No one has ever said anything remotely like that. The issue here, and the reason it caused so much concern when it was still stuck in China, was that it has characteristics that make it incredibly difficult to prevent it breaking out into a community and across into new communities.
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I have to disagree with you here.
In my view you hit it early and you hit it hard. That way you gain control and you get that control early. That results in shorter timescales for whatever measures you have in place but also the ability to react quickly going forward. That is the way you minimise the impact on schools, economy, health systems, people’s well being etc.
Second waves are nothing new. It was discussed months ago. The UK simply failed to get control, and has been playing catch up ever since with a government that’s only focus is self preservation. And now with a second wave looking pretty much nailed on to be as bad as the first with regard to case numbers we still dont have the practices or the infrastructure in place to deal with this again.
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I just don’t think you can in countries that are not state controlled, and even in state controlled counties, how do you stop something like this from becoming a pandemic? e.g. shut down Beijing airport? When do you shut it down? 100 cases of something you have no idea about? 1000 cases after a few weeks when you have identified something? Has it been identified as deadly, highly contagious?
I don’t see a practical solution for hit it early and hard.
Hindsight is of course a wonderful thing, but retrospectively, China should have quickly shut down the original province in which the epidemics started. Had they done that, we’d not be in the current state.
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New Zealand
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No offence intended if you feel that was directed at you. It was more of a shout out to people young enough to not have lived through SARS, and yes it does not mean that people that were not around during SARS, dont know about it.
Err… you mean, like toddlers?
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I don’t consider that practical. I don’t see how every country in the world acts as per New Zealand, and that has the type of isolation that New Zealand has. This is what I mean by practical.
I’m specifically talking about the utter failure that is the UK’s response to COVID-19.
Even Greece managed better than the UK. In fact almost every nation in the Europe has done better than the UK.
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15 years ago? I don’t consider a 10 year old, old enough to consider the impacts of SARS, or even if I am 50% wrong, I don’t consider a 5 year old, old enough. I didn’t mean for “lived though”, to be interpreted as being alive.
I didn’t think it was directed at me. I responded to it because it was a strawman. A pandemic is defined based on its global spread, not it’s seriousness. The issue with this is not that it is a pandemic, but that it’s a really big fucking deal, and the fact that we will have other diseases and health issues to deal with does not diminish the need to seriously address this.
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On a different note. There has been debate over ‘viral load’ here. Essentially PCR can not give a quantity or at least not one that is comparable between laboratories (Timone in Marseille does quantity analysis via PCR however this is through a highly controlled processus).
There is however imo a method to follow viral concentrations through analysis of water above all ‘sewage’. I am sure there are surveys of this but they are not reported and results are very thin on the ground. Compared to individual test I would reckon this type of analysis would not cost much. of course it won’t replace individual tests however it could give a good indication of what’s happening or not.
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lol, I thought it was a few years ago, but maybe I’m getting my epidemics confused. This is the main one to really hit the UK with any severity, so I haven’t really been that tuned in to the various strains of bird and swine flus that have gone around previously.
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New Zealand
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They being an Island Nation where exceptionally lucky unlike the U.K. which is definitely not an Island Nation 
Having a semi competent Government may have helped NZ as well.
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I assume that is Sarcasm??
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Absolutely dripping with it mate.
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I agree with what you say, I just interpret it differently.
I don’t think anyone has not treated this seriously (and please don’t bring up with hoax community), its more of an interpretation on what seriously means in different parts of the world. What I mean by this, if one country does A, and another B, it doesn’t mean one is taking it more seriously than the other. Its just a different strategy and no-one at this time knows what is going to be best. The strategies also rely on data, real data can only be gathered over time, so strategies evolve. In Canada we had travel restrictions, then after a time, quarantine, then after a time, masks, then after a time no public transport, etc (not in that order). I think most countries evolved and continue to evolved like this, and some countries seemed to have said ok, no more changes, this is what we have decided, lets wait and see. I have no idea what will be best, the experts don’t know, they speculate and someone pats them on the back for being correct in the end, while the 1000’s that were completely wrong are forgotten. As they say, history is written by the victors (something like that).
As you say, Pandemic is based on global spread, so its already global, which takes me back to the practicality of extreme measures. And I want to emphasize practicality.
Phew. Tough when you dont recognise new screen names
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I can’t remember exactly who said it but I half recall a Tory MP saying that the UK wasn’t as lucky as some island nations during the Pandemic.
Hopefully someone else remembers the exact story.
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What would you say to nations that are competent and those that are clearly less so? That is not a diferent strategy. That is something completely different.
Furthermore, what you are talking about here is lives. Not numbers on a screen and as such the virus demands the upmost respect. That meant taking heed of all the current advice and knowledge as it became available.
Having a leader that decided to go on holiday or perhaps one that said it wasn’t that serious at all is not heeding that advice, and to be honest not that competent. These two are literally responsible for a large number of deaths that really shouldn’t have happened.