Wednesday, 11 March 2020

Almost all policies to fight the contagion are ludicrously useless rituals

Well, almost none of these hysterical reactions is any helpful to reduce the rate of contagion at the level of the individuals let alone the aggregate numbers. This disease was tamed to near non-existence in China – which has reduced the daily new cases from the peak around 1500 to dozens – but it was at a painful cost.While I have no proof, it seems plausible to me that China did these massive maneuvers because it had bad conscience about the origin of the virus. The virus could have been created in the lab. It could have been leaked due to a scary accident, a bat who bit a researcher. Or its propagation at least depended on the first month of inaction. At any rate, China decided to fight the virus in a hardcore way. It wasn't sufficient to prevent the virus from getting to other countries – it really couldn't have achieved this outcome (the virus was probably present abroad already when the Chinese maneuvers began). But it was sufficient to tame the new cases in China itself."

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