I would and never will blame anybody for ordering a lock-down only for doing different things to late. I posted here that the US should stop all air traffic and close down the interstates for private people more than 4 week before it happened under pressure.
When you say "it happened" you mean the lock-down. Air traffic and interstates were not closed down. Air traffic fell by 95% in Atlanta, and it is still down, but it was never closed. There was no need to close it down. People stopped travelling on their own. There was certainly never any need to close the interstates.
There was never a large-scale lockdown in Korea, Japan or New Zealand. They acted quickly and avoided the need for that, except in Sapporo. There was a "soft" voluntary lockdown in Tokyo. It did not last long. It accomplished the goal, which was to lower the number of cases and allow better methods based on case tracking to start working again.
I do not know why Hokkaido and Sapporo was an epicenter. Perhaps it is because it was still cold there, and much of downtown Sapporo is accessed by underground tunnels and shopping malls. You can walk for miles underground. The hallways are crowded. There is a lot of snow there. I have heard that some Canadian cities have similar underground walkways.
As I have said before, a lockdown is a last-ditch effort. It is what you do when all else has failed. It should not be necessary. If U.S. officials and the administration had followed the W.H.O. advice in February, we would not have needed a lockdown, and 120,000 people would not have died. A few thousand would have died. The economy would not have crashed, and millions would not be unemployed. The W.H.O. experts coming back from China clearly described the methods being used there to stop the epidemic. Tracking, warning, quarantine, and -- when all else failed -- a lockdown in Wuhan, but none elsewhere. Korea and Vietnam immediately implemented these steps. Japan dithered and made some mistakes, but soon followed. After an initial burst of cases in Korea, the situation came under control and it has stayed under control.
Osterholm and some others keep insisting that Japan, Korea, China, New Zealand are bound to have a second wave of infections. They keep saying this, despite the evidence. This is irresponsible. It will frighten people and it may prevent the implementation of effective steps to stop the epidemic. See:
https://www.bluezones.com/2020…o-predicted-the-pandemic/
"We can expect COVID-19 to infect 60% – 70% of Americans. That’s around 200 million Americans."
No, we should not expect that. Osterholm has been proved wrong again and again by the epidemiologists in these other countries. At this point, I begin to think his assertions are sour grapes. He does not wish to admit he was wrong. He said: "But I can say with certainty, what I call the laws of virus physics, is that this is going to continue to transmit until we see a large part of the population infected."
In Georgia, the government is not doing anything to reduce the epidemic beyond desultory attempts at case tracking. Projections now show 10,142 deaths by October 1, 2020, and a steady rise in deaths after that. I suppose another 10,000 or 20,000 people will die in Georgia before a vaccine is deployed, and another 300,000 people will die in the U.S. (201,000 by October 1.) In other countries, a few hundred people will die. We are sacrificing hundreds of thousands of people and trillions of dollars on the Altar of Stupidity. Our only goal, it seems, is to deny that science works, even if that means we kill thousands of people and destroy the economy.
https://covid19.healthdata.org…states-of-america/georgia
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