An interesting stat: More people died from this yesterday than have died from in in China in total.
Wow. Every single day from now on, that will continue to be the case and given the world is nowhere near the peak, I imagine it will be the case for months.
Interesting (and deeply saddening) but so what? Well if it only carries on like this for a couple of months, that would the death count outside of China is more than 60x that of China itself. Probably much more, depending on how high the world daily death rate gets.
And yet China accounts for 1/6th of the world's population. It only goes to show how the world has dropped the ball on this. A country with 1/6th of the world population is going to end up with less than 1/60th of the deaths. My guess is a much smaller fraction indeed - maybe 1/600th.
China showed us how best to respond with an immediate lockdown and severe travel restrictions in their own country. But we - not just here in the UK but pretty much everywhere else - waited too long and allowed people to freely move around whilst the virus was silently permeating the population. And we will get to see the results of that play out every day for the next few months.
What if we went into immediate lockdown as you say we should have.
Yes the spread of the disease would have been less.
Yes we would have had less deaths.
Intensive care beds lying empty.
Then slowly but surely, people would get restless and start breaking the lockdown. Mainly because they would have seen very few deaths and think this isn't that serious.
Before long, the death figures would start rising again.
Pleas to remain inside would be ignored. The reason for this is persons are smart but people are thick.
The government knows this.
We already have pubs doing lock ins.
People "exercising" in public parks. I don't think i've seen as many cyclists in my life.
Dog walkers stopping to have chats with people.
People have been BBQing on the moors in large groups.
Old people deciding that it is ok to go outside to shop/visit friends.
All this in less than one week of a lock down.
Now we have a situation with no controls. So the army is deployed onto the streets.
Like all the random riots we have had over the years. People would see the army as the enemy.
People would resist calls for isolation. Chaos would soon follow.
The virus takes over again and now there is nothing to stop or limit it.
The figures we have now would look great in comparison.
We have no way of stopping this. Only trying to slow it or manage it.
They have said from the start that they know they have "one" shot at total isolation/lockdown.
Mistakes have been and will be made. But i think we are doing ok.
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