A Chinese Mystery and Covid-19’s Economic Puzzle Has Beijing ‘contained’ the virus? If so, was the cost worth the benefit, and would it be for the U.S.?
By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
March 6, 2020 6:55 pm ET
Words I never thought I’d read in the New York Times: “So Mr. Trump has a point.” This concession came in reference to this week’s highly unrealistic death rate for Covid-19 announced by the World Health Organization, upping its guesstimate to 3.4%. Mr. Trump pooh-poohed the figure in an on-air phone call with Fox News’s Sean Hannity and the Times could hardly jump on the latest outrage bandwagon having written itself one day earlier that the figure “came loaded with caveats.” The biggest of these caveats, as you have read elsewhere, is the probable failure of governments in China and most countries to detect thousands of mild or symptomless cases. In the New England Journal of Medicine last week, U.S. experts predicted that the American fatality rate may prove closer to the flu’s 0.1%. To seek is to find with the new coronavirus infection. Until recently, the U.S. was doing the equivalent of looking for its lost keys under a streetlight by confining its testing to those with a demonstrable connection to an infected area or person. This was never a reason to take comfort that Covid-19 wasn’t already here and spreading. Containment means quickly tracing the contacts of sick people and encouraging them to quarantine themselves, as well as closing schools, workplaces and public events. In the U.S. and other countries, it probably will not involve the forcible imprisoning of healthy people in their homes as adopted in parts of China. Containment nonetheless is the strategy recommended by the World Health Organization. In contrast, mitigation means accepting that the virus is running flu-like through society and focusing on the severely ill. As with the flu, the elderly and those in bad health are most in jeopardy. Hundreds of such people die a week from “acute respiratory distress” in the best of times (a whole research literature exists to examine which of these patients gain meaningful benefit from being kept alive with ventilators). Now this question becomes societal. At what point should we stop working so hard to prevent transmission to people who most likely will have a mild flu- or cold-like experience in hopes of preventing a small percentage of severe cases that require costly medical intervention? Containment, after all, has costs for people’s well-being too: It deprives them of jobs and income as travel is curtailed, events are called off, and restaurants and other businesses empty out in ways that don’t happen with the flu. A debate in the British government and undoubtedly other governments was described in blunt terms by the Times of London this week: “Ministers and officials are considering the trade-off between allowing an acute outbreak, from which the economy would rebound more quickly, or trying to save more lives by imposing restrictions on mass gatherings and transport.” This remarkably important debate is now roiled by uncertainty out of China. Even as the government there may have changed tactics and started abetting Maoist-style rumors that the virus originated in the U.S., visiting experts have credited an astonishing turnaround. Cases in the epicenter of Wuhan have plummeted precipitously. The spread of the epidemic to other provinces seems to have been all but curtailed. In a startling statement, the WHO’s Michael Ryan claimed in a Monday briefing: “Here we have a disease for which we have no vaccine, no treatment, we don’t fully understand transmission, we don’t fully understand case mortality, but what we have been genuinely heartened by is that unlike influenza, where countries have fought back, where they’ve put in place strong measures, we’ve remarkably seen that the virus is suppressed.” Dr. Ryan here suggests the new coronavirus may be unflu-like in its susceptibility to containment but it’s hard to know since nothing similar has ever been tried with the ordinary flu, which is believed to kill upward of 300,000 globally every year. An unquantifiable factor (if this picture of Chinese success holds up) is how much is due to the strong-arming of the Chinese government and how much to the voluntary compliance of the Chinese people, who apparently have taken to heart instructions to stay home, wash their hands and cover their mouths when sneezing. Witness accounts describe neighbors pressing on travelers alcohol-soaked cotton balls to clean their hands and packs of tissues to be used when pushing elevator buttons. Chinese internet companies reportedly use cellphone and social-media data to alert users when and where they may have crossed paths with an infected person. To repeat, nothing similar has been tried with respect to flu outbreaks that kill thousands a year because, until now, nobody thought it worth doing. Publics everywhere accepted flu risk (which Covid-19 may be no worse than) as a cost of going about their lives in the world.
