stopping this sort of crisis arising again? Simplistic ‘Lord Rust’-style solutions need not apply.
And we can surely believe CCP numbers because CCP would never spin things to make it look like they are in total control of situation 😆
Nullius in Verba (March 15, 2020 at 8:12 pm), I appreciate the implicit compliment – your wording suggests that it is your own English that might differ from others (plural) in this forum, not just from mine. I also ‘appreciate’ the double-edged nature of such a compliment in a libertarian forum, where to be seen as more representative of the mass is not an unqualified good. 🙂
However I think it is not language but the reasoning it expresses that is the problem.
The US and UK government responses each implicitly rebuke the Italian one, as the Austrian government explicitly rebuked the UK one. One may be swift to ban travel of foreigners from abroad and then slower to ban internal travel of citizens within the country (US) or vice versa (Italy). In the US, hostility to government policy may have an immediate anti-Trump element that rests on a more basic set of attitudes that precede Trump. In Italy, with its longer and stronger statist traditions, Trump/anti-Trump is irrelevant, and similarities in desired policy rest on deeper similarities in political preferences and/or genuine differences between the countries’ political cultures.
Someone who thinks that the pressures on Trump (e.g. to have done less in controlling borders and to do more or more swiftly in locking-down the internal US) are wrong and politicised, is likely to feel the same about e.g. the UK versus Italy, without having to think that anti-Trump motivates the latter – and therefore without having to think that you’ve disproved their point by saying Italy isn’t quarantining to affect the November election, which they already well knew.
The most successful responses have been South Korea, Singapore, and Hong Kong. Those governments responded aggressively and quickly.
The British government, led by a narcissistic, very lazy PM who sat on his fat ass for a whole month (and that was after he spent weeks on holiday) has opted to do absolutely nothing, callously killing the old and the sick to save money, driven, it seems, by Dominic Cummings belief in eugenics, crackpot theories, and Spaffer’s laziness and buck-passing.
Trump has deliberately withheld testing for political reasons to protect himself. Why not use the WHO tests? The company that made the faulty US tests should be fined and shamed. But I suspect they are Trump donors.
Notice how he doesn’t care at all about testing (“I like the numbers as they are”), but gives the snowflakes in Wall Street massive socialist welfare handouts instantly. Maybe Wall Street wouldn’t behave like a baby shitting itself if the US government stopped wiping it’s bottom with disgusting, obscene corporate welfare handouts.
Trump’s response is much more akin to North Korea than South Korea, where the “Dear Leader” and his wealthy friends must be protected at all costs, even millions of lives.
Xi’s presence in Wuhan is the biggest piece of evidence that the situation is under control.
I’ve always believed the virus was a PRC bioengineered agent, designed to cripple economies and render target nations vulnerable to further PRC pressure.
These target nations would be liberal western democracies which cannot, for various reasons, impose the same level of quarantine measures as the PRC. The PRC would hence suffer a glancing blow from the viral blowback, but the target nations would be crippled.
Problem is, the virus escaped and hit Wuhan 1st.
Apparently, a Koontz story, written in the early eighties, had the Chinese government releasing a plague from Wuhan, in the year 2020! And in the book, Harbinger, talking about the Endtimes, the date December 2019 is mentioned as the start of the end! Anyone else heard anything interesting?
The corocrap will not kill millions and 80% of people are not going to be infected. Exposed to the virus maybe–but not infected.
The fucking Black Death –in ages of filth and pig ignorance–had prob a near 100% exposure (eventually– accounting for a slower pace of travel) and a very low survival rate if you did become infected. Two thirds of the population did NOT become infected.
If the human immune system were as useless as the panic-squad make out we would have died out long ago.
“And we can surely believe CCP numbers”
Seems that since they acknowledged (maybe late) the seriousness of the plague, they treated it seriously and correctly. Hiding piles of corpses if difficult.
The bashing of the totalitarian regime of the PRC is very correct. Still I don’t see how it is related to this plague. This is a natural disaster, not one started or initiated by the PRC regime.
Anyway, the slowdown occurred also in Hong Kong, Singapore and Korea.
