Imaginos1892 wrote:The E wrote:Covid-19 has a hospitalization rate of between 10 and 20% of all cases.
Were that the case, all of the world's hospitals would have been packed to the rafters two months ago.
Hospitals are not, in fact, packed to the rafters, therefore your claim of '10 and 20%' is, at best, a gross exaggeration.
Those are the official numbers issued by the Robert Koch Institute. They do note, however, that they are preliminary and not fully reliable since, for obvious reasons, asymptomatic cases aren't tested as thoroughly as patients who do exhibit symptoms. They also note that some chinese studies show hospitalization rates of around 2%; how reliable that is I cannot honestly judge.
Regardless of what the actual number of hospitalizations will end up being in the end though, we do know that shutting down public life hard and fast can stop this bug in its tracks. Is it not preferable to endure a few weeks of hardship when the alternative is a widespread outbreak?
This ‘pandemic’ has been ‘raging’ worldwide, unnoticed, for at least four months while the Chinese denied its existence. Had there ever been a time to panic, that time is long since past. They're locking down the barn after the doors stood wide open for months.
For months, eh?
The first recorded case that everyone firmly agrees on was diagnosed at the beginning of December (chinese authorities suspect that there may have been at least one case somewhere in November). It became serious enough in Wuhan to report on on New Year's; right as people in China started to travel en masse. If there is a case to be made for chinese authorities to not have done enough, it is in this small time period in December, when the number of known cases was in the low hundreds right before a large, annual migration as people travel to and from their homes to celebrate new year's with their families.
However, by that point, it was likely already too late to really stop the virus from spreading. The first case diagnosed in the US was in mid-January; it is highly likely that the virus had already spread largely invisibly for a few weeks before that (Wuhan is a large travel hub).
By January 22nd, the Trump administration was already downplaying things hard. In February, the first entry restrictions on people who had been in Wuhan and Hubei province in the preceding two weeks went up; while Trump claimed that "We pretty much shut it down coming in from China" on February 2nd, that turned out to be blatantly false.
Point being, claiming that chinese authorities knew about COVID-19 "for months" and did nothing is you either lying or not caring about the real sequence of events.