It was a joke, obviously. Relax. I couldn’t give a toss about a raffle for some silly vouchers.
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There’s no eradication possible now, just some level of mitigation .
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If there is persistent and dedicated mask wearing, do you think that the exponential growth / level of spread can be brought down?
Of course other vulnerabilities exist including, among other things, transmission among family members. But I wonder how mask wearing (one of Taiwan’s relative strengths) will help as the authorities try to deal with this UK variant now running loose.
Guy
Of course the level of spread can be managed like in Japan and Korea but it’s here to stay now. We can see it’s been spreading really quickly, probably the variant effect.
Brought down, but not below an R1 value.
I think a hard lockdown and we can still be ok
I am so pissed they didn’t learn their lesson from the NZ pilot since December. It was such a warning shot.
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I haven’t been following the cases and connectivity very closely, but do we have any idea roughly when the initial transmission into the wider community occurred? (From the quarantine hotel workers or pilots, or both?)
An optimistic interpretation could be as follows. The daily progression of case numbers (several to 29 to 180 to 206 or whatever it is) looks alarming, but the lack of testing, followed by a sudden relative surge in testing, and the manner in which cases are found and reported obscures the reality.
It could be that community transmission has remained relatively low but we’re just now finding out the results of a couple of clusters that have been smoldering for many days or a couple of weeks, which simply weren’t detected before owing to Taiwan’s complacency and low rate of testing.
I’m confident that there will be many more cases out there that haven’t yet been detected and the numbers will continue to increase, but this situation would mean more moderate growth than the scary-looking exponential-like increase suggested by the small number of data points obtained with erratic testing.
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Well… That’s the sunny optimistic look.
I think I heard that some case had reported symptoms in mid April, but I don’t have the source handy.
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that was in this thread, i’m quite sure. i get all my news on this from here
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Praying for the best but the possibility that community transmission is “relatively low” seems pretty unlikely.
This is all over the country already mate. Cases in Taipei, New Taipei, Taichung, Yilan, KHH, Changhua. Last night’s news was that the Changhua grape seller infected 3 people she was sitting with at a wedding where there were 1,300 guests (!!!).
As @DrewC mentioned there are reports people had symptoms in April so maybe this wasn’t even spread by the pilots. Could have been some other unidentified leak at Novotel or even somewhere else.
Or couldve been two seperate transmission events happening simultaneously. Stranger things have happened.
I wonder how many of the optimistic scenarios are peoples’ wish fulfillments or looking for reassurances.
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I think it was the hotel manager who reported symptoms on the 17th of April but was sent home with prescription. He was later identified through tracing from the pilot. There were a few other pilots identified with antibodies only, so had probably had it some time before.
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Work places should be closed! My office neighbor is coughing for a week and still coming into work
This is making quarantine useless for the rest of us. Same mistakes as in the US last year. Don’t do a half assed quarantine and don’t trust Taiwan bosses to do the right thing.
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I figured if this new wave of the virus started spreading from Apr 14, and if we remove the previously accumulated total cases from consideration, the number from Saturday suggests we got around at least 700 new confirmed COVID-positives. We are looking at a doubling rate around 3~4 days.
If that number is correct, by Apr 19, this Wednesday, we should have a total of 1,400 COVID-possitive people from this new wave, and around 2,000 total if we add back previous cases.
As long as we stay below that number by Wednesday, we might have flattened the curve. If not, then this is going to grow pretty quickly.
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At this point, I’m just really waiting for the vaccines and isolating/social distancing as much as possible until I get a jab. Between me and some friends, we believe COVID has been underreported here or just simply undiagnosed for a while now. Taiwan has never done mass testings, despite COVID having asymptomatic symptoms and the fact that there are false negatives. But it’s not really to blame anyone, it is what it is.
On the bright side, I still have confidence that Taiwan will be able to contain this outbreak. It’s also good to see residents complying without big hiccups like the ones we’ve seen abroad. It’s not even because of false hope, but the fact that we are less densely populated than other countries in Asia. Worst-case scenario is that COVID patients would undergo home care, but that’s being done already in the Philippines when ICU beds ran out. And for some of my friends, it did work and saved their relatives’ lives.
???
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I’m not doing what you suggest here, trust me. (I was actually accused of being pessimistic here last night…) And I specifically stated this as an optimistic interpretation in response to @afterspivak’s question. My guess is we’ll be at >1000 daily cases by the end of the week, as I’ve stated upthread.
And part of what I wrote here isn’t all that optimistic - it’s just a simple fact about the shitty manner in which the data was obtained. Taiwan has been doing essentially zero testing for ages then did a bit more testing for the last two days, so of course you get what appears to be a sudden jump in cases. But it’s not really a jump from 29 new cases one day to 180 the next - it’s just cases that were already there being detected.
I meant “relatively low” in terms of R0 value compared to other countries taking fewer precautions - that’s why I added the word “relatively”.
Yes, I’m aware. Thanks for posting the same info again.
And, there you go, you’ve got it - that’s exactly my point. Relatively slow transmission that’s been happening for weeks or whatever.
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