Slack / Private Message Drop — page 49

Yes, I got this was and subscribed to the loon group without my knowledge. [2020-06-02 14:24:01] [Eddie Holmes] That's a great blog though [2020-06-02 15:03:49] [Andrew Rambaut] https://apnews.com/3c061794970661042b18d5aeaaed9fae [2020-06-02 16:05:25] [Eddie Holmes] Yes, I read it first thing. I think they have pretty much nailed it. They asked me a comment a few times but I just ignored. Won't do Zhang any favours in China though. [2020-06-02 20:08:07] [Kristian Andersen] Yeah, great reporting from the AP on this, however, I vehemently disagree that faster information (we're talking ~ a week here) would have had _*any*_ measurable difference - Europe and the US would still have been sleeping on their watch and _*nothing*_ would have changed. The article make it sound as if China's delays made this a worse situation - sure, maybe a little bit, but compared to the delays (past and present...) on the US side, that's peanuts. That needs to be really friggin' clear. [2020-06-03 00:15:40] [Eddie Holmes] Completely agree. NO country would have imposed a lockdown faster than China. No way. The mistake - which was understandable - is that they (China) assumed that was SARS and hence would be relatively easy to contain as they just had to quarantine the symptomatic cases. [2020-06-03 07:02:39] [Kristian Andersen] Agreed. What's really frustrating is that people writing about China's 'slow response' have no clue about outbreak response or what is involved. Plus, in hindsight it's easy to see that it transmits really easily, but we/they didn't know that in the beginning and it was a reasonable assumption that it didn't. China definitely isn't innocent, but no matter how you look at it, they reacted exceptionally fast - all the delays that totally changed the course of this pandemic happened outside of China. [2020-06-03 07:08:37] [Andrew Rambaut] There was definitely the rush to publish in Nature that probably resulted in some hiding of data. The posting to virological put a stop to that I think. But I seem to remember that Zhang had a Nature paper ready by the time the sequence was uploaded to Genbank (and before the Virological post) - Eddie persuaded him to release the data first which probably saved China generally from much greater embarrassment. [2020-06-03 07:24:26] [Kristian Andersen] Yup, that last bit is definitely true. And yes, there were (short) delays no doubt - but they were inconsequential in the grand scheme of things (my main issue here is that especially in the US is that people can't uncouple the two - i.e. (1) the delay and (2) the consequences from that delay. People immediately jump to the conclusion that this could all have been stopped if there hadn't been a week delay, which is obviously rubbish) [2020-06-03 11:52:58] [Robert Garry] Actions and statements that lead to actual delays that were more consequential: 1. It's China's problem - we don't have any cases here