This is obviously not true because there are many countries that had many introductions from travel, just like this, and even large outbreaks, and got it under control without anything like China’s shutdowns. There are other proven strategies that work well.
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Replying to @zeynep @DouthatNYT
Take a look at my article. Almost every country got multiple introductions, just like the United States, and some even had bigger outbreaks than we did early on and did not have draconian shutdowns, just appropriate response to the threat, and it worked.https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2020/09/k-overlooked-variable-driving-pandemic/616548/ …
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Replying to @zeynep
I guess I think the regional concentration of success stories in small, pandemic-hardened Pacific Rim countries is telling; I read your "once a country has too many outbreaks" paragraph as describing the US in most plausible late-February conditions.
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Replying to @DouthatNYT @zeynep
The example of Europe shows that it's possible to suppress w/harder lockdowns after a major trauma, and it's reasonable to see US failure in that regard in May/June. But no big non-Pacific country, not even Germany, achieved SK/Taiwan/Japan suppression early once it was seeded.
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Replying to @DouthatNYT
The idea that it was not seeded in South Korea & Japan is simply not true. You're just assuming the answer: we failed because it was seeded, and they didn't because it wasn't. Also Europe overdid lockdowns and then relaxed the wrong way. My article is long but it addresses that.
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Replying to @zeynep @DouthatNYT
New Zealand had 277+ separate introductions that we know of. South Korea had one of the world's worst outbreaks very early. Yes, a few countries got lucky early on, but even the ones that got unlucky had varied response, and there were right answers.
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Replying to @zeynep @DouthatNYT
No one is arguing that there weren't. We are asking whether Donald Trump failed in some way peculiar to him, or in some way that was pretty common among large countries with a lot of introductions. The answer Ross and I come to is "Not obviously worse in Spring, bad in summer."
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Though I think that actually, once you control for density and slightly later super-spreading, Donald Trump underperformed even on those metrics--but also that this is a complex case unlikely to convince many people who didn't already hate Trump.
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Replying to @asymmetricinfo @DouthatNYT
We failed spectacularly in ways absolutely unique to us and the bigger circle of failure includes almost all of Western Europe, and the key tool was whether one had the pathogen right, early, by looking at the data rather than sticking to the wrong playbook plus some competence.
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I'm rejecting the idea that once the epidemic somehow "seeded" there wasn't much to do, Ross's first tweet. Just not true. Absolutely reject the culture argument; many different cultures worked. Competence? Sure, everything fails without some competence.
2 replies 1 retweet 16 likes
zeynep tufekci Retweeted Ross Douthat
This is just not true, because we have lots of examples. That's what I'm pointing out.https://twitter.com/DouthatNYT/status/1314563296389816325 …
zeynep tufekci added,
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