China’s Wuhan reports no increase in COVID-19 for 4th day in a row

China’s Wuhan is where the outbreak of coronavirus started. In particular, it likely started from a type of live animal “wet” market where it contaminated many people in a short time span. But something very encouraging is that Wuhan has now reported zero increase in COVID-19 cases for 4th day in a row.

Now, there has been a lot of sketchy and shady things happening in China since the inception of this disease. There are reports of them concealing data and information related to the virus so naturally many people are suspicious about the zero reported cases.

I am not qualified enough to get deep into that debate and I will leave it up to readers to do research for themselves. 

But something to note about China is that they have been on extreme lockdown.

I don’t have first-hand experience of what it was like during their lockdown but I heard that for a couple of months individuals were required to wear a mask when outdoors and only allowed to leave their residence in very limited amounts of time. China even used AI facial recognition to enforce the mask policy.

Citizens were subject to mandatory temperature scans and I believe their interactions with potential infected people were also tracked with apps. I also heard reports that force was used to keep their citizens in their homes.

Again, I don’t have firsthand knowledge of these practices but they don’t sound too far-fetched to me based on my knowledge of the region.

While I could see the US moving to more strict lock down approaches, I don’t think it is possible for the US to implement a level of stringent lock down that could work in China without some serious repercussions. Americans are just too accustomed to our freedoms (which is not a bad thing).

So while I think it is very encouraging that there may have been zero reported cases in the last four days, I think we should take this information and view it through the right lens.

Basically, even if this information is true or accurate (which I’m not convinced it is) it could be very difficult or impossible for other countries to get to a point where zero increases are happening in such a short time span.

But I don’t think that zero increases is the practical goal at this point — all we want to see is a dip in transmission rates and that will start to make people feel optimistic about the near future.

Hopefully with nationwide social distancing we will start to see those rates decline in the next few weeks as we enter May. But based on trends in other countries, I think we need to brace ourselves for what could be a wild week in the spread of the pandemic.

We just have to remember that the science shows that testing, tracing, + social distancing will work — it is only a matter of time.

H/T