11101
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- Aug 26, 2014
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I assume the lockdown will be temporarily, only to stop the catastrophic spreading that is happening. Gradually, I assume that the restrictions will be loosened, but still keeping social distancing and recommending work from home for those that can do it. Schools is a bit difficult to know, probably there is going to be some form of e-learning for another year and a half.
China is not in lockdown, only the province centered around Wuhan is. The other regions are functional, but apparently people are cautious and keeping social distancing. Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Singapore, Hong Kong are all doing well without going on lockdown.
If everything goes well, we might expect restrictions to loosen around July/August, while in meantime the countries being prepared for a potential second wave. Also, there are already some anti-virals (or even malaria pills) which have shown good promise, with more testing going on, so we might have good news shortly.
And viruses are weird. H1N1 just went away after infecting 1 billion people or so. Maybe this one might do similar, or might mutate to something less lethal, maybe the summer might help our fight against it, etc. Also, maybe this is not as bad as we think. The estimate R0 is from 1.3 (similar to flu) to around 4. SARS and Ebola were around 2 and they were contained.
Or maybe nothing will work, and then the survivals will create herd immunity, but I have become optimistic in the last few hours.
Save the optimism for later this week. Strict Wuhan style lockdowns clearly work, but we will not know until Friday if the kind of lockdown that will be accepted by a Western audience works - please stay indoors but we won't force you to. A spike in Italian cases this weekend was expected and predicted by authorities, due to people's behaviour last weekend, but now we have to hope cases start to fall. If they don't then i don't know how we can slow it down.