| | | I don’t know how many here read - or remember - the postings on this thread early in the pandemic. Wuhan was a disaster - people dying in the street and on the floors of emergency rooms. It scared the whole world, and set the response pattern for most of the rest of the world — lockdowns, masks, etc.
I was watching very closely what would happen once the disease spread into other Chinese provinces. Soon, it became clear that far fewer people were dying outside of Hubei. At the time, I did a back of the envelop calculation that the case fatality ratio (CFR) in the provinces outside Hubei - and in other Asian countries - was about 0.3%. So, I realized that the 5K or so who died in Hubei/Wuhan were only the sickest of the sick, the tip of the iceberg - and that the real infection cases in those places were in the multiple millions.
I was surprised when - I think, of Feb 3 2020 - the president (or PM?) of Singapore gave a speech, where he calmly told the population what precautions to take and what to expect. He said that the fatality rate, in the end, will be about 0.2%.
So! That was exciting. By the time the disease was raging in Milan and Bergamo - I knew what was happening. Just like in Wuhan, they allowed hundreds of thousands of cases to accumulate before they recognized what was going on. A bit later, very much the same thing happened in NYC and some other places.
I’m still shocked that a retired internist like myself - or the leader of Singapore - could figure out the true fatality of the disease back by early February of 2020. It means it was possible to do so. Had President Trump received sensible advice, I think many of his reactions would have been different. But, yep, we know who his advisors were. Bureaucrats and paper pushers, too many of them. |
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