hould Schools Be Closed? Uneven Global Response Sows Confusion Closures have sent tens of millions of children home even though few of them have fallen ill, as authorities study whether they play a role in infecting others By Sam Schechner and Nick Kostov
Updated March 6, 2020 11:55 am ET The spread of a novel coronavirus has triggered a wave of school closures around the world. But a public-health mystery over what role children may play in spreading the disease has led officials to apply the strategy unevenly—catching parents and teachers by surprise and sowing confusion about whether classrooms are safe. The school-closure strategy, part of the established arsenal for slowing epidemics, was quickly adopted in countries with major coronavirus outbreakslike China and South Korea. Other countries, including Iran, Japan and the United Arab Emirates, since followed suit. This week, Italy imposed a nationwide shutdown that impacts some 8.4 million students and Washington state closed some schools, too. Other countries, however, are weighing the unknown benefits of school closures against considerable social costs. The U.K. and Germany have closed only a handful of schools, and officials cautioned against closing more. France has shut about 150 schools in areas hit by outbreaks, but Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer said Thursday the government wasn’t planning blanket closures even in the event of a full-blown epidemic like Italy’s. “We don’t think it’s the appropriate strategy in France’s case,” Mr. Blanquer said. “If you’re a nurse with children and you have to stay at home to watch your children who aren’t in school, well then you’re not at the hospital helping those who need it.” Those social costs are already being felt in some areas. With no end to the virus’s spread in sight, some working parents are already scrambling to arrange weeks, if not months, of child care. They are also struggling to keep their children—and themselves—calm as some schools close while others stay open.
Julien Aufort, an electrician in the French Alpine village of Saint-Gervais-les-Bains, said his 6-year-old son’s school closed for 14 days after a student there tested positive for the virus. Mr. Aufort’s older children continued going about their daily routines—attending school in a neighboring village and playing sports—while authorities instructed his 6-year-old to wear a surgical mask at home and undergo a test for the virus, which was negative. “It’s very scary for a boy his age,” Mr. Aufort said. “He went into a room where all the doctors were decked out in protective clothing, masks. He didn’t understand what was happening.” Some 400 miles away, at the center of a cluster of at least 105 infections in France’s l’Oise department, Christophe Patora, 45, a contractor, said he was puzzled by the decision to close his five-year-old’s school when others in neighboring villages remain open—leaving the area open to contagion. “I find these measures either disproportionate, or derisory,” said Mr. Patora, who has to rely on his father to watch his son. So far, 13 countries have implemented nationwide school closures, affecting nearly 291 million children up through 12th grade, according to Unesco. Another nine countries—which comprise 180 million more children in primary and secondary school—have closed some schools to contain the virus, Unesco said.
A major reason for the patchy implementation of school closures is that health officials don’t yet have a clear understanding whether children—and their schools—are a significant vector for spreading the virus. For reasons researchers don’t yet understand, early evidence suggests children are less likely to be infected and even when they are their symptoms have been less severe. In China, 87% of confirmed cases were in people aged 30 to 79, according to the China Center for Disease Control based on data from 44,672 people who were confirmed to have had the virus as of Feb. 11. That same study found that only 1.2% of confirmed cases were in those aged between 10 and 19, and 0.9% in those aged 9 or below. Among those infected, just one person aged between 10 and 19 died of a total of 549 people, while there were no deaths recorded among the 416 confirmed cases of children between 0 and 9 years old. With flulike viruses, schools can accelerate the spread of infections among children and back to their families, health officials say. For that reason, closing schools has the potential to reduce transmission, particularly among school-aged children, according toa 2013 reviewpublished in the medical journal BMJ Open.
