Why DeSantis’s Covid Policy Remains Relevant America’s still living with the damage done by lockdowns. Now China’s endgame is coming. (WSJ, Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.); Likelihood of seeking medical
by Paul Alexander
attention was virus-dependent: higher for influenza; lower for coronavirus & RSV (4%), 5% of respiratory virus infections & 21% influenza infections medically attended; was COVID ubiquitous in 2020?
Was the lockdown lunatic response wrong all along? I and Kulldorff and Atlas etc. said so, March and April 2020, that the lockdowns had to be stopped immediately. Why? It is clear now COVID was circulating maybe as early as 2018 and for sure early 2019 globally and we as societies, were already experienced with it immunologically and immune at some level. Every single lockdown action by our government in US, Canada, Canada, Australia, all nations save Sweden, was wrong. Florida was late but got it near right but late. Some praise is due to Ron. I think Noem too.
SOURCE:
‘The results wouldn’t be published until a few months after Covid arrived in early 2020, but Columbia University’s Jeffrey Shaman and colleagues produced a study in 2016-18 showing that only 5% of cold-symptom sufferers and 21% of people with flu-like symptoms sought medical attention.
Had the data been available in the pandemic’s earliest days, it would have reinforced what should have been everybody’s first assumption after reflecting on their own medical behavior. If most people with mild symptoms weren’t seeing doctors, not only was Covid less deadly than being reported, it was likely already out of the bag globally and unstoppable even in countries where it had yet to be formally identified.’
When most people come down with flu-like symptoms, they don’t see a doctor. That’s why any measure of how many have been infected with the Wuhan virus will tend to be relatively misleading. America’s biggest Chinatown is in New York City. More than a million Chinese tourists visit the city every year; dozens of locals likely return weekly from trips to see family and business associates in Wuhan. The Wuhan virus reportedly can take 14 days to incubate; according to Chinese reports, carriers have been identified who can spread the disease without appearing sick. If you are a New York resident, are you taking comfort that, as of Tuesday, no cases have been confirmed in the city? Of course not.
Once the immediate fire is out, debate will turn to China’s unprecedented social experiment. Did the order to stop travel out of Wuhan come too late? Officials quickly had to broaden the area covered—just five days after settling on Wuhan and its 11 million people they expanded the quarantine to cover a region of 50 million—so the evidence is strong that the initial decision was at least tardy. But can any inland city the size of Wuhan be effectively quarantined when 200 million Chinese now own private cars? Only an authoritarian government, it is said, would even try. But the alternative approach, as adopted during the SARS epidemic 17 years ago, of focusing on identifying and isolating individual carriers also plays to the authoritarian heavy hand. Under either approach, China’s Orwellian social credit system and its growing online and offline monitoring capabilities suggest new possibilities for contagion control in the future.
SOURCE:
The Cure for the Chinese Flu
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