Corocrap is the second best moniker after Winnie the Flu.
If the human immune system were as useless as the panic-squad make out we would have died out long ago.
Absolutely.
Millions is a pretty low percentage as these things go. I’m banking on something like 0.2% of humanity dying here – hardly extinction-level, “merely” tragic. And well within the range of what the human immune system has been known to let pass.
Everyone uses every opportunity to bash his favorite villain. The US press bashes Trump, Paul Marks bashes the PRC.
No, not at all, You don’t know shit about China, do you? 😆 😆 😆
“The corocrap will not kill millions and 80% of people are not going to be infected.”
OK, let’s work that out. The USA has 330 million people. 20% of that (by your number) would get infected (do you mean ‘show symptoms’?), which is 66 million. The death rate for identified cases so far is 3-4%. 3-4% of 66 million is 1.98 million to 2.64 million.
About 75 million adults in the USA are over 60, and another 30 million considered vulnerable for other reasons. The rates are higher for the over-60s.
About 15% of those diagnosed with it are seriously ill with pneumonia, requiring a ventilator, and about 6% become critically ill, with heart failure, septic shock, ultra-low blood pressure, kidney damage, intestinal damage, and need more invasive treatment like extra-corporeal membrane oxygenation (an artificial lung machine) and dialysis. 6% of your 20% is about 4 million. 15% of your 20% is just under 10 million. There are not 4 million intensive care beds. There are not 10 million ventilators. What do you think is going to happen when they run out?
Most of the deaths would be in the over-60s, and are in any case a fairly small percentage overall, so humanity is certainly not going to ‘die out’. If you wanted to be harsh about it, you could shrug and ignore it as ‘just one of those things’, and throughout 99% of human history we would have. It probably wouldn’t even have made the history books. But that doesn’t mean there won’t be millions of deaths.
It doesn’t mean there will be, either. We don’t know how many people get the virus without knowing about it – 80% is a guess. We don’t know how people will react to government advice and emergency laws, or how that will change the infection rate. We’re not even really sure how the virus is transmitted. But in the worst case of everybody being exposed the medics are going to have to be about two orders of magnitude wrong in their estimates for this not to be counted as a significant death toll – numerically, at least. Whether it turns out to be as politically significant as, say, the death toll on 9/11 is another matter, and yet to be seen.
Life is a learning experience. Hong Kong and Singapore and so on learned their lessons from SARS. They were well-prepared, took immediate and severe action as soon as they knew there was a problem, and stamped on it before it got going. Everyone else was too slow and too tentative. Too worried about the economic and political cost, if the public decided it was a panic about nothing. (It seems many have, anyway.) So we’ll have to wait and see what happens.
Actually, NiV, I think what Mr Ecks was saying is that the (worst-case) forecast that 80% of people will get it is overblown. I’ve been doing a little calculating myself, and I think he’s right. We’re also told that, at worst, a vaccine may be a year away. So…
For 80% of the UK population (of 70m) to catch it before March 2021, you’d be looking at more that 150,000 new cases per day, starting right now. That’s a thousand-fold increase. Nowhere on Earth has seen anything even close to that. Italy’s seeing about 3500 right now, Spain 2000. South Korea peaked at 1000.
Now, granted, that’s reported cases, and many will go unreported. But a) these are, by definition, not serious cases which require hospitalization, and b) we’re hearing this morning of 7.9m hospitalizations in the UK. Again, for that to happen in the next six weeks (and therefore amount to 7.9m simultaneous hospitalizations), you’re looking at that thousand-fold increase.
“And we can surely believe CCP numbers”
The official numbers for Wuhan – around 0.5% of the population infected – are within a few per thousand of those for Daegu, in South Korea, and Lombardy. It goes against the grain to trust a crowd of Commies, but I think they’re probably legit.
“The British government, led by a narcissistic, very lazy PM who sat on his fat ass for a whole month (and that was after he spent weeks on holiday) has opted to do absolutely nothing, callously killing the old and the sick to save money, driven, it seems, by Dominic Cummings belief in eugenics, crackpot theories, and Spaffer’s laziness and buck-passing.”