However, the new coronavirus is behaving differently than the flu, health officials say. For instance, people who are infected but not yet sick seem to play less of a role in spreading the new coronavirus than they do the flu, according to the World Health Organization. What age groups they infect is different, too. Clusters of infections have turned up around large gatherings of adults—at churches, old-age homes, conventions—but there have been no reported school-based outbreaks among children. In Singapore, which reported 117 confirmed coronavirus infections as of Thursday, officials have left the schools open and no clusters or outbreaks have emerged from them, according to Dale Fisher, a professor of infectious disease at the National University of Singapore. “There are outbreaks in an old-age home, in a prison. But you’re not seeing reports of ones in schools,” said Bruce Aylward, senior adviser to the WHO’s director general, who led an international team that studied China’s efforts to contain the virus. That doesn’t mean there is no cause to close schools. While there are few established cases of children passing the disease to adults, that remains unclear. “Even if the kids themselves aren’t getting sick, are they going to bring the virus back home and infect the grandparents and the parents?” Mr. Aylward said. “That’s a question we can’t answer yet.” “Where you have uncertainties you err on the side of caution,” he added. Question marks remain in part because much of what the world understands about the new coronavirus comes from China, where the virus originated and the site of the most confirmed infections. Chinese schools were closed for the week-long New Year holiday break when the outbreak started to take off, and China kept schools closed—meaning that health officials have less of an idea how a full-blown outbreak would spread through schools than if they had been open. Researchers are now looking at data from other countries where there are many cases, such as South Korea, Italy and Japan, to get a better sense of infection rates and transmission rates among children and between children and adults. “We’re pushing for data,” the WHO’s Mr. Aylward said. “In the fog of war, it’s hard to get these answers.” On the ground, parents and local officials have been whipsawed between competing priorities. Officials are trying to effectively contain the disease and save lives, but without spreading panic that is leading to shortages of medical supplies in some areas—or causing disruption that could spark a backlash against containment steps. In Germany, more than a dozen schools closed this week, mostly in the state of North Rhine Westphalia, but also in Berlin, in some cases after teachers or students traveled to areas with widespread coronavirus infections. But on Wednesday, German health officials said that such measures weren’t currently needed. “It is only necessary to close schools when for example the virus is very, very widespread, when it’s strongly spread among children or when teachers can easily pass on the virus,” said Dr. René Gottschalk, head of Frankfurt’s Department of Health. “In the current situation, there is no need for this.” In the U.K., where the virus is currently less widespread, the government is also advising schools against closing unless instructed—but said it would consider such measures in the event of a faster outbreak. School vacations helped slow the spread of swine flu in 2009, the government said in a coronavirus action plan published Tuesday
“Shutting down all our schools and universities...would not have a clinical benefit at this stage, but it would entail huge social and economic costs,” British Health Secretary Matt Hancock said Thursday. Italian officials, who said Wednesday that they would close all schools until mid-March, admit they don’t know yet whether the closures it had earlier implemented were effective. But Italian officials hope that school closures will help the whole population, by slowing the spread of the virus from children to older generations. Most of Italy’s deceased and seriously ill coronavirus patients have been elderly. In France, officials have similar concerns. Laurent Touvet, a local police chief in eastern France, on Friday banned minors from visiting old people’s homes and hospitals in the Haut-Rhin department where 81 people have tested positive for the virus. Mr. Touvet suggested that minors could be carriers of the virus “without having any symptoms,” something health officials are still trying to determine. For some parents, whether their children’s schools are open or closed, the whole process seems ad hoc. Jessica Sallé, 41, who works in client relations, said her 17-year-old daughter’s school on the edge of the l’Oise cluster is open, but school officials closed the canteen and canceled gym classes and some exams. “Will it change anything? I’m not sure,” Ms. Sallé said of the measures. “Seeing the number of people who have the virus here, it’s probably already too late.” —Sara Germano, Jason Douglas and Marcus Walker contributed to this article.
一楼一篇。
A Chinese Mystery and Covid-19’s Economic Puzzle Has Beijing ‘contained’ the virus? If so, was the cost worth the benefit, and would it be for the U.S.?
By Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.
March 6, 2020 6:55 pm ET
Words I never thought I’d read in the New York Times: “So Mr. Trump has a point.”
This concession came in reference to this week’s highly unrealistic death rate for Covid-19 announced by the World Health Organization, upping its guesstimate to 3.4%. Mr. Trump pooh-poohed the figure in an on-air phone call with Fox News’s Sean Hannity and the Times could hardly jump on the latest outrage bandwagon having written itself one day earlier that the figure “came loaded with caveats.” The biggest of these caveats, as you have read elsewhere, is the probable failure of governments in China and most countries to detect thousands of mild or symptomless cases. In the New England Journal of Medicine last week, U.S. experts predicted that the American fatality rate may prove closer to the flu’s 0.1%.
To seek is to find with the new coronavirus infection. Until recently, the U.S. was doing the equivalent of looking for its lost keys under a streetlight by confining its testing to those with a demonstrable connection to an infected area or person. This was never a reason to take comfort that Covid-19 wasn’t already here and spreading.
Containment means quickly tracing the contacts of sick people and encouraging them to quarantine themselves, as well as closing schools, workplaces and public events. In the U.S. and other countries, it probably will not involve the forcible imprisoning of healthy people in their homes as adopted in parts of China. Containment nonetheless is the strategy recommended by the World Health Organization.
In contrast, mitigation means accepting that the virus is running flu-like through society and focusing on the severely ill. As with the flu, the elderly and those in bad health are most in jeopardy. Hundreds of such people die a week from “acute respiratory distress” in the best of times (a whole research literature exists to examine which of these patients gain meaningful benefit from being kept alive with ventilators).
Now this question becomes societal. At what point should we stop working so hard to prevent transmission to people who most likely will have a mild flu- or cold-like experience in hopes of preventing a small percentage of severe cases that require costly medical intervention?
Containment, after all, has costs for people’s well-being too: It deprives them of jobs and income as travel is curtailed, events are called off, and restaurants and other businesses empty out in ways that don’t happen with the flu.
A debate in the British government and undoubtedly other governments was described in blunt terms by the Times of London this week: “Ministers and officials are considering the trade-off between allowing an acute outbreak, from which the economy would rebound more quickly, or trying to save more lives by imposing restrictions on mass gatherings and transport.”
This remarkably important debate is now roiled by uncertainty out of China. Even as the government there may have changed tactics and started abetting Maoist-style rumors that the virus originated in the U.S., visiting experts have credited an astonishing turnaround. Cases in the epicenter of Wuhan have plummeted precipitously. The spread of the epidemic to other provinces seems to have been all but curtailed.
In a startling statement, the WHO’s Michael Ryan claimed in a Monday briefing: “Here we have a disease for which we have no vaccine, no treatment, we don’t fully understand transmission, we don’t fully understand case mortality, but what we have been genuinely heartened by is that unlike influenza, where countries have fought back, where they’ve put in place strong measures, we’ve remarkably seen that the virus is suppressed.”
Dr. Ryan here suggests the new coronavirus may be unflu-like in its susceptibility to containment but it’s hard to know since nothing similar has ever been tried with the ordinary flu, which is believed to kill upward of 300,000 globally every year.
An unquantifiable factor (if this picture of Chinese success holds up) is how much is due to the strong-arming of the Chinese government and how much to the voluntary compliance of the Chinese people, who apparently have taken to heart instructions to stay home, wash their hands and cover their mouths when sneezing. Witness accounts describe neighbors pressing on travelers alcohol-soaked cotton balls to clean their hands and packs of tissues to be used when pushing elevator buttons. Chinese internet companies reportedly use cellphone and social-media data to alert users when and where they may have crossed paths with an infected person.
To repeat, nothing similar has been tried with respect to flu outbreaks that kill thousands a year because, until now, nobody thought it worth doing. Publics everywhere accepted flu risk (which Covid-19 may be no worse than) as a cost of going about their lives in the world.
