Thread by @Neoavatara

I want to debunk another myth... That China stopped the infection purely through authoritarian lock down procedures.

WHO Official Says Coronavirus Containment Remains Possible npr.org/sections/goats…

"As long as you have these discrete outbreaks ... there is the opportunity to control them — to get on top of these and contain them and prevent a lot of disease and ultimately death," says Dr. Bruce Aylward, adviser to the director-general of the World Health Organization."

"Aylward led a fact-finding trip in China in February on behalf of the World Health Organization. He says the experience there altered his view of what can be done."

""They actually changed the course of a respiratory-borne outbreak without a vaccine, which was extraordinary," says Aylward. The number of daily new cases in China went from around 2,000 just a few weeks ago to less than 100 in recent days."

Here is the take home point:

"But Aylward says other countries may be taking the wrong lesson from China by attributing its success to the unprecedented restrictions on daily life in several cities, most famously Wuhan, the city of 11 million people where the outbreak began."

"There, the government has suspended transportation out of the city and for the most part required people to remain in their homes — with only brief forays permitted to stock up on food and other supplies."

""China has 31 provinces, thousands of cities," notes Aylward. "And it was only a few cities where they took those draconian measures. In the vast majority of them, they ... really went back to fundamentals of public health.""

"These included ensuring that there was enough testing capacity to quickly identify cases, isolating infected patients, tracing anyone who had contact with them and, when necessary, placing those contacts in quarantine facilities so they wouldn't get infected... "

"... by the sick person or spread the disease further. Also, in places where clusters of cases were emerging, authorities prohibited mass gatherings."

""That's how they stopped it in the areas with over 1.3 billion people," says Aylward. "We spent 2 weeks on the ground... Every other province had thousands of cases, not unlike the situation you see in European countries or in the U.S."

"In short, Aylward says, "it wasn't a lockdown everywhere. That's the wrong way to portray China's approach to the disease. And that's leading to some fundamental confusion and failure to do the right things.""

People need to stop saying we as a free society can't stop this... We absolutely can.

We have to be proactive, and make costly decisions, but it absolutely can be done.