Baloney. To the extent that I’d almost accuse you of being a paid troll. So far, the UK has had one of the slowest rates of infection in Europe. And let me tell you a little story. A friend of mine manages a chain of care homes. Someone (she didn’t say if it was staff or a resident) tested positive in one of the homes at the end of last week. It has been ordered into quarantine, and the staff are currently living on the premises. As you can imagine, this is causing huge inconvenience, but there are police posted at the doors. Does that sound like “doing absolutely nothing”? You don’t know what you’re talking about, mate.
It’s not about average number of cases. It’s about the basic reproductive number and exponential growth. Back in Wuhan at the start, the number was a crazy 3.8, IIRC, and that was with possibly underreported PRC numbers.
My country of Singapore has tacitly admitted the UK’s strategy as bollocks, and I see no reason to disagree.
The question now is, how bad will the UK get it, and by the time the communities or the govt implement sricter quarantine measures, how many would be dead already?
“That’s a thousand-fold increase. Nowhere on Earth has seen anything even close to that.”
Yet.
This is how exponential increase works. Start with 1, then 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64 – six steps and we’re still not over 100! What’s scary about this?! – 128, 256, 512, 1024, 2048, 4096, 8192, 16384 – OK, another eight steps and it’s looking a bit more significant, but still, that’s not huge compared to the world population – 32768, 65536, 131072, 262144, 524288, 1048576 – OK, we’ve passed a million dead, but it’s taken us twenty steps to get here. So the next million is like, another twenty steps? – 2097152, 4194304, 8388608, 16777216, 33554432, 67108864, 134217728, 268435456, 536870912, 1073741824 – only another ten steps and we’ve just topped a billion. Note, 93% of that total happened in the last four steps.
So, go back to the first four steps. 1, 2, 4, 8. The numbers are not big. The rate of increase is not huge. You can count them on your fingers. So – intuitively – at the rate it’s going, it’d take millions of years to reach a billion, right? No, it takes 30 doublings. With an exponential rise, almost all the increase is always concentrated right at the end. Here’s a plot of the rise in the number of cases; and look at the two blue lines, for the rest of the world outside China. Each thick horizontal line is a ten-fold increase. Three of them makes a thousand-fold increase. How long does that take at its current rate of expansion?
I know about exponential increases. But that’s my (poorly-expressed) point: nowhere, even China itself, has seen one sustained for more than six weeks. It’s a little early to tell, but Italy’s rate of increase looks like it might be starting to flatten off too. Sure, it’ll get worse. Maybe much worse (as I said, in Wuhan, Daegu, and Lombardy, infections are running at around 1-in-200), but 80% of the population is a worst-case scenario, and those are, by definition, highly unlikely.
And, if our daily cases were to reach the hundreds of thousands, the calls for the government to change strategy would be deafening.
This guy says it better than I can.
“But that’s my (poorly-expressed) point: nowhere, even China itself, has seen one sustained for more than six weeks.”
Again: *Yet*.
The exponential growth pattern only changes if you change it, or it runs out of people to infect. China changed it by clamping down on movement and people meeting massively. Every other country that stopped it did so by clamping down on movement and people meeting massively. Hence this business of the “panic and fear” that led to the “shut down of sports events, empty restaurants, avoidance of shopping, etc.” that I was commenting on. You have to reduce the infection rate, by doing something to actually reduce/prevent infections, or the epidemic will just keep on growing.
The actual number of cases is always a week or two ahead of the graph, because it takes 1-2 weeks for the symptoms to show. Anything you do always has a 1-2 week lag before curve can respond, during which time it’s gone up another 10-fold. So at any given time (so far) the problem is always ten times bigger than it looks. And the bigger the numbers get, the harder it is to stop. This is why you have to clamp down on it early, when the numbers are still small.
It’s only going to be a “highly unlikely” worst case scenario *because* governments are taking action *now* to restrict people’s activities. If people don’t change the way they behave, the growth rate won’t change until it starts running out of people to infect.
“It’s only going to be a ‘highly unlikely’ worst case scenario *because* governments are taking action *now* to restrict people’s activities. If people don’t change the way they behave, the growth rate won’t change until it starts running out of people to infect.”
