Wikipedia, of course. I didn't think to look there. D'oh!
tufty wrote:Population under total lockdown ~60M
Chinese cases ~80K
About 0.1 - 0.15%, err on the low side to cover cases outside the Hubei area.
So, yeah, still a fraction of one percent, even at the epicentre of the worst case of it so far.
And, of course, Wuhan is a special case.
In that that's where it was discovered, so even if the Chinese authorities had instantaneously locked everything down the exact moment the virus was identified (which they didn't exactly do, but I'm sticking to just the numbers here, and we can discuss the politics involved later), the virus always gets that implicit "head start" for the duration of the period when it was out there, but no-one knew it yet.
The virus doesn't appear when you first identify it. It was already out and about in Wuhan, and spreading, before discovery - because, indeed, that's what prompts the discovery in the first place, when a mass of people start getting ill and some dying, that's when you realise that there's something horribly wrong here and you need to investigate the cause.
Not to defend the known failings of the initial Chinese response at all, but to recognise that "ground zero" of any infection is always going to be bad, because the infection gets a "head start" in spreading before we've even realised it's there and, indeed, we only begin realising it's there because it's already causing extraordinary illness and deaths (that is, to create enough of a "signal" to be noticed above the "background noise" of the fact that, well, people do get ill and die for a multitude of other reasons as well). So discovery comes off the back of the fact that it's already bad to begin with.
But, I stress, in making these points, I do not wish to minimise the seriousness of this in the slightest. Exponential growth is a very deadly beast indeed. The deadliest one of them all, I'd say. Which was why I was so concerned with Boris's initial "ah, fuck it, just let it happen" approach - that was catastrophically bad thinking and I'm glad that various universities and institutions flooded the government with new data and modelling to help them appreciate that, no, we really, really, really do need the tighter controls and restrictions - and an aim towards "suppression", not natural "herd immunity".
I'm still not convinced that they remotely understand the nuance of all this, mind you. But thank fuck someone at least bashed the basic concept of exponential growth into their heads, as "just let it happen" is totally and utterly insane. I mean, genuinely and properly insane, not just "I'm being melodramatic because I disagree with you" kind of mad.
I guess politicians are so used to reacting to terrorists or wars or whatever, with a "we will stand up to them, with a stiff upper lip and daring-do" approach, they automatically switched to that mode. But this is a virus. It doesn't work that way. You can't play "mind games" with a thing that's not even living, much less has no mind.
"Words ought to be a little wild - for they are assaults of thought on the unthinking."
- John Maynard Keynes
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