You can’t shut us down. This is the busiest travel area in the entire country. You would cripple travel between Boston and DC. It would be a nightmare.
Looking forward to a continued lockdown for the next 3 weeks. Does that mean I won’t be able to cram into my church on Easter?
China closed down travel between Hubei and other provinces. That worked for them as Hubei was the center of the outbreak and the cases in other provinces had come 'from' Hubei. They were able to send doctors, nurses, and medical supplies from all the other provinces into Hubei, and keep the infection from coming out from Hubei. We all said at the time that that would be extremely difficult to do such a lockdown in pretty much any other country in the world.
I am heartened that countries are trying to emulate that lockdown in Hubei as much as possible and try to make use of the extra preparation time to work out ways to do that in ways that are more consistent with our cultural norms.
The thing is that unlike the situation in China in January and February, most countries won't have one province at the centre of their outbreak, and resources from outside to be sent in from far less affected regions of the country. So we're not going to have exactly the same course of spread and limit that occurred with the Wuhan/Hubei/Greater China 'model'.
I think personally that we need to look at saving lives as our priority, using scientific methods to do that rather than emotional and arguing over politics. Of course that's going to be hard the more personal this gets. But that's when it's most important to have those guidelines in place.
I think we also need to remember that every country is learning as it goes. This has happened so swiftly. Governments aren't used to working at these speeds other than for very local and temporary emergencies like local floods, earthquakes, tornadoes and hurricanes. This is happening on a national and global level in every country at the same time...there will be waves of infection rolling across countries, focusing in nodes of large cities, waves across the globe. There will be suffering and death.
We don't really have any modern equivalent to this to use as a guidebook.
In the UK we have some awareness of plague outbreaks in the middle ages, villages trying to keep themselves segregated from the outside world, turning away traveling traders. Then there were religious groups traveling around village-to-village, town-to-town, praying, self-flagellating, etc. We have some beginnings of understanding about infection control, though they thought of infection more in terms of miasmas (bad airs) they also knew that contact between people played a huge part in the spread of infection.
I don't think we have such an awareness of what happened in the days of the 1918/1919 Spanish Flu pandemic, or any flu pandemics between that one and this Coronavirus pandemic. I think there will be basic infection control measures that will be applicable, but then governments have the difficulty of how much our world has changed since then, and how to utilise modern technology in the fight, but how do we cope when some of that technology aids the spread of disease (modern travel)?
How do we cope when a village can't lock itself away from the rest of the region, the rest of the country, the rest of the world, and feed itself with the produce from its own fields? When we need food, clothing, and medicine from 'outside'? When this is happening all across the globe at one time? When it's not just a single region of a single country having a massive disaster and the rest of the globe can step in to help? When every country, rich and poor, is fighting to get the same resources (PPE, medicines, the eventual vaccines, ventilators, oxygen cylinders) for its own people?
I haven't been in this thread for a while now, and it looks so different now. For the USA it would appear that the global conundrum is occurring at a national level? That it's not just countries fighting over border rules and over attempting to get their hands on ventilator supplies, but it's happening there at state level?
China was able to have cities like Beijing and Shanghai send resources to Wuhan/Hubei. A country like the US is going to be having simultaneous outbreaks in all cities, and all cities will be 'Wuhan'. But just as the Chinese used their culture to fight the virus, the US and other countries have to find the most useful parts of our cultures to fight the virus...not fight each other!
How about we ask for the input of epidemiologists and virologists for their input on things like travel between cities? How about we work together against the virus, forget about political campaigns and campaign against the virus. Forget how you're perceived 'now' as a politician and think more about how history will be the ultimate judge, and it won't accept your "buts". Prioritise saving lives over gaining vote shares over the other party.
Yes, unlike the average flu season, our freedom to go out and infect others is going to have to be curtailed in some ways. Most people seem to be accepting that on the ground. It doesn't matter to the doctor and nurse treating the patient what party the patient voted for. It doesn't matter to the patient how the doctor or nurse voted. Those doctors and nurses don't have the luxury of standing around finger-pointing and blowing their own trumpets as if it was election season. What can we all learn from them and the way they go about fighting the virus?
