Is it possible that China was successful with their social distancing efforts because their citizens are law abiding while other parts of the world follow their own freedom rules?

Not really.

Your social distancing effort is not working well, because your media and your politicians lie to you. Stay home and six feet are not enough, not only that, no. They are not the key to make this work.

Do you know at which moment since the lockdown on Jan. 23 were we feeling hopeless the most? It’s the moment we found that we didn’t have enough masks.

Yeah, not the moment we had no clue how the coronavirus transmits, not when we heard the daily death numbers in Wuhan. What we cared the most was: how could we manage to get one mask per family per day if the factories were shut down?

I was relieved when I heard that the facemask production power went back on and even soared. From 10 million per day to 20 million, 40 million, etc.

Why is this important?

Because for a highly infectious respitory disease, you can’t do a real effective quarantine without the face masks. Without face masks you have to do a much stricter quarantine. That’s mission impossible.

With face masks you feel safe, you can go the the groceries, you can go out to seek help in an emergency, you can go to the hospital for other illness. The workers in the essential businesses like power, transport and logisticals can go to work. The police and the civil servants can fulfil their duty.

Face masks ease the quarantine. Face masks make the stayhome mitigation strategy a reasonable plan.

That’s why when we saw your media downplayed the importance of facemasks in Feb. we sincerely thought you have some secret cure for this virus.

And no.2: your media and even many hospitals tell confirmed patients to just go home and rest?

Wtf?

It’s proven wrong in China. We figured that out at the cost of hundreds of lives. That’s why we built all those makeshift hospitals. Not the first two hospitals built in 2 weeks, the ones after.

Patients with mild symptoms shouldn’t go home. You spread the virus to your family. Say a family is of 4–5 people, 20% rate of severe cases, then almost certainly one of your family members are going to need a ventilator. And that will be a nightmare.

Patients with mild symptoms must be collected, put together and treated with great care to reduce mild-to-severe transition rate. Even personal isolation is bad idea. One trait of this disease is that you get sick, you get better and the big moment comes: either you recover, or you suddenly get very sick and die. The deterioration is so abrupt, that if you live isolated, you probably don’t have time to get help.

Patients with mild symptoms must be collected, put together and treated with great care.

No.3: ventilator is not the savior.

Some people think that ventilator is what we need. Once we have enough ventilators we can just fan the virus out of people’s lungs and we’re good. No. It’s not that easy. Ventilator is not a cure.

In China we already found that the critical treatment comes before the ventilator phase, or at least in the early time of the ventilator phase.

The nasty thing with the COVID-19 is that it stimulates the deep small alveolus in your lungs and makes this very thick mucus. The mucus stucks in the lungs, deep. So when the ventilator pumps air into your lungs, it pushes the mucus only deeper, so that the alveolus can’t breathe and die.

So the more important thing is to get the mucus out before it completely stucks. Or, find some meds that stop the alveolus from producing the mucus. And these two things have to be done as early as possible.

And that’s also why it’s a bad idea to just “go home and rest”.

No.4: it’s all about time.

This is an exponential thing we are dealing with. So everything must be done early and fast. We paid heavy cost for the first delay. So we changed to act faster. We build two hospitals in two weeks. We removed the bad/useless officials/politicians in hours if not minutes. Once we found that something’s not good, we stopped that. Once we found something’s good, we spread the message the next second.

It’s all about time. The later you are, the more you need it. Act now, act fast. Now is always the best time you can have.

All these things above, I learn them from public media in China as an average Joe. I didn’t contract the virus. I didn’t go the hospital once. I don’t know any doctor or nurse or professional. I heard all of them from the media.

So if you till today still know less than I do, you shold seriously question your media and your government.

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