Minor correction, China REPORTS making rather good progress.

While I am neither a tinfoil hat wearer nor have anything against China, the fact that they were silencing a Wuhan doctor who was trying to alert people and authorities to the virus all the way back in December makes me skeptical of their reported status.

China isn't an information blackhole nor do they have perfect censorship. If the outbreak were still accelerating in an exponential fashion it'd be impossible to hide it from the world. They have successfully hit the inflection point on their logistics curve of viral spread (for now, anyway).

And China is reportedly sending equipment to Italy - not something they would do if the infections were still growing. Their actions seem to align with their message.

Genuine question, do you happen to have a source? Not that I don't believe you, I am just curious about the details, such as how many units, for how much (is it free?), etc.

Here is some info about this. https://www.ansa.it/english/news/2020/03/10/2-mn-masks-1000-...

> Wang assured Di Maio that Italian orders for the ventilators would be made a priority by Chinese firms after similar requests were made by other European countries.

Thanks for sharing, I really appreciate it.

Please correct me if I misunderstood, but the wording makes it sound like they were ordering them from China, i.e., buying, not receiving it as a donation. Which is exactly what I was afraid of. Money is money, and I can totally see some governments, especially the PRC one, prioritizing that over the actual help for their own citizens. Especially in the scenario where they know they are screwed no matter what, so might as well make some quick bucks.

That’s a rather baseless claim.

China now reports that they've already closed 14 temporary hospitals in Wuhan due to decreasing case numbers, and a few more are scheduled to be closed in the next few days: http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2020-03/09/c_138859119.htm

That does not look like the kind of news you'd fake, or would risk doing purely for propaganda reasons.

>nor do they have perfect censorship

Which is exactly how we get all those leaks and info from silenced doctors.

Yeah, it's a story of failed censorship and the truth coming out anyway, not successful censorship hiding the scale of the problem. That's impossible so long as China is on the Internet.

They cannot stop all of it, so things will definitely leak out. However, they can stop a giant majority of it, so while we still get the leaks, the magnitude of the prevented leaks is probably still significant enough that the censorship can be considered as "working".

Do not underestimate the Great Firewall. But anyways, from a manufacturing and distribution of basic essential health supplies, and more, China is probably best positioned to help save the world.

The Wuhan authorities tried to silence her. There's no real reason to disbelieve their numbers now, beyond the problems of getting good numbers in a large country.

Read the WHO/China report. Or look at South Korea.

The WHO among other bodies have visited and done their own data gathering.

Many people here are conflating "stop" with "make it non-exponential". "Stop" just ain't going to happen, and hasn't happened anywhere (Vietnam reports they have, but come on). China reports bending the curve away from exponential. That is the goal. It is a very important one.

It's not just no longer exponential. The number of active cases is China is in decline. How long they can keep that going is debatable. But as of right now they are effectively stopping it.

That is not stopping. Extrapolating your trend to infinity suggests stopping is plausible. Latest data I see is 134 new cases per day in China. Let's take those numbers at face value and believe them (no sarcasm intended). However, these are just known cases. China is not testing everyone. As managing the spread becomes more successful it becomes cost and manpower prohibitive to test enough people to catch them before they spread significantly.

China has moved the R0 below 1 through some combination of behavior changes, else the number of active cases wouldn't be going down.

If they can keep it below 1, it will die out. It's possible there are many more unknown cases, but if unknown cases are increasing, confirmed cases should be too.

What I would encourage people to consider is whether this virus is at the level that we would all be happy to allow military enforced city-wide quarantines or travel restrictions...

I understand that this is NOT the flu, but it seems like the best data we have puts the most pessimistic CFR at about 0.6% if you look at the South Korean data (who have done, by far, the best job testing en masse).

I agree that slowing the spread of the virus to help our health care workers avoid being inundated with admissions to the ICU is worth while, but I'm extremely skeptical of embracing what China has done.

> but it seems like the best data we have puts the most pessimistic CFR at about 0.6% if you look at the South Korean data

Check your stats. 0.77% of South Koreans who tested positive for the virus have died already, and more of them will die in the future. The CFR is likely to be above 1%.

Right now the best information I've heard from several epidemiologists who study pandemics is that we are still seeing the results of severity bias, in that people with absolutely no symptoms will be far less likely to get tested. Also, South Korea is not seeing anything close to an exponential increase in cases.

When those same experts see numbers coming out of Italy, they believe very strongly that the number of infected is far higher than being reported because testing is not as widespread.

~0.5% is a very reasonable estimate of the initial CFR when an epidemic starts. It's bad, around 5x as much as the flu, but probably not worth a national China-style quarantine.

But it has a key context: that's the CFR for when all patients are treated. In most of China, there were never enough infections to trigger a healthcare system collapse: that's why in all but one province, the CFR was indeed ~0.4%.

In one province, Hubei, the medical system did collapse.

Its CFR jumped to 3-4%. That is worth going to extreme measures to prevent. In the USA, that would amount to ~10M dead.

That is not a seasonal flu.

I think a superior approach for most of the world is one along the lines of Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea: extensive testing and contact tracing and limited but real quarantine measures. But, yes, everything should be on the table to prevent the nightmare healthcare system collapse scenario.

CFR of 0.6% is a very optimistic figure. It is a naive calculation based on current # deaths / # infections.

1) But # infections were growing exponentially, we need to use numbers from the same cohort, which implies much lower # infections & higher CFR. Naive CFR will go up once infections grow more slowly. (It already is higher than 0.6%).

2) South Korean confirmed cases are much younger than their median age, mainly between 20-29 years old (perhaps because of where superspreading events happen—that church). This age group has a much lower fatality rate from Covid-19.

3) # hospital beds per capita in South Korea is second highest among OECD countries (1st is Japan) and ~4 times that of the US. They already have patients waiting for beds. Most countries will do much worse if they reach the same # infections per capita.

CFR changes dramatically depending on whether people can get hospital care.

We can embrace what China has done, or what S. Korea has done, or what Singapore has done, or what Italy has finally started doing. Any of those would have a dramatically positive effect. Right now, we (U.S.) haven't done any of that. That is the problem.

China is now seeing a wave of secondary infections as they relax travel restrictions and as people enter the country from elsewhere. They have not stopped the spread, they simply slowed it down.

That's the whole point. If you slow it down you can avoid the rapid spike in severe cases that overwhelm the system. It's like traffic -- once you surpass a certain volume, the system locks up and throughput drops.

And that in itself is a huge accomplishment that will save many lives.

I think the point was to do a controlled restart while making sure the rate of secondary infections remains low enough that the impact of the coronavirus remains less than the flu.

What is your source? I can't see anything visible in the Hopkins data, and all news stories seem to be about continued stability in China.

I work for a company with significant manufacturing in China, our source is people on the ground. So, Anecdata, but well-connected anecdata.

I imagine that was done on some doors not all, just to better funnel people to the remaining open exits where they had their manned check points.

I cannot see that happening in the U.S. without armed confrontations.

Like guns or not, that's the 2nd Amendment at work.

Is it? Unless you have some sort of evidence that “they didn’t try this because guns,” that’s less than speculation.

That is ridiculous. I was commenting on a hypothetical situation.

People own guns for defense. There's reason to believe that if people are being trapped in a building against their will, they may use them.

Rather scary how massive apartment buildings in China, where most people live, are able to be turned into prisons so quickly.

Uh, that’s not clear at all given how they report cases.