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Why hasn't it skyrocketed in China and Japan, Sweden, and Germany.
In fact can anyone explain the low deaths in those countries? What are they doing right that USA and UK are not?
I don't know about the others, but I think I can see what's happened in China.
Unlike countries like the UK and USA, China's outbreak was mostly limited to one province, which was closed off from the rest of the country, so most cases were in that single province and that's where they had to build the extra hospitals etc. They had the ability to send in hospital staff and ventilators etc from the rest of the massive country to that single province.
Then, they were able to achieve excellent contact tracing, so that when cases turned up in other provinces, they did contact tracing along with the social distancing in order to keep the R0 low in those regions and give them the potential to eradicate outbreaks in places where there was seeding from people who'd traveled out of Hubei.
What's happening in places like London and New York is more akin to what happened in Wuhan. But due to Wuhan being the epicentre and most cases still in that area even when they realised and acknowledged the seriousness of the virus, they could mostly keep the virus from spreading out of that region.
I followed the cases growing in the UK more than in the USA, but we had so many seeding events that we gave up and let it grow. We didn't yet have the ability to test enough people. I fear that some people returning from holidays in countries like Italy and Spain might not have taken the disease seriously enough and not isolated properly (the government wasn't ordering them to, and most people will stick to what the orders are).
So there's a huge difference between how China went about restricting the spread of the virus and the way we effectively allowed it to spread through the community and become what it is today (UK). I'm not saying this to attack anyone, it's just observation/analysis.
You could see on some of the sites, I forget the names of them, that have reporting the statistics, that in China each case was labeled with tracking, so at the beginning almost all cases tracked to Wuhan (which was the same thing in the rest of the world when the first cases were identified outside China, and this can act as a verifier to what the Chinese were reporting in their cases due to the consistency).
Even now it appears China is closely following up anyone who enters the country from outside, the Chinese returnees, and they're reporting cases in those people who are bringing the virus back with them as opposed to contracting it in China. We're not doing that in the UK, and we haven't been doing that .... I was going to say for weeks, but it's almost fair to say that we haven't done that at all!
So, I've seen an image that has the cases per so many thousand population in various countries and it's noted that China's is so much lower than Italy or Spain...There's a reason for that, and it's not lying, it's because China did an amazing job of locking down that province where the outbreak started and keeping it mostly restricted there, and then doing 'spot' cleaning up of cases that came out of the province in the way you do the spot cleaning of smaller fires that emanate from humongous wildfires.
This is also why it was said ages ago by epidemiological modelers that China was at risk of a second wave of the virus later in the year that would likely affect the whole country and have much bigger implications than what was effectively the Hubei outbreak rather than the China outbreak.
Even within the Hubei outbreak, China reached a point where they were using those arena 'hospitals' to put people in quarantine from their families, but those weren't people suffering from the most serious cases on ventilators like in the UK "Nightingale" hospitals. So that was another way to restrict the spread. The lockdown in Hubei seemed more severe than the UK lockdown, at one point they were only allowing one person per household out about twice a week to do shopping, and the only businesses open were supermarkets and pharmacies (along with hospitals) and public transport was totally shut down.
They didn't have enough tests to go around in Hubei while this was all happening! That's another big thing to note, they did it without enough tests to go around, but they reached a point where they were actively searching for cases, looking for them, x-raying chests for signs of the Covid-19 pneumonia in order to diagnose by clinical signs even when they didn't have enough tests.
My hope is that we in the UK will end up with far more options if we can take the best parts of the various strategies from other countries, like China and South Korea and mould them to fit for our country. I believe if we combined the two strategies we could virtually zero the cases here before there is a widely-available vaccine.