Nick Kostov
Updated March 6, 2020 11:55 am ET
The spread of a novel coronavirus has triggered a wave of school closures around the world. But a public-health mystery over what role children may play in spreading the disease has led officials to apply the strategy unevenly—catching parents and teachers by surprise and sowing confusion about whether classrooms are safe.
The school-closure strategy, part of the established arsenal for slowing epidemics, was quickly adopted in countries with major coronavirus outbreakslike China and South Korea. Other countries, including Iran, Japan and the United Arab Emirates, since followed suit. This week, Italy imposed a nationwide shutdown that impacts some 8.4 million students and Washington state closed some schools, too.
Other countries, however, are weighing the unknown benefits of school closures against considerable social costs. The U.K. and Germany have closed only a handful of schools, and officials cautioned against closing more. France has shut about 150 schools in areas hit by outbreaks, but Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer said Thursday the government wasn’t planning blanket closures even in the event of a full-blown epidemic like Italy’s.
“We don’t think it’s the appropriate strategy in France’s case,” Mr. Blanquer said. “If you’re a nurse with children and you have to stay at home to watch your children who aren’t in school, well then you’re not at the hospital helping those who need it.”
Those social costs are already being felt in some areas. With no end to the virus’s spread in sight, some working parents are already scrambling to arrange weeks, if not months, of child care. They are also struggling to keep their children—and themselves—calm as some schools close while others stay open.
Julien Aufort, an electrician in the French Alpine village of Saint-Gervais-les-Bains, said his 6-year-old son’s school closed for 14 days after a student there tested positive for the virus. Mr. Aufort’s older children continued going about their daily routines—attending school in a neighboring village and playing sports—while authorities instructed his 6-year-old to wear a surgical mask at home and undergo a test for the virus, which was negative.
“It’s very scary for a boy his age,” Mr. Aufort said. “He went into a room where all the doctors were decked out in protective clothing, masks. He didn’t understand what was happening.”
Some 400 miles away, at the center of a cluster of at least 105 infections in France’s l’Oise department, Christophe Patora, 45, a contractor, said he was puzzled by the decision to close his five-year-old’s school when others in neighboring villages remain open—leaving the area open to contagion.
“I find these measures either disproportionate, or derisory,” said Mr. Patora, who has to rely on his father to watch his son.
So far, 13 countries have implemented nationwide school closures, affecting nearly 291 million children up through 12th grade, according to Unesco. Another nine countries—which comprise 180 million more children in primary and secondary school—have closed some schools to contain the virus, Unesco said.
A major reason for the patchy implementation of school closures is that health officials don’t yet have a clear understanding whether children—and their schools—are a significant vector for spreading the virus. For reasons researchers don’t yet understand, early evidence suggests children are less likely to be infected and even when they are their symptoms have been less severe.
In China, 87% of confirmed cases were in people aged 30 to 79, according to the China Center for Disease Control based on data from 44,672 people who were confirmed to have had the virus as of Feb. 11. That same study found that only 1.2% of confirmed cases were in those aged between 10 and 19, and 0.9% in those aged 9 or below. Among those infected, just one person aged between 10 and 19 died of a total of 549 people, while there were no deaths recorded among the 416 confirmed cases of children between 0 and 9 years old.
With flulike viruses, schools can accelerate the spread of infections among children and back to their families, health officials say. For that reason, closing schools has the potential to reduce transmission, particularly among school-aged children, according toa 2013 reviewpublished in the medical journal BMJ Open.
However, the new coronavirus is behaving differently than the flu, health officials say. For instance, people who are infected but not yet sick seem to play less of a role in spreading the new coronavirus than they do the flu, according to the World Health Organization.
What age groups they infect is different, too. Clusters of infections have turned up around large gatherings of adults—at churches, old-age homes, conventions—but there have been no reported school-based outbreaks among children. In Singapore, which reported 117 confirmed coronavirus infections as of Thursday, officials have left the schools open and no clusters or outbreaks have emerged from them, according to Dale Fisher, a professor of infectious disease at the National University of Singapore.