Oh yes, I’ve never denied that. As I said in my first comment, more is being done than people realise.
Sorry! My bad. The Book is not called “Harbinger”, but ‘Endtimes’, by a man called Montaigne. Any other predictions that others have seen?
Actually, now I’ve had a day or so to think about it, it’s not that simple. There is a natural limit to the exponential growth of infectious diseases. That’s the “herd immunity” the CMA was talking about which has got so many people indignant. The point isn’t that we just let everyone catch it then they can’t catch it again; it’s that if, say, 50% of the population does catch it and develops immunity*, that’s half as many carriers the virus can use to spread itself, and therefore finds it twice as hard to infect the remaining 50%: an exponential increase in difficulty, in fact. That’s why you see the Gompertz curve in the article I linked to, with a slow inital spread, exponentially increasing, then just as quickly levelling off. Yes, conscious prevention efforts certainly help, and we shouldn’t be complacent, but it is a natural progression.
As of right now, we have to assume that everyone we meet is potentially carrying the virus (an extreme reaction, perhaps, but not unreasonable). In a couple of month’s time, because of the exponential spread, that will no longer be the case. So the idea is to slow the spread as much as possible to ease the stress on the medical system, protecting the most vulnerable, until the outbreak becomes more manageable.
*And all indications are that they do. There’s always a small number of people who end up catching viral diseases again.
“There is a natural limit to the exponential growth of infectious diseases. That’s the “herd immunity” the CMA was talking about which has got so many people indignant.”
Yes, that’s right. Eventually it runs out of people to infect. Since R0 seems to be estimated between 2 and 3 (2.6 seems favourite), you have to reduce the infection rate by a factor of 2-3 to get it to stop growing and start shrinking. So you need to have half to two thirds of the population immune before it stops growing. Thus, the best estimate is that when the number of cases reaches 60% of the population the number of new cases will start going down, and there will be virtually no new cases at around 80%. It will run its course and die out. The level at which it does so depends on R0, which is different for different diseases, depends on how many of the population are already immune (if it’s a previously-seen disease), and also depends on the precautions against infection that you take. This one is a bit different because it appears to be completely new to humans, so there is no pre-existing pool of immunity as there would be for common diseases like influenza or measles.
If you simply let it proceed unchecked, so the models say, then it will indeed level off in late May and peter out around the end of August as the majority get immunity, but in the process it will kill about half a million in the UK and two million in the USA. (I suspect that’s an underestimate, since they don’t appear to account for the effects on mortality of running out of respirators and ICU beds, but whatever.) If you take other quarantine-like measures, you can at least halve that, possibly a lot more. The longer you extend the quarantine, the lower you can keep the total, but at a bigger economic cost.
“That’s why you see the Gompertz curve in the article I linked to”
The real behaviour of epidemics doesn’t follow a Gompertz curve – that was developed for a different sort of population statistic. Willis of all people ought to know better than to draw conclusions from long-range extrapolated curve-fitting of arbitrarily-picked formulas to noisy inhomogeneous data without doing any sort of sensitivity analysis, or even explaining why he used that particular formula. That’s a classic climate scientist trick!
The behaviour of epidemics does follow a sigmoid-shaped curve similar in visual appearance to the Gompertz curve. However, the early part of the growth (when only a small fraction of the susceptible population is infected) is exponential, while that’s not the case for the Gompertz function. And even if you make the assumption, the early part of the curve tells you virtually nothing (especially if the underlying rates are not fixed and the measurements are noisy) about its later behaviour, or where it will level off. There are lots of Gompertz curves where the beginnings are virtually identical, but the ends completely different. A curve-fit of the early part will find it nearly impossible to distinguish them.
If you’re interested in how it ought to be done, there’s one of the simplest 3-box models described in Wikipedia, but obviously they can be made arbitrarily complicated.
“As of right now, we have to assume that everyone we meet is potentially carrying the virus”
Yes. Right now everyone is susceptible. Later on, far more will actually carry the virus, but far fewer will be susceptible.