(In the UK, in Italy, in Spain, in France. In spite of harsh lockdowns)
As we all know, Wuhan (China) was the model. "We need a lockdown. Like they did in Wuhan! That's how they shut the virus down."
Except that in Wuhan, they did NOT only do lockdown.
They started off with the lockdown. But as it became clear that this would not be enough, the Chinese also added in centralized quarantine (or "out-of-home quarantine")
"Centralized quarantine" simply means, you find people who are infected and have them leave their own households and go and recover in a facility where they can't infect anyone (often a hotel or school that's not being used at the moment due to social distancing). That way, it's far less likely that they will infect the other people in their households.
Analysis of death rates in Wuhan, adding in the time lag for infections and the incubation period, are pretty clear: the lockdown was not enough. It was really the centralized quarantine that bent the curve.
In the UK, Italy, Spain and many other western countries, governments decided to hold lockdowns, inspired by Wuhan. The problem is, they have decided to ignore the other bit of the equation--the need to provide a safe quarantine place for infected people, so that other members of their families can stay safe.
By the time these countries held their lockdowns, the virus was already entrenched, meaning that a LOT of households already contained an infected person. When you then hold a lockdown, without removing those infected people, what you are literally doing is trapping infected people and uninfected people together in quite small spaces (households) and forcing the healthy people to breathe in a thick fog of virus that's being shed by the infected person. Hour after hour, day after day.
Guess what happens? The virus burns its way through households. The death rates remain stubbornly high, with the number of new infections sometimes even increasing a little for a while after the lockdown commences. Eventually, the virus will be left with nowhere to go after it has infected all family members that it was going to infect, and the number of deaths will start to fall. But my goodness, a lot of people will have died by this time. Hence those grim, grim figures we are seeing from several European countries, including the UK.
Household infections-and preventing them-should be our no. 1 focus, apart from containment in medical settings.
COVID19 spreads most easily when people are close together for prolonged periods of time. An infected person wandering around a not-particularly-crowded beach or park is extremely unlikely to infect anyone else there---the literature suggest that infections in outdoor environments are very rare. Infection is more likely in a school or workplace, where people are close together for longer periods. But the household trumps all. People living together spend long periods of time together, especially if lockdown means they have nowhere else to go. If someone is infected, the odds of other people catching COVID19 from them are very high. Worse still, the severity of the disease does appear to be linked with the size of the viral dose. People getting big doses of virus seem far more likely to come down with a severe case of COVID19, probably because the immune system is overwhelmed and does not have time to rally. People stuck at home with an infected person are exposed to huge amounts of the virus.
If the UK wants to come out of lockdown with any sort of economy left, it is absolutely crucial to get death rates and hospitalization figures down as quickly as possible through testing and centralized quarantine. There are lots of unused hotels and other facilities right now that can be used. Many industries like the hotel industry will need financial help at some point anyway. They can earn their assistance by helping out with quarantine right now. This is what is being done in other countries.
And just a plea but.... we might have got going on the centralized quarantine a bit earlier, if we had not wasted weeks on end being distracted by trivia. No, the continuing high numbers of new infections, deaths, hospitalizations are NOT being caused by people taking a dog for a walk twice a day, by people jogging, by kids scootering through a park, by people eating a sausage roll and an apple on a **ing bench. They are being caused because huge numbers of infected people have been left, by the governments, to spray huge doses of virus all day every day all over the rest of their families until those family members get sick as well, often much much sicker than the original infected person.
www.nytimes.com/2020/03/30/opinion/coronavirus-new-york-quarantine.html New York starts quarantine
www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/being-sick-and-alone-is-miserable-being-sick-at-home-with-your-family-might-be-dangerous/2020/04/13/cfe63b32-744e-11ea-ad9b-254ec99993bc_story.html "Being sick and alone is miserable, being sick at home with your family might be dangerous"
twitter.com/nataliexdean/status/1250225520551346177 Data from Iceland shows how easily COVID19 spreads within households
www.nytimes.com/2020/04/24/world/europe/italy-coronavirus-home-isolation.html isolating the sick at home, Italy stores up family tragedies
www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-out-of-home-quarantine-measures-in-china-helped-limit-spread-of/
Out-of-home quarantine’ measures in China helped limit spread of COVID-19, epidemiologists say
www.nytimes.com/2020/04/01/opinion/coronavirus-viral-dose.html It looks like dose matters a lot with COVID19
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Covid
The probable reason why deaths are so slow to fall
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Kokeshi123 · 30/04/2020 14:07
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