As I just said in my last post, though, the same tactics used in Wuhan won't work for Seattle. Wuhan was the source that was exporting cases outwards. That meant that the lockdown could act like a firebreak around Wuhan/Hubei and they could put out little fires around it.
But for Seattle, if that was locked down today like Wuhan was, they'd just be importing cases from another part of the US in two to four weeks time.
I think I understand a bit better now. The prediction that a vaccine would take around 18 months meant that either the Wuhan lockdown worked, or we'd probably be looking at pandemic. So other countries could put out the little fires and keep it relatively contained in their countries by putting people into quarantine when they arrived from China with the virus. But in order to keep it out entirely, you'd have to have your entire country shut down to foreign visitors for at least the next 18 months. How many countries in the world would feel able to do that? And maybe 'we' don't really understand or appreciate why they feel that's not possible.
And as it turns out, Seattle was incubating the virus already in mid-January. If I understood some of the phylogeny charts, it was also in Italy by then and has been incubating since very early on. So it seems that the only way for 100% closure of borders to have worked would have been to close them very early on in January when the virus was barely known and no one knew much about it or its potential to cause a pandemic, or what the death rate might be if it did.
I suppose all this gives me a little better appreciation for the difficulties faced by international governments. It appears they could have been playing a no-win scenario against this virus the whole time that we've been criticising their every move
