Thread by @balajis

In China, the lockdown order came from above. It was executed by a state run by technocrats, and the population generally bought in.

In the US, lockdown is a bottom-up push from social media. The state isn't run by technocrats, the population isn't fully bought in.

Put another way, American lockdown is a clone of what Italy did, which is a clone of what China.

But in the language of a product manager, if you just clone a feature in isolation you might miss a bunch of details that make it work in one context but not as well in another.

So, we should know *exactly* what the Chinese did, and determine which of those features are compatible with our ethics and which are not, and then execute.

The Donald McNeil clip on Maddow the other day gives a good overview of what the Chinese did.
msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/…

Another alternative is to just copy as many features of the Taiwanese 124 point plan as we can still execute on.

My feeling is that we may be blindly cloning one aspect of the Asian response (lockdown) but not the sum total of what they did. jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/…

The WHO report from late February is worth reading in detail, starting on page 16.
who.int/docs/default-s…

See also content starting on page 27.

Now, it's not at all clear that China has beaten the disease. Their strategy appears to be:

- use lockdown to get new cases to zero
- relax lockdown, replace with digital quarantine
- identify viral fires & isolate
- meanwhile, drive drugs + vaccines

https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1237470083783495682

Still, China was surprise attacked by the virus...yet *appears* to *maybe* have it under control despite being first at bat. Sending 2M masks to Italy would be expensive PR if epidemic was still blazing.

The US is last at bat, had months of prep time and everyone else to copy...