Improving ventilation will help curb SARS-CoV-2

Not everyone lives suburban houses, some live in apartment buildings with central heating that you have little control over. It's a problem for people all around the world in different environments.

The WHO was pressured into saying not to ban flights from China. Made worse by the fact that China itself was nailing domestic flight from Wuhan to the pillars of shame for eternity.

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/blogs/Whathappensif/how...

> The WHO is supposed to urge member countries to keep their borders open as much as possible

The WHO is supposed to care about health, not be the World Trade Organization. This had nothing to do with science. Saying: Ah, yes, banning flights will have little effect, because there are already Chinese tourists there, is defeatist, not effective pandemic control.

> The US banned travel from China, but continued to allow travel from Europe.

So you are effectively saying the US did not ban travel hard enough for it to be effective? Or that Italy should have also banned Chinese tourists, for the US ban to be effective?

> The first major outbreak in the US, in NY, was brought in from Europe. Because the US had almost no testing at that time, the outbreak in NY spread undetected for weeks.

From my information, it was spreading around the world in December of 2019. Expats in Wuhan who got hospitalized in November 2019 were told in December that they had contracted viral pneumonia SARS.

From CDC leaks, it appears to have been spreading with local community spread, and their warnings to prepare were either blocked by Trump, or were not send to avoid panic (of course it will start in New York and LA, so wait until it spreads everywhere, so people don't start to flee like headless chickens)

> If you look at the actual advice that the WHO was giving in late January / early February 2020,[4] it was probably a much better strategy than what the US ended up doing.

Do not ban flights from China! Or if you do, ban all flights from everywhere! But that won't be effective anyway! What is effective is testing! China shows us the way how to contain this. They are the role model of virus control.

The advice from the WHO was an absolute joke. Listening to it in the early stages of the pandemic would make you a poor master of the house, unprepared to deal with a family during a pandemic.

> What was the US' biggest problem early on in the pandemic?

Not a lack of testing. Testing only makes the problem formally worse. The real problem was a lack of information coming from WHO, as they were the mouthpiece of China, and China was hush about the real origins, the real CFR, the real R+, the real human-to-human transmission.

China had the guts to pressure the WHO into saying that packages from China were 100% safe, corona would never survive the trip. And now they push it as disinformation as the origin: it was imported into China or Wuhan from a package or frozen meat.

If you want to say travel restrictions are not effective against containment of a H2H virus, be my guest. The situation we knew we were dealing with from SARS-1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_China_Flight_112

> The WHO was pressured into saying not to ban flights from China

As I just explained, the WHO's recommendations on travel restrictions are based on the International Health Regulations (2005). The US was intimately involved in the drafting of that document. The WHO was following the mandate it had been given.

> The WHO is supposed to care about health, not be the World Trade Organization.

If you look at the WHO's history and read through the International Health Regulations, you'll find that the WHO is supposed to be concerned with the economy. It's not supposed to overreact and tank the world economy. Whatever measures it recommends are supposed to be in line with the IHR, and backed by the best available scientific evidence. The WHO is also not supposed to punish countries that suffer outbreaks, because everyone recognizes that if you start doing that, countries will simply lie and hide outbreaks. This is one of the reasons why the IHR discourage travel restrictions.

> Ah, yes, banning flights will have little effect, because there are already Chinese tourists there, is defeatist, not effective pandemic control.

It's not defeatist. It's rational. Closing the barn door after the horse has bolted is useless. If there are already sick people inside your country, your first priority has to be finding them, isolating them, and quarantining their contacts. By the time the US stopped inbound travel from China, there was already community spread inside the US.

> So you are effectively saying the US did not ban travel hard enough for it to be effective?

Neither hard enough nor early enough. By the time anyone (including the Chinese government) realized that the new coronavirus was a big deal, there were probably already people with the virus inside the US. The US' travel ban in late January was a political stunt, but it had little practical effect on the development of the pandemic in the US.

> Expats in Wuhan who got hospitalized in November 2019 were told in December that they had contracted viral pneumonia SARS.

This is false. The first detection of a SARS-related coronavirus in a patient was on 27 December 2019. The virus may have already been spreading around the world by then, but it had not yet been identified as a novel virus.

> Not a lack of testing. Testing only makes the problem formally worse.

