Ok, so I've been sitting on the idea of writing a post here, but I think I hit the point where I have to.
I recently read an interview with Bruce Aylward, who is in charge of the WHO's group that went to China to figure things out with Covid-19 (and I'll
link it here for people who want to read it also). One of the big takeaways I got was that China was able to start lowering the amount of reported cases in the last few days in part because they took a whole lot of steps to try and contain the spread, and I thought about how that would compare to things in the United States. Some of the things, like the whole-city quarantining, would never fly here for obvious reasons, but limiting travel has definitely helped slow down the spread. The city of Wuhan seems set up to be hit particularly hard by any rapidly-transmittable disease, but such cities exist in other parts of the world as well, and as the disease spreads to other countries, getting any sort of data on how to slow it down is important. The interview talks a bit about why we haven't seen another city in China shut down like Wuhan, but it does clarify that WHO statement that you shouldn't cancel mass gatherings to "play it safe". Rather, shutting down public spaces is a natural step in pandemic containment, and in the early days when we did not know much about the disease, it was a necessary step. Other countries in the region doing so is understandable as they are in the general area, but I think it was a message to places like the US where there is not a huge saturation of cases yet.
But the interview does also point out the problem with one of the big talking points here, which is that the coronavirus is not a big deal. One of the big things China did was to actually treat this like a big pandemic, rather than isolated cases, and create an environment where people felt comfortable enough to come forward if they felt they had any of the symptoms. They went out of their way to teach the public about the disease, instead of pretending this is not a threat. That helped them track the disease and gather data that the WHO now has (and for what it's worth, the interviewee did not seem to believe China was hiding data from them), which can help them better fight the spread of the disease. There's talk about how China is now having to restart its economy after the methods they employed, but that those methods were ultimately successful, and China is seeing the drop now because they treated the coronavirus as a public health crisis and were willing to sacrifice economically to protect people.
This is where I will now say that anyone making comparisons to past disease outbreaks is just making bad-faith comparisons in an effort to brush aside the very-real potential of this disease. Bringing up the Hong Kong flu epidemic of 1968-1969 (just to use the most recent bad comparison) fails to consider just how advanced things are today. Medicine and our understanding of disease and how it is transmitted have advanced pretty far since that time. Technology and how we are able to travel and communicate have advanced pretty far since that time. Hell, for as bad as social media is, the fact that it gives people a faster way of communicating important information is something that was not even possible back then. Aylward brings up that humanity in 2020 is a fantastic surveillance system to help prevent the spread of disease just by having strong ways of informing the general public.
Comparing it to the common flu also isn't a great comparison. It's easy to quote the number of deaths each year and say "well why don't we talk about this ever?" but that leaves out this huge data point of how many people actually contract the flu each year. Just going off the CDC's numbers for this most recent flu season, 16,000 people have died and 280,000 people have been hospitalized. That's not even counting the estimated 29 million that the CDC believes have gotten the flu. THAT's why you never hear the news talk about it, because statistically the number of deaths compared to the number of cases is so small that it is negligible. Just going off those numbers, if you transmit the flu you're close to a 0.01% chance of ending up in the hospital or dying. I get that statistics are a dying art, but try to be a bit better.
And then here is something for the people treating this like the potential end of the world: it's not. There's enough reporting by now to say this is transmitted similarly to the more-common flu, but with the added bonus of sticking around in the system for much longer. The recent data on the disease that Aylward mentions is that it's down to a 1% mortality rate in China outside of the Hubei province, and even China's general 3.8% mortality rate for people with the disease is driven in part by the flurry of deaths in the early stages of the epidemic. Yes, the US health system is probably woefully unprepared should the disease hit here at the level it did in China, but the good news is that by the time it does get here, we will hopefully have had enough time to prepare, especially if we learn by what other countries are doing. And part of that is actually treating this like an actual public health crisis and not some grand media hoax.
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