In close collaboration with Seoul National University's Structural Complexity Laboratory

 

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Why I'm sharing this

For a month or so, I've been concerned by the appallingly lax response of Western governments to Covid-19. To be blunt, despite claiming to be listening to experts, they are either getting appallingly bad advice, or they are not listening to the advice they are getting. I've been trying to build my own website to try to explain why the response is too slow, and where it will lead, but it's urgent, and Tomas Pueyo does it better than I could in any reasonable time. Please read it. If it matters to you, I, Bob McKay, am staking my own reputation, as a PhD mathematician, and as a competent researcher, on this: It is not misinformation. It is far more accurate than what Western governments are telling us. Please pass this on. If you happen to notice any problems with the link, please let me know.

What do you mean, appallingly lax response

Australia-specific, but you can hopefully see how it applies to almost any Western government

I think it was about the time that Australia made the second extension to the ban on entry from China (from memory, probably early-mid February, I recall that I was just starting to relax from the very near bushfire threat), it was patently obvious, from doing analyses similar to Tomas' on the worldometer data, that the danger from travellers from Korea, Italy and Iran was greater than from China (assuming that China was truly locking down Hubei, which having a fair amount of experience and contacts in China, I was pretty sure of). I was concerned enough that I wrote to the ABC in response to their coverage (so this isn't just misremembering the past), but got no response. A couple of weeks later, our government banned travel from Korea, which was wise (my apologies and sympathy to my Korean friends - I lived in Seoul for ten years - but it was the right reaction). Unfortunately they didn't ban travel from Italy, despite the fact that it was again obvious that it was the most dangerous source, and by then, given the Chinese lockdowns, clearly more dangerous than China. Again I wrote to the ABC: no response, but to be fair, they were probably overwhelmed by contacts. I'm stating this to point out that this isn't just hindsight. Further incompetences included the failure to cancel the Australian Grand Prix till the last minute, when the danger was absolutely obvious a fortnight before. Because of the urgency, I'm writing this before I have had the chance to check today's news, but as of yesterday, the incompetence is continuing. A few days ago Donald Trump cancelled all travel from the Schengen area. I don't associate Trump with wise actions, but this was one. Australia, yesterday, was still allowing travellers from disaster areas. What do I mean disaster areas? Right now (well, as of yesterday), the perception is that Italy has the highest level of active Covid-19. That could be true, but check out the statistics of (for example) Norway or Iceland. It's probably partly due to better detection, but their active case levels per head of population are far higher than Italy's (and even more so, China's).

Speaking of China, where is probably the safest place (in terms of likelihood of catching covid-19) to walk down the street today? I would suggest Beijing, because there are close to zero active cases on the streets – somewhere close to 90% have recovered, and the rest are under secure lockdown. Of course, a foreigner doing that today would probably be immediately locked up, but they wouldn't catch covid-19. There is close to zero chance of China allowing a covid-19 case on a plane. Yet Australia continues to ban travellers from China, at enormous cost to our economy. This is going to cost us. China must be pretty annoyed with us by now. Their economy is going to recover soon, it's going to be the only large economy in the world that is likely to avoid collapse, and they will have plenty of countries desperate to export to them. Plus they can supply the test kits, protective clothing, ventilators etc. that we urgently need (they ramped up production unbelievably fast, they don't need that production capacity now, they know who has coronavirus, and they know they're not on the streets). We probably need to bypass some of our medical device certification, but at this critical juncture, taking the word of the Chinese that a test kit or a ventilator works is better than not having one.