“There are outbreaks in an old-age home, in a prison. But you’re not seeing reports of ones in schools,” said Bruce Aylward, senior adviser to the WHO’s director general, who led an international team that studied China’s efforts to contain the virus.
That doesn’t mean there is no cause to close schools. While there are few established cases of children passing the disease to adults, that remains unclear. “Even if the kids themselves aren’t getting sick, are they going to bring the virus back home and infect the grandparents and the parents?” Mr. Aylward said. “That’s a question we can’t answer yet.”
“Where you have uncertainties you err on the side of caution,” he added.
Question marks remain in part because much of what the world understands about the new coronavirus comes from China, where the virus originated and the site of the most confirmed infections. Chinese schools were closed for the week-long New Year holiday break when the outbreak started to take off, and China kept schools closed—meaning that health officials have less of an idea how a full-blown outbreak would spread through schools than if they had been open.
Researchers are now looking at data from other countries where there are many cases, such as South Korea, Italy and Japan, to get a better sense of infection rates and transmission rates among children and between children and adults.
“We’re pushing for data,” the WHO’s Mr. Aylward said. “In the fog of war, it’s hard to get these answers.”
On the ground, parents and local officials have been whipsawed between competing priorities. Officials are trying to effectively contain the disease and save lives, but without spreading panic that is leading to shortages of medical supplies in some areas—or causing disruption that could spark a backlash against containment steps.
In Germany, more than a dozen schools closed this week, mostly in the state of North Rhine Westphalia, but also in Berlin, in some cases after teachers or students traveled to areas with widespread coronavirus infections. But on Wednesday, German health officials said that such measures weren’t currently needed.
“It is only necessary to close schools when for example the virus is very, very widespread, when it’s strongly spread among children or when teachers can easily pass on the virus,” said Dr. René Gottschalk, head of Frankfurt’s Department of Health. “In the current situation, there is no need for this.”
In the U.K., where the virus is currently less widespread, the government is also advising schools against closing unless instructed—but said it would consider such measures in the event of a faster outbreak. School vacations helped slow the spread of swine flu in 2009, the government said in a coronavirus action plan published Tuesday
“Shutting down all our schools and universities...would not have a clinical benefit at this stage, but it would entail huge social and economic costs,” British Health Secretary Matt Hancock said Thursday.
Italian officials, who said Wednesday that they would close all schools until mid-March, admit they don’t know yet whether the closures it had earlier implemented were effective. But Italian officials hope that school closures will help the whole population, by slowing the spread of the virus from children to older generations. Most of Italy’s deceased and seriously ill coronavirus patients have been elderly.
In France, officials have similar concerns. Laurent Touvet, a local police chief in eastern France, on Friday banned minors from visiting old people’s homes and hospitals in the Haut-Rhin department where 81 people have tested positive for the virus. Mr. Touvet suggested that minors could be carriers of the virus “without having any symptoms,” something health officials are still trying to determine.
For some parents, whether their children’s schools are open or closed, the whole process seems ad hoc. Jessica Sallé, 41, who works in client relations, said her 17-year-old daughter’s school on the edge of the l’Oise cluster is open, but school officials closed the canteen and canceled gym classes and some exams.
“Will it change anything? I’m not sure,” Ms. Sallé said of the measures. “Seeing the number of people who have the virus here, it’s probably already too late.”
—Sara Germano, Jason Douglas and Marcus Walker contributed to this article.
封得越早,损失越小。韩国的效果已经快出来了。 连伊朗也是该测就测,该收就收,全部是中国救援队指导。
意大利不是几周前,它和韩国都是exactly2周前才开始爆发的。2/21时,意大利全国才16例
对的,再去看看评论区就知道美国人有多愚蠢了。还算是美国精英层呢。
早就Cancel 了。