Another one of those examples has been actively censoring covid information from the start, and thus cannot be trusted.
As for Vietnam, it is an interesting case, and we don't have enough data to rule out cross reactivity or other factors playing a role.
Extrapolating these data points to the entire world with wildly varying sociological, biological, environmental, and countless other factors and saying this is clearly the correct (and implicity achieveable) strategy for all 8 billion people on the earth is at best hypothetical.
Australia and NZ have densely populated cities, and what does being an island have to do with anything? Countries can close their borders. In fact, Australian states closed their borders to one another.
> Another one of those examples has been actively censoring covid information from the start, and thus cannot be trusted.
You don't have to trust the government. Just ask people you know in China what's going on there. Things have been mostly open for a year now, with no sign of the virus (outside of a few localized outbreaks, which have been dealt with through local lockdowns and blanket testing of the population). China is not the black box that many people think it is.
> As for Vietnam, it is an interesting case, and we don't have enough data to rule out cross reactivity or other factors playing a role.
Vietnamese people are not somehow immune to SARS-CoV-2. They're susceptible, just like everyone else.
> Extrapolating these data points to the entire world
This is the wrong way to think about this. These aren't data points generated by some semi-random process. They're countries that effectively implemented a strategy that we know should work, based on the basic principles of epidemiology. The virus is spread between people who are in close proximity to one another. If you drastically reduce contacts between people, the virus has far fewer chances to spread, and the epidemic recedes. If you do that long enough, you get down to a small enough number of cases that you can trace every single one and snuff out the virus completely. After that, you have to have strict measures at the border in order to catch imported cases, and you have to do regular testing in the population to make sure you don't miss the beginnings of any new outbreak.
There's nothing to "extrapolate." The strategy works because of very basic principles of how the virus spreads. The only question is whether each county has the organizational capacity and societal will to carry this strategy out.
Indeed, that's a critical question to the long term success of the strategy.
If the world is unable to put 8 billion people in solitary confinement (nevermind the disastrous effects that would cause) indefinitely until the virus is eliminated (nevermind the fact that we are incapabale of validating if it was actually completely erradicated), the virus is only going to pop back up.
There is no evidence of such a strategy working at scale across the world.
The scientists on the covid team at the WHO have said as much: lockdowns should only be used as a last resort to buy time to scale up health care resources. Should we listen to those scientists?
> the virus is only going to pop back up.
It does indeed pop up every once in a while, because the borders can never be 100% sealed. There have been outbreaks in Beijing, Qingdao, border towns in Heilongjiang and Yunnan, and elsewhere. But the government is understandably on high alert, and these outbreaks were caught early enough to be stopped with local lockdowns, coupled with blanket testing of the population (i.e., testing everyone in a city in a few days).
There was a brief "second wave" in China this winter, in which an outbreak managed to spread to several cities, but it was ended with relatively short lockdowns and mass testing. The number of new infections per day peaked around 100.
The basic lesson here is that you can both have near-zero case counts and let people live their lives almost as normal if you first act decisively to bring cases to zero, by using temporary, strict lockdowns, quarantines and mass testing.
> There is no evidence of such a strategy working at scale across the world.
China is the largest country in the world, so I'd call that "at scale." Vietnam is larger than any EU country. We're not talking about San Marino or Monaco here.
> The scientists on the covid team at the WHO have said as much: lockdowns should only be used as a last resort to buy time to scale up health care resources. Should we listen to those scientists?
A lot of recommendations will be reevaluated after the pandemic is over. Nothing like this has happened in 100 years.
They took shit seriously and everyone prepared the minute news reached them of a possible pandemic. A good friend of mine is from VN and he was shipping PPE back home to his parents around August or October of 2019.
I think most Americans don't realize how common pandemics have been in east Asia. To them, it's like preparing for any other natural disaster. It's like comparing the Michiganders response to a blizzard to that of Texans.
This is why we need more data about cross reactivity playing a role in the relatively favorable health outcomes in Asia and Africa compared to the rest of the world.