What? Testing lets you know what's actually happening. If you start testing early enough in an outbreak and if you put enough resources into contact tracing, you can significantly slow - or even reverse - the spread of the virus. If you're not quick enough, you can at least figure out that you have to start implementing lockdowns. But only finding out that you have an outbreak when hospitals start filling up is the absolute worst thing that can happen.

By the way, the blog you linked to is full of false claims. Right off the bat, it claims that in late January 2020,

> China, intentionally or otherwise, was able to lockdown its cities unknown to the world.

Probably every newspaper, news radio station and TV news show around the world covered the lockdown of Chinese cities in late January 2020. It was the #1 story worldwide.

> As I just explained, the WHO's recommendations on travel restrictions are based on the International Health Regulations (2005).

General recommendations! Not a playbook from 2005 you pull out for dealing with an upcoming pandemic!

> the WHO is supposed to be concerned with the economy. It's not supposed to overreact and tank the world economy.

It is also not supposed to underreact and tank the world economy. What would the world economy look like if China had reported their real numbers, and these real numbers had triggered a safety threshold and banned/heavily restricted travel from China for the 2 months December and January?

Probably a lot different from the world economy now: All Western countries show decline, and just China showed economic growth in 2020.

> The WHO is also not supposed to punish countries that suffer outbreaks, because everyone recognizes that if you start doing that, countries will simply lie and hide outbreaks.

Instead, China simply lied and hid their outbreak. And they got a compliment for it. Weird tactic if everyone recognizes this.

> Closing the barn door after the horse has bolted is useless.

This is a barn with over a billion horses, not a single horse. Close that damn door!

> By the time the US stopped inbound travel from China, there was already community spread inside the US.

Yes, it is not waterproof, but shields against the rain. And if you say economic concerns play a major role in deciding travel restrictions, then this measure should also be judged accordingly. China was pushing for travel from a political/economical interest. US pushed back from a political/economical interest.

> By the time anyone (including the Chinese government) realized that the new coronavirus was a big deal

The WHO had to learn about this pandemic from open source information gathering! The Chinese government tried to save face, and lost control. By the time the rest of the world was notified, it was already months too late to act.

Some scientists have actually put a human life number on this delay. By the time people in power knew, efforts were started to cover it up.

> The US' travel ban in late January was a political stunt, but it had little practical effect on the development of the pandemic in the US.

It can be both. Political pushback against China playing politics. It had some practical effect, and it is completely in line with common sense and science that travel bans help curb outbreaks.

> This is false. The first detection of a SARS-related coronavirus in a patient was on 27 December 2019.

According to you this is false. You seem to be following the official timelines. According to my timeline, the first doctors fell ill early December. Wuhan expats were told by Chinese doctors in the middle of December, that their hospitalizations in November were due to viral pneumonia SARS. But officially, many of those doctors, patients, and expats, dissapeared.

> What? Testing lets you know what's actually happening.

CDC and intelligence agencies know what's happening without the need for tests. You throw tests at the problem and find 10k people in New York, instead of "projections of multiple community spreads". How your tactics change with this news? How does the public reacts to those numbers?

We know the barn is on fire! Testing only shows where. What would have helped would have been neighbor China warning about a starting fire.

> put enough resources into contact tracing

By then it was already way too late for contact tracing efforts. Like you said it was already community spreading. Contact tracing would only have been an option if China had shared early information.

> But only finding out that you have an outbreak when hospitals start filling up is the absolute worst thing that can happen.

The CDC was well aware of the outbreaks. The hospitals were already planning for 450k deaths with 5 cases. They don't need tests for that. They have OSINT solutions for that, and can hook into US government data collection too. Like said, it is how the WHO was notified about COVID. They had to find out by mining social networks in China, and polling hospital admittance.

> What would the world economy look like if China had reported their real numbers, and these real numbers had triggered a safety threshold and banned/heavily restricted travel from China for the 2 months December and January?

In late January 2020, China:

* Announced there was human-to-human transmission.

* Completely sealed off Hubei province (population: 60 million).

* Implemented lockdowns in cities throughout China.

Yet most countries did next to nothing for a month or more. It wasn't until hospitals in Lombardy, Italy started filling up that people in Europe and the US started to take the virus seriously. So my prediction: better information from China (which the Chinese government itself did not necessarily have anyways) and more dire warnings from the WHO would have had no effect. Following WHO recommendations would already have been a massive improvement over what European countries